Back to Buenos Aires Review: A Brooding Drama Revisits the Violent Days of Argentinas Dictatorship, and the Traumas That Remained in Its Wake

The dark days of Argentina’s dictatorship return to haunt a man 30 years later in Back to Buenos Aires (Ritorno a Buenos Aires), director Marco Bechis’ brooding portrayal of the deep wounds left by a military junta that tortured and killed thousands of people during its brutal reign over the country. Powerful and well-played, if sometimes lacking in tension and plausibility, this Venice competition premiere should find additional slots in festivals and arthouses throughout Europe, as well as in Latin America.

Inspired by the Chilean-Italian filmmaker’s own personal histroy as one of the rare desaparecidos (victims of forced disappearance) to survive kidnapping and imprisonment in Argentina after the military coup of 1976, the movie is bolstered by a psychological and historical verisimilitude that reflects how intimately Bechis knows his subject. Where Buenos Aires occasionally falters is in a narrative that slowly but surely moves ahead without much suspense, while losing its way in a few unnecessary plot contrivances.

The film begins in Torino in 2008, during which we see 50-something paramedic Mariano (Adriano Giannini) working hard to save the life of a patient, then floundering at home afterwards. Solitary and taciturn — the man barely utters a full sentence until the third act — he keeps receiving messages on his answering machine about a court appearance back in Argentina. We soon learn that he’s been asked to fly to Buenos Aires and testify against members of the junta who, 30 years after the fact, are finally facing criminal prosecution. Reluctant at first to accept, Mariano decides to hop on a plane and return to the site of his torments.

The rest of the movie takes place in the confines of a worn-down Buenos Aires courthouse, where Mariano and a handful of former captives are waylaid while waiting for the trial to begin. It’s immediately apparent that the other survivors regard Mariano with a fair amount of disdain, and we begin to understand why when a series of chronological flashbacks takes us back to the coup of 1976. There, we see young Mariano (Eduardo Hoy) going from armed rebel on the run with other student leftists to being a prisoner held and tortured at Buenos Aires’ notorious Garage Olimpo (also the subject and title of Bechis’ 1999 award-winning feature, which played in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar).

Why the others hold Mariano in such contempt becomes clear when we learn he was something of a kapo in the infamous prison, surviving for years as both the in-house medic and a pawn for guards who practiced torture and rape on a regular basis. The film’s standout sequence has him returning to the location of his internment along with Evelyn (Verónica Gerez), the daughter of one of his former comrades, wandering through a massive empty garage in which tiny individual cells are still marked off on the ground.

During this and other scenes, Mariano looks physically sick from the guilt he holds vis-à-vis the others, as well as the scars he still bears after being tortured and humiliated for over two years. Giannini is strong in a role that has him drenched in sweat and silently suffering for most of the movie, although a little more dialogue might have helped round his character out. A love affair that Mariano has with fellow survivor Amalia (Ana Celentano) adds something extra to the plot, while another thread involving an evil doctor (Adrian Fondari) feels a bit phony, lacking the realism of the main storyline.

The film’s most disturbing moments make reference to some of the horrific acts of the junta, including the “death flights” during which captives were drugged, loaded onto a plane, stripped naked and tossed into the sea from high altitudes. The pain of that period seems like too much to bear for Mariano, who also risks prosecution if the court determines he was a willing participant in the barbaric regime, even if he was a prisoner himself.

In its last act, Back to Buenos Aires settles into a courtroom drama in which Mariano faces the demons he’s been harboring for decades. If the film’s ending ties things up in ways that don’t quite reflect the complexity of what’s happening, Bechis earnestly tries to show how someone like Mariano could perhaps find a way forward — not necessarily by getting past his traumas, which will always be there, but by learning how to live with them.