Country: Argentina
Director: Luis Puenzo
Time: 1 hour and 52 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Kanopy (free w/library card) and Amazon (free w/subscription)
What It Elicits: Uncomfortable truths, the Dirty Wars, musings on complicity
“History is a set of lies agreed upon,” wrote Napoleon, a man who knew a thing or two about the construction of political narratives. Indeed, the contestation over dominant historical accounts, though frequently in the news these days, remains a battle as old as time. Within repressive government systems, in which official information dominates media and counter-narratives coexist amidst an onslaught of rumor, imperfectly glimpsed verities, and self-imposed silences, the discovery of truth (i.e. ascertainable facts upon which narratives construct themselves) does not always provide the promised panacea. For confronting, with naked candor, the recent past forces subjects to confront their own actions and (perhaps, worse) can destabilize the very narratives that allow them to function within the world. For good reason, self-deception has never gone out of fashion. Luis Puenzo’s The Official Story engages with these questions of truth and complicity by following a high school history teacher, Alicia, in the final years of Argentina’s military junta as her (perhaps willful) naiveté surrounding the political violence of the Argentinian regime—and that very violence’s impact upon her own family’s constitution—collapses, spurred in part by her friend’s return from exile, in part by a fellow teacher’s activism, and in part by her husband’s increasingly volatile behavior, crystallizing around the question of her adopted daughter’s origins. (Between 1976-1983, children of disappeared political activists were often placed with regime-affiliated families in Argentina .)
At its broadest, The Official Story underscores the ways in which repressive governments render their own citizens complicit—unwittingly or wittingly remains a central question of the film—while those same citizens, and in particular those whose lives aren’t disadvantaged by politics, can often work to avoid staring into the abyss. Puenzo’s film, however, transcends this simple critique through empathy with its central character. For it remains facile to cast aspersions on those choosing to work within oppressive structures (often for their own benefit) without interrogating or fully understanding the constraints imposed and the difficult choices on offer. In the end, The Official Story forces its viewers to ask themselves what role, given the circumstances, they might expect themselves to play. And this emerges the darkest question of all.
Go Down the Rabbit Hole With:
Héctor Oliviera — Funny Dirty Little War (1983)
Pablo Larraín — No (2012)