A narrative in the genre of the prosecution of the military junta that ruled the country, created by Amazon Prime Video for worldwide projection and designed to win prizes.
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| [Argentina 85] |
"We think it very wonderful and even poetic that a film that discusses democracy is the victor in a vote by the general public. In a time when it seems that certain remarks that do not respect democratic norms are rising, maybe too much, it is something lovely, a good symbol, and it fills me with pride. "
On the main stage of the San Sebastian Film Festival during the past weekend, Ricardo "Chino" Darn expressed his gratitude to the festival audience for bestowing the audience prize onto Argentina 1985, the film for which he was one of the producers. The film stars his father, Ricardo Darn, and follows both the past and current instances of the historic trial of the Military Juntas that took place at the very beginning of 1985. The trial is the subject of the film.
The strong screenplay, which is presented with just the right amount of subtleties by Mariano Llinás, provides a rich environment in which Santiago Miter's strong narrative pulse may shine.
It is abundantly obvious that Miter is motivated by a sincere interest in working on the procedures of political growth in his fiction. He accomplished so in the film El Estudiante, which was his first feature, following in the footsteps of political changes that took place in the hallways of academic cloisters. He repeated the bet on a larger scale with the outstanding La Cordillera, in which he chose Darn for the first time to capture the difficulties of forming a collective project within the framework of a summit of South American leaders. This time, however, he used La Cordillera to bet on a horse named Cordillera.
But beyond the mirror of the superstructural, Miter lingers on the interior tensions of his characters, on the closeness that intensifies that step before to the plunge into the abyss. [Citation needed] And obviously, work is being done on it in Argentina in the year 1985.
Taking use of Darn's talent and fascination in front of the camera, he assumes the role of Julio Cesar Strassera, the prosecutor he personifies, as the protagonist of the drama.
But not in the role of an unquestionable hero; rather, play the part of a gray lawyer who is confronted with extraordinary events as he enters his office. And he has the potential to create history, to reach that point of the debate to stay in the books with his slogan "Judges: Never Again." This will allow him to leave his mark on the annals of history.
That is where the classic narrative comes into play (all of Mitre's films can be taken as an exercise that moves on the paradigm of classic American cinema of the seventies), in order to weave a captivating thriller, which, despite the fact that the viewer is aware of the outcome, "hooks" them throughout the course of the story.
The work that Alan Pakula did in 1976 for the film All the President's Men, which stars Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford and follows the alternatives of the Watergate case and the fall of Nixon, can be cited as a comparative beacon in this line of analysis. The dialogues, the closed frames, and the use of interior locations offer an exercise that can serve as a framework for analytical consideration.
It is a film "from" a platform that will have a brief passage through movie theaters (three weeks) before ending up as a content offer on the VOD service. This presupposes a remarkable advantage such as its international projection. Perhaps, however, it is also what enables marking its greatest defect, which is the excessive underlining of certain actions. Argentina 1985 was released on the market as an Amazon Prime Video production. This is a detail that is by no means a minor one.
Another factor that came into play with production by Amazon and that occurs with all platforms that finance film projects is that it puts the traditional industry under stress, particularly the theatrical release. Video-on-demand services provide a gap, or a window of time, of a few weeks before adding that content to their offer so that movie theaters can have exclusivity over that content.
This results in the formation of a variety of "boycotts," and the theaters with the greatest influence, namely the international complexes (Cinemark, Cinepolis, and Showcase), do not accept the agreement.
Paradoxically, this pessimistic outlook gives rise to a constructive activity, which, in turn, is beneficial to more intimate movie theaters and economic movements that have access to (and make use of) the exclusivity afforded by those weeks.
And on top of that, they even prolong the validity when the general public asks for it (as happened with the Netflix film The Irishman, which continued in the theaters of the Devoto complex after the platform offered it to the world).
It was a theme that crossed all vernacular cinema in the first years of democracy, after 1983. With productions that differed from one another in quality and subject matter. Within the context of the history of Argentine cinema, the film by Miter and Llinás gets on a fairly busy path: reviewing the seventies and early eighties, the dictatorship and its consequences.
From La Noche de los Lápices to the Oscar-winning La Historia Oficial, passing through Los Chicos de la Guerra or El Exilio de Gardel, the range opened up in a compendium that added chapters and production teams to a constant reading of recent history. With the passage of time, different approaches appeared, especially from genre cinema, as is the case with films like Kamchatka, Koblic, or Crónica de una Fuga, directed by Adrián Caetano.