At the core of La Historia Oficial lies a political melodrama. Directed by Luis Puenzo, who ran a successful production company making commercials in the 1980s, the film was a critical success in Argentina and abroad, as well as a box-office smash in the domestic market: the top-grossing picture of 1985, and the second highest of 1986. La Historia Oficial had a theatrical release in major European countries and in the United States. It garnered national and international prizes, including an Academy award for best foreign picture in 1986, and the Cannes award for best actress to Norma Aleandro.
The film has come to represent in the minds of Argentine and foreign scholars the way the military regime of 1976-1983 operated against leftist guerrilla groups in the 1970s. Now a part of the Argentine imaginary, La Historia Oficial is seen as a document, albeit fictionalized, on how the relatives of those kidnapped were left to cope with the disappearance of their loved ones.
The film describes the process of political awareness undergone by Alicia Marnet de Ibáñez (Norma Aleandro), a high-school history history teacher married to Roberto Ibáñez (Héctor Alterio), a businessman who has prospered through his ties to the military and foreign investors. The couple has a five-year-old adopted girl, Gaby (Analía Castro), whose birthday they are about to celebrate when the film opens. In the eyes of their family and friends, the Ibáñez are a happy couple. However, through a series of shattering personal events starting in March 1983, at the beginning of the school year (the opening sequence), nine months after the military defeat in the Malvinas/Falkland war, Alicia becomes aware of the military dictatorship’s kidnapping of alleged terrorists, and suspects that their adopted daughter might be the child of a missing couple. Her search for the truth leads her to contact an organization striving to reunite children of the desaparecidos with their grandparents. Alicia believes that Sara Reballo (Chela Ruiz), a working-class woman, is the little girl’s grandmother. The marriage collapses as a result of Alicia’s quest, since Roberto is forced to acknowledge that he has indeed obtained the girl illegally through his connections with the regime. The last months of the military in power also halt Roberto’s business dealings. The couple part and the future of Gaby remains uncertain in the film’s open ending.
The pursuit of the protagonist is punctuated by a visual pattern of slamming doors, heavy with symbolism. In the loudest slam, marking the climax of film, Roberto brutally closes the bedroom door on his wife’s finger. At the end of her journey, Alicia is made to suffer vicariously the fate of those fellow citizen humiliated and tortured by the Robertos of the regime. She leaves the family home by firmly closing the front door.
La Historia Oficial has been analyzed as a persuasive emotional account of how an important segment of the population suffered from moral and political blindness during the military rule of 1976-1983. The protagonist’s myopia to the events of those years has been justified as a plot device to make the story unfold as an Oedipus narrative: the need to find the truth sets in motion a chain of fateful events. Even more, the protagonist’s passive role in accepting a newborn baby received under suspicious circumstances, without asking questions, has been glossed over or explained as the plausible reaction of a sterile woman anxious to become a mother. Her journey towards moral enlightenment becomes credible only if Alicia’s unrealistic unawareness of the sociopolitical context and her disconcerting ignorance about the origin of Roberto’s wealth and the child are accepted by the viewer.
As in classical tragedy, this quest for truth is punctuated by moments of critical recognition, anagnorisis, that bring about a change of course in the action, peripeteia. These scenes offer the three finest melodramatic peaks of the picture: Alicia’s friend Ana (Chunchuna Villafañe) describes her torture and rape; Gaby’s presumed grandmother recalls the circumstances of Gaby’s parents’ disappearance; Alicia confronts her husband in the climax scene, no holds barred.
For an Argentine audience, the narrative strategy of the film is clearly perceived from the opening shot, with the singing of the Argentine national anthem. From the onset, there is a metaphoric link between a family torn asunder by the consequences of an immoral act - the fraudulent appropriation of a child - and the political scene between 1976 and 1983, when the armed forces violated constitutional rights to destroy the militant left. In the film, the personal is political, and the microhistory – the emotional breakdown of a family with links to the regime – mirrors the bigger canvas – the collapse of the military dictatorship.
The well-known Argentine children’s song “En el país de Nomeacuerdo, doy tres pasitos y me pierdo” (“In the land of I- don’t -remember I take a step and I’m lost”), by singer composer María Elena Walsh, becomes a leitmotif with unambiguous metaphorical meaning. It is heard non-diegetically, sung or hummed at several key points in the story, punctuatint the final image of the film, Gaby sitting alone on a rocking chair while the camera pulls away and the credits roll on.
Besides the portrayal of the military by allusion and metaphor, the film also takes a direct look at those members of the upper-class profiting form their links to the military. It is the film’s weakest plot thread, since it relies on stereotypes and clichés, with these scenes staged as sleek commercials for luxury products.
Truth and memory, the two themes interwoven through La Historia Oficial, are sides of the same coin. They are embedded in the title of the film, and by the end, they have given a new meaning to the protagonist’s role as a history teacher. When the credits roll, Greek tragedy has stretched a hand to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: Alicia’s emotional and moral journey through a land where memory is flimsy and history distorted has made her a heroine in full melodramatic mode. The heightened emotional, visual, and stylistic language of the film has been able to convey and articulate the moral dilemmas Alicia has had to navigate. In 1985, La Historia Oficial told Argentines this was their trip too.
When the film opened in the US, it received good critical notices. Roger Ebert wrote that “The Official Story is part polemic, part thriller, part tragedy. It belongs on the list with films like Z,Missing, and El Norte, which examine the human aspects of political unrest. It is a movie that asks some very hard questions. Should Alicia search for the real mother of her daughter? Is her own love no less real? What would be “best” for the little girl? (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-official-story-1985)
On its 30thanniversary, La historia oficialwas restored in 4K based on the original negative, in a project funded by Argentine Film Institute, and shown as part of the Classics section of the Cannes film festival in 2015.
The screening tonight at the CSUN Cinematheque brings to a young college audience, the opportunity to see a landmark in the history of Argentine cinema.
For an interesting perspective on teaching La Historia Oficialto US students, see the experiences of Prof. Nicolas Poppe at Middlebury College: http://www.thecine-files.com/teaching-la-historia-oficial/, published in 2015.
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