From the "Movies" Archives:

by Mia Mask

(indieWIRE/6.23.00) -- "Garage Olimpo" (1999) is director Marco Bechis' haunting nightmare about human rights abuses in Argentina during the "dirty war" from 1976-1983. The film opens with an aerial shot of the beautifully rippling, rosé-colored ocean off the coast of Buenos Aires. These lyrical ocean images open and close Bechis' powerful film. But spectators will not grasp their devastating significance until the final moments of the movie. The cyclical pattern of these shots is mirrored in the film's cyclical narrative structure, which ties the end to the beginning, leaving audiences to contemplate the ways in which Argentina's national past has repeated itself.

At the center of the film are Maria (Antonella Costa), a beautiful young woman who lives with her mother, and Felix (Carlos Echevarria), a young boarder in love with the eighteen year-old girl. While Felix works as a watchman, Maria teaches reading and writing in a slum and is active in a small organization that opposes the military dictatorship. One morning, a group of men come to the house and seize her. They keep her captive at Garage Olimpo, a dungeon-like detention center for housing and torturing political prisoners. The inconspicuous but hellish Garage is situated in the heart of Buenos Aires; thus its central location ironically helps to mask the atrocities occurring inside from those casually passing by. Eventually, Felix's sexual obsession with Maria becomes her only hope and potential weapon against the surreal nightmare to which she's indefinitely condemned.

The background for this film is the 1976 election in which the civilian government was deposed by the armed forces, an event that has often occurred in Argentine history. A military junta then took control of Argentina under a revised constitution and all activity by political parties was suspended by the new regime. With the return to civilian rule in 1983, the constitution of 1853 was restored. But the "dirty war," which ended in '83, left behind the foul odor of corruption. Children -- now teenagers -- taken from their disappeared parents grew up not knowing their true identity. And police brutality continued to be a principal human rights concern in Argentina, followed by threats and attacks on independent journalists and the government's unwillingness to provide justice for abuses committed under the military dictatorship.

Bechis cross-cuts Maria's experience in prison and her mother's frustrated attempts to locate her (played by former Italian starlet Dominique Sanda). Her mother seeks assistance everywhere but secures help from no one. First, she tries the police precinct where her daughter is supposedly being held, only to confront a wall of silence. Second, she goes to confession where the priest's request for names reveals the Church's complicity. Third, she pleads with a wealthy, powerful male friend -- whose exclusive golfing rights signify his affluence and privilege -- but he too refuses to become involved. Bechis shows us the pervasiveness of collusion with armed repression used to stifle dissent, implying it's not only ubiquitous, but part of the fabric of Argentina's society.

Marco Bechis is certainly not the first director to call attention to political corruption and social injustice in Argentina, or the existence of human rights abuses in Latin America. Directors Fernando Solanas' and Octavio Getino's ground-breaking "The Hour of the Furnaces" ("La hora de los hornos") was released in 1968. As part of revolutionary filmmaking praxis, the film was to be stopped and discussed as it was being projected. This radical approach took precedence over aesthetic concerns. While watershed in its prioritization of politics, "Furnaces" was the progenitor of things to come.

Bechis' "Garage Olimpo" is part of a national legacy of revolutionary cultural production: the struggle to give political repression artistic expression. David Foster's "Violence in Argentine Literature: Cultural Responses to Tyranny" analyzes literary texts viewed as cultural responses to military oppression and dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Similarly, his Contemporary Argentine Cinema discusses films (i.e., "Kiss of the Spider Woman," "The Official Story," and "Man Facing Southeast") examining the transformation of social topics into motion pictures and the relationship between commercial filmmaking strategies and Argentine re-democratization.

The Human Rights violation film perhaps constitutes its own genre. Examples include: Constantin Costa-Gavras' "Missing" (1982), Agustin Villaronga's "In a Glass Cage" (1985), Roman Polanski's "Death and the Maiden" (1994), Jonathan Sanger's "Down Came a Blackbird" (1995), Bruno Barreto's "Four Days in September" (1998) and now Bechis' "Garage Olimpo" -- to mention only a few of the most successful. This list is not meant to equate any of these disparate films, which all emerge out of different industries and dissimilar distribution networks. Take note, Polanski's "Death and the Maiden" was distributed by Columbia-Tristar, Bechis' "Garage Olimpo" has yet to secure a U.S. distributor.

But there are similarities between some of these films, which appear to share stylistic codes and cinematic conventions. For example, many of these movies place the story's moral weight on the awkwardly titillating spectacle of the tortured female (or adolescent boy's) body. The unfortunate female resistor, inevitably captured, is subjected to the criminals' torturous whims -- guaranteeing audiences images of her sweating, panting, bare-breasted and bloodied. These pictures often -- but not always -- rely on images of physically vitiated, psychologically manipulated, brutally abused women, held captive by perverse men.

Perhaps the more generous way of looking at these films is as an indictment of militaristic patriarchy. But I find it easy to loose sight of the important political statements intended when the cinematic image lingers on the languid feminine body, overcome, defeated and conquered as it is by masculine authority. The tendency to equate the national landscape with the feminine is as old as repression itself. Here's a rhetorical question for filmmakers engaged in this radical cinematic work: Aren't there other ways to visualize and signify the indignities and horrors of human rights abuses? At any rate, Marco Bechis' "Garage Olimpo," a centerpiece at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival is remarkable for its elegant pace, fine performances and disturbing visual irony.

[Mia Mask is a contributing film critic to indieWIRE.]