Chronicle of a Disappearance

A rough but accurate gauge of national resilience: When dictators fall, how soon do filmmakers rise again? In the case of Argentina, the recovery was impressively quick. Almost as soon as the generals were gone, artists responded to the immediate past with remarkable feature films and documentaries: Héctor Olivera's Funny Dirty Little War (1983) in the first category, Susana Muñoz and Lourdes Portillo's Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (1986) in the second. Since then, films inspired by the "dirty war" have developed into a large and significant subset of world cinema, with Luis Puenzo's The Official Story, Marco Bechis's Garage Olimpo and Hijos, David Blaustein's Spoils of War and (in a different mode) Fernando Solanas's La Nube among the most notable on the list.

We may now add to them Albertina Carri's complex and fascinating The Blonds (Los Rubios), which is having its US theatrical premiere at New York's Film Forum (through April 20). It is, I admit, not an easy picture to grapple with--but then, neither is its subject matter, which is the gaping hole in the filmmaker's life.

In 1977, when Carri was 4 years old, the police kidnapped and murdered her parents, the underground leftists Roberto Carri and Ana Maria Caruso. Years passed before the little girl learned what had happened. She grew up without memories of her mother and father; and no one has been able to supply for her what was lost. Her older sisters, who do remember the parents, evidently prefer not to talk about them, at least not for the record. Former comrades, when questioned, just rehash their own experiences and discourse on politics. The neighbors who saw Ana Maria and Roberto hauled away know only that they themselves did nothing wrong and don't want trouble; and the cops, strangely enough, have a hard time recalling anything before 1983.

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