'Argentina, 1985': the common man who saved democracy

In an unexpectedly emotional speech when collecting the audience award at the recently closed San Sebastian festival, the actor Chino Darín, this time as producer, pointed to the poetic justice behind the "popular and anonymous" recognition of a film who speaks of "democracy" precisely at a time when his values ​​are in danger throughout the world.

More information

Argentine cinema revives the trial of the dictatorship that changed the country's history

In his apt message, the son of Ricardo Darín —actor who in

gives life to the famous prosecutor Julio César Strassera, responsible together with Luis Moreno Ocampo for directing the accusation against the Military Junta that governed Argentina with nauseating impunity and sadism between 1976 and 1983—, summed up the ultimate meaning of a film that, through a genre as juicy as judicial cinema, vindicates the epic of the common man in the course of history.

An epic that, with enormous audacity, this film brings to the present.

The director Santiago Miter (

) has written, together with his usual co-writer in recent years, Mariano Llinás (author of

and the monumental

), a film that openly plays with the clichés of classic courtroom cinema to achieve that which is repeated so many times in this film: to convince as many people as possible.

represents the historic trial of the military leadership for crimes against humanity through the figure of an official, Strassera, convinced that the success of the trial depended on both the street and the court.

It is not just a matter of sending Videla or Massera to jail, but rather that the citizens who had supported them, those "fachos" who give rise to some humorous dialogues, opened their eyes to the chain of crimes they committed.

The film is built around the character of Strassera and his own family.

A Frank Capra-style portrait of a middle-class official (“History isn't made by guys like me,” says the character at the beginning of the film) whose initial struggle is against his own immobility.

That dramatic arc so well exploited in Hollywood cinema is the basis of a film that is not afraid of being what it is: a political film that appeals to the viewer's emotion through a character that monopolizes almost everything and that only an actor with the star of Ricardo Darín can bring to fruition.

Although always with the support of secondary characters as well constructed and executed as Strassera's wife, played by Alejandra Flechner;

Luis Moreno Ocampo himself (Peter Lanzani), the old assistant played by Walter Jakob,

questions.

Unlike such emblematic films as

, the classic on the Nuremberg trials by Stanley Kramer, or

, in which Rob Reiner achieves one of the best portraits that exist of the awareness of a young lawyer (Tom Cruise),

reduces the monster , the military, to a caricature without a voice.

It is the most questionable decision of a script that in its exposition of that great theater of history that are the trials brilliantly introduces a not so common epic, that of the writing itself.

Strassera's famous plea, the "Never again" that he coined for the books, is presented here with the emotion of the individual voice, but also that of the collective, of teamwork that crosses out or adds words to build what lasts, a text written by a gray man who was able to understand that a couple of pages could contain all the glory of his profession and the last line of defense of democracy.

ARGENTINA, 1985

Address:

Santiago Mitre.

Cast:

Ricardo Darín, Peter Lanzani, Alejandra Flechner, Carlos Portaluppi, Walter Jakob.

Genre:

courtroom

Argentina, 2022.

Duration:

140 minutes. 

Premiere in theaters on September 30 and on the Amazon Prime Video platform on October 21.

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber