At The Movies: Putting the past on trial in award-winning Argentina, 1985

Argentina, 1985 (NC16)

141 minutes, showing on Amazon Prime Video

5 stars

The story: In an act that has never been repeated in Latin America, a civilian government that replaced a military junta took the former regime to court. In the place and date of the title, public prosecutor Julio Cesar Strassera (Ricardo Darin) is given the perilous job of building a case against the generals and colonels whose death squads have murdered thousands of citizens.

This depiction of actual events won this year’s Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and has been nominated in the Best International Feature Film category at the upcoming Academy Awards.

“History is written by the victors” is a saying that makes sense for about a minute until one realises that losers rarely ever shut up. Instead of slinking away into the darkness like movie villains, they simply rebrand and carry on under a new name.

Strassera found himself beset by losers in 1985. The former Argentine military regime, the one best known for giving two fingers to the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands, had lost its official powers. But it still had plenty of unofficial clout, enough to have Strassera and his legal team fearing for their lives.

Argentine director and co-writer Santiago Mitre depicts, in stark, non-didactic terms, the quagmire that lies ahead of the prosecution. Through his conversations with other lawyers, political figures and his family, a picture emerges of a population beaten down by years of terror. A nationwide form of post-traumatic stress disorder has taken hold.

Mitre also steers away from making Strassera a typical crusading figure. He is not a tear-shedding humanitarian, nor an Aaron Sorkin-style man of principle (The Trial Of The Chicago 7, 2020; The Newsroom, 2012 to 2014).

In Darin’s careful hands – and it is a tragedy that outside of Latin America, he has received little awards recognition – Strassera is shown to be a grumpy bureaucrat who has survived in his job by being more pugnacious than most. As the threats to his life and those of his family roll in, he fights on, powered by the need to complete the assigned task. This makes him more palpably human than any heroic lawyer or journalist in recent movie history.

Hot take: This engrossing legal drama shows the amount of grit it takes to put a former military regime on trial – justice moves slowly and painfully when the names of those being prosecuted still inspire a primal fear.