Back to Buenos Aires

When it comes to the current art and political debate resounding through film festivals, Chilean-Italian director Marco Bechis has been unequivocal about his approach to filmmaking. “Every artistic activity is also a political act. An artist is someone who wishes to shake up our consciences,” he writes in the press book.

Garage Olimpo (1999) was one such tumultuous milestone in Argentine political cinema, detailing the horrors and violence of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1970’s and the wholesale torture and murder of young activists opposed to the regime.

Now his new film Back to Buenos Aires, which is practically a sequel, manages to tell an equally gripping tale centered around the victims who survived arrest and torture and who have borne the physical and emotional scars of the experience all their lives. Bowing in Venice’s main competition, it is an engrossing drama filmed with sober visual restraint coupled with a pulsating soundtrack like a heartbeat that keeps the mind from wandering.

Part of the power and conviction of these two films undoubtedly springs from the director’s real-life experience: in 1977, the twenty-year-old Bechis was himself abducted and imprisoned in a secret camp known as Club Atletico before being deported from Argentina. Back to Buenos Aires changes the details around its wounded protagonist Mariano Guerra, as Bechis reaches for specific fictional elements, “approaching a truth that memory alone cannot tell.”

Above all, Mariano is a psychologically shattered victim riddled with survivor’s guilt. Played with heart-breaking humanity by Adriano Giannini in one of his finest performances, Mariano is at first glance a man who has built a new life for himself in Italy, rescuing people as a first responder with an ambulance crew. But a closer look shows the bleak existence of a nervous loner living a circumscribed life with his dog. And a crisis is at hand. A letter has arrived from a magistrate in Argentina that fills him with dread: it is an official request to appear in court during the group trial of military officials who took part in detaining and disappearing the regime’s political opponents. His testimony must be delivered in person, and it could put him in legal jeopardy. As a judge warns, if he’s not careful he may enter the hearing a witness and leave it a defendant.

When the scene finally shifts to Buenos Aires, Mariano’s misgivings grow as he is forced to confront a group of fellow captives he hasn’t see in 33 years. They are housed in spartan quarters for protected witnesses inside the Ministry of Justice. These aging men and women warily scrutinize him closey before recognizing “Tano” (Mariano). The very fact he survived two years’ of imprisonment in the Garage Olimpo detention center makes him suspect, and Mariano’s guilt-flushed face and body language keeps up the suspense. Will he tell the court what he knows, and how much of the truth is he willing to pull from his broken psyche to convict the stiff old men on the defendants’ bench for their crimes against humanity?

Several crucial encounters influence him. One is his admiration for a woman of 60 (Ana Celentano) who has testified four times and only now, in her fifth appearance in court, does she have the courage to recount how she was gang raped. Her understanding of his mixed feelings over testifying leads to an emotional scene between them, one of the rare moments to offer him hope this nightmare can be overcome.

Another is his confrontation with a young woman, Evelyn (Veronica Gerez), who demands information about her mother Muneca (Olivia Nuss). At first he denies he knew her, then he impulsively drags Evelyn to Garage Olimpo, which is now a memorial site open to the public, and achingly relives his harrowing memories of Muneca’s arrest and torture, which he witnessed. In the film’s most explicit scene, her naked body is resuscitated from the dead with a defibillator wielded by a young medical student from Italy.

A ghost from the past appears as a balding, moustached figure; Mariano recognizes hin as “Doctor K” (Adrian Fondari), his mentor and rapist, who made him inject prisoners with anaesthetic before they were put on a plane and dropped to their deaths in the ocean. It’s hard to imagine how he identifies the much-changed old medic who once kept him alive to be sexually abused, but twice they meet in bathrooms over the urinals, where the setting subtly makes a connection. Giannini brings the repressed pain of a lifetime to the confrontation scene, as old humiliations come rushing back in a shocking demonstration that Doctor K still holds control over his victim.

Apart from these few well-spaced dramatic peaks, the screenplay by Bechis and Vijaya Bechis Boll carefully maintains a non-judgmental attitude toward Mariano, letting the audience be the judge and jury. While the soundtrack throbs with almost thriller-like urgency, the director gives his actors time and silence to mature their reactions. Fabrizio La Palombara’s cinematography similarly keeps a respectful distance, countering emotionally charged locations like the empty spaces in the Garage Olimpo memorial or the cloister-like hallways of the ministry lit with the ambiguous lighting of theater sets.

Director: Marco Bechis
Screenplay: Marco Bechis, Vijaya Bechis Boll 
Cast: Adriano Giannini, Ana Celentano, Verónica Gerez, Olivia Nuss, Adrián Fondari, Paula Cohen, Marcelo Chaparro
Producers: Domenico Procacci, Laura Paolucci, Alfredo Federico, Simona Banchi, Marco Bechis, Daniele Incalcaterra, Paolo Del Brocco, Patrick de Jongh, Cibele Amaral, André Ristum
Cinematography: Fabrizio La Palombara
Editing: Jacopo Quadri, Nicolò Tettamanti
Production design: Caterina Giargia, Mario Scarzella, Eduardo Antunes
Costume design: Caterina Giargia, Sara Giovene, Coca Serpa
Music: Guglielmo Diana
Sound: Marco Fiumara, Ray Fisch
Production companies: Fandango, 39Films, Karta Film, Rai Cinema, 34 Filmes
World Sales: Fandango Sales
Venue:  Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Italian, Spanish
105 minutes