“A harrowing film about coming to terms with the feelings of guilt felt by those who survive.”

After the military junta overthrew the government of Isabel Perón in 1976, the use of illegal detention and torture centers became widespread in Argentina. During the so-called Dirty War that followed the coup, political adversaries of the regime were snatched from their homes and from the streets, often in broad daylight, and brought to one of these facilities. There they were subjected to gruesome interrogation techniques, often leading to death without a trace. One notorious facility was Garage Olimpo, a former tram and bus terminal converted into a house of cruelty. Its name was derived from a sign that was posted above the door, “Welcome to the Olympus of the gods“, referring to guards and torturers as the gods who decided the fates of mortal prisoners. But even gods can fall down from Olympus.

In 1999, Argentinian director Marco Bechis made Garage Olimpo, about a young woman detained in the facility, who exploits the feelings one of her interrogators has for her in order to survive. Bechis is a survivor of the Dirty War himself, deported from Argentina after a stint in Club Athletico, a similar prison to Garage Olimpo. He ended up in Milan, and eventually returned to the chilling cells of political imprisonment in his 1999 film. Now, 27 years later, he again opens the doors to the torture halls to study the emotional and psychological trauma of a man who was broken down to the point of cooperating with his torturers, and the feeling of guilt that has haunted him ever since.

Torino, 2008. Mariano Guerra (Adriano Giannini) is a fireman who lives a solitary life. He has a daughter he barely sees; it takes him having to return to his country of birth, Argentina, for her to come over and take care of his dog while he is gone. The reason for his return is a trial, one he has been dreading for a long time. He is summoned to testify against the group of men who ran Garage Olimpo, a clandestine prison opened in 1978. Mariano is a key witness for the simple reason that he was detained there for two years and 46 days. This is notably longer than other detainees, many of whom were put on the notorious death flights. As one person in the film reminds everyone, being thrown out of an airplane over open water is like hitting concrete: the body disintegrates on impact.

After his return to Buenos Aires, Mariano is given a simple room in the Ministry of Justice, along with some of his former compañeros from an armed resistance group that fought Videla’s junta in the late ’70s. Mariano is continuously on edge around these others, especially when accusations start to fly about who ratted out whom. When Evelyn (Verónica Gerez), the daughter of Mariano’s former lover and fellow resistance fighter, shows up, Mariano’s nerves are even more rattled. He has his reasons; he gave his torturers the name of this lover, Muñeca (Olivia Nuss), and injected her with a sedative right before she was transported to take the last flight of her life. His background as a medical student gave Mariano certain privileges because he could help in the prison’s infirmary, treating wounds and resuscitating prisoners who had endured one electric shock too many. He didn’t do this out of free will, but was basically made the (sexual) pet of a particularly sadistic doctor known only as Doctor K. As Mariano’s testimony comes up, he has to face his darkest demons from the past, and come clean about his collaboration with the men that ran the house of horrors.

A portrait of psychological trauma first and foremost, Back to Buenos Aires leans heavily on the emotional toll its protagonist has paid, and is still paying 30 years after the fact. In Giannini, Bechis has found an excellent interpreter of that trauma. His Mariano, an introverted man not by nature but by psychological force, is haunted by his past, and Giannini, often filmed in extreme close-up, wears every bit of that on his face. A confrontation with his former nemesis in an anonymous bathroom leads to a complete emotional breakdown, which shows that even after 30 years only a few words are enough to make the abused fall back into their subordinate roles. It’s a harrowing scene in a film laden with emotion, but Bechis’ strength is that he never lets the emotion completely take over and turn Back to Buenos Aires into a heavy-handed account of Argentina’s troubled past. By focusing on the trauma of just one person, and through his struggle with the past showing both the generational aspect of it and functioning as a lead-in to the trauma of others in the cast (mostly that of character actress Ana Celentano’s Amalia), Bechis keeps the emotional tension high without overdoing the melodrama. This leads to a number of confrontational scenes, Mariano’s encounter with Doctor K (a frightening Adrián Fondari) just one example of how this film can slap you in the face. But while the supporting cast is excellent, Giannini towers over all, giving a performance worthy of a Volpi Cup win.

Bechis’ direction is restrained. He effectively uses the trope of certain places conjuring up memories of the past that are then played out as flashbacks, mainly because in the film’s final scene (before a touching epilogue) he manages to bring the two Marianos, the one who sees old wounds being reopened and the one who tries to mend the wounds of others while new ones are inflicted on himself, together in a simple visual gesture. Aerial shots of Buenos Aires at night evoke the idea of airplanes flying over, carrying a load that may never return, and the film’s final stretch, in which it effectively becomes a courtroom drama, gains power in the moment Mariano finally gets a chance to call out the man that broke him. A quarter of a century after Garage Olimpo, Bechis has returned to Argentina’s darkest hours, also his own darkest hours in a way, with a harrowing film about coming to terms with the feelings of guilt felt by those who survive, and fighting the demons that guided them down the darkest path to survival.