I've heard Argentines say that Buenos Aires is more densely populated by psychoanalysts than anyplace else in the world. Whether there's truth to this boast (if it is a boast), I don't know; but something must be on the mind of a city that can produce Lost Embrace, a film that presents actual footage of a ritual circumcision, then introduces a long-absent father who is missing one arm.

Vanished body parts, vanished parents and lovers, a whole society that vanished in Eastern Europe: These are the ghosts that haunt this ambling comedy of neighborhood life in Buenos Aires. The neighborhood in this case is an indoor mall: little more than a twisting, up-and-down hallway lined with seven or eight glassy storefronts. Given the modesty of this setting, the shopkeepers' main business consists of looking in on one another. They visit, gossip, spy and tease; and while they are so engaged, the main character snoops and kibitzes with us.

He is Ariel (Daniel Hendler), a shaggily handsome young fellow with a rolling gait and an almost psychoanalytic urge toward self-explanation. He opens the film by giving a voiceover tour of the mall, as a handheld camera follows the back of his head down the hallway, past the storefronts, to his mother's lingerie shop. As he will soon relate, he was the baby in that circumcision footage--an infant whose father deserted right after the ceremony, in 1973, and has lived in Israel ever since, to Ariel's infinite resentment.

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