Imagining Argentina

A W Bergh, Stockholm:Heard about the green Ford Falcons of Buenos Aires? Death mobiles they was called and were doing the same dirty job for president Videla and a string of junta generals, in the 1970s mimicking their highly successful colleague dictator Pinochet across the border in Chile. Kids protesting against expensive school bus fares could be taken for a ride and never seen again. Disappearances, desaparecidos, was the name of the game and seems to the mayor training for the brave military men crushing the enemies of Argentina in their dirty war against opposition during the late 1970s and early 80s. Performing roughly 40 000 desaparecidos until they met real soldiers on the Falklands in 1982 and was beaten to pulp in a few days by the British. The military rule was toppled but their henchmen have to this day not even been brought to justice. Only leaving a trail of wailing crazy mothers circling the famous Plaza de Mayo Square in central Buenos Aires, flashing large pictures of their murdered sons and daughters. A pity Imagining Argentina is such bomb telling the story. Costa-Gavras took less than a decade to make Missing, to give us a fair shot of what Pinochets CIA-backed bloodstained fascist coup in Chile was all about. A heck of a better job than this quarter of a century late badly told yarn. While Jack Lemon tormented the American ambassador on site to find his missing son in Santiago and actually had the bastard to admit that eggs had to be broken in order to save dear American investments down here on their backyard clairvoyant Banderas use voodoo to figure out the whereabouts of his vanished wife (and later on his already lifeless daughter). To make it even worse, to no avail as it turns out. It chiefly brings him out on the huge Pampas only to meet an old Jewish couple, keeping exotic birds as a hobby(!), lecturing him on the horrors of Nazi Germany. Thats amazingly about all the politics to learn from decades of Latin America military violence in this story. Need I tell more? Not even Leonard Maltin bothered to include the film in his Movie Guide