The title The Official Story refers to a policy that is not far from “The Big Lie” of the Nazis: It is the official government version of truth, regardless of whether that “truth” is real or make-believe. In this film, the official story is laid out by the Argentine military dictatorship of the 1970s, which casually rewrites history to its own purposes.
As the film begins, that dictatorship has been overthrown, and some normalcy is back in the country, but the effects of the regime linger on. We see scenes from the life of Alicia (Norma Aleandro), a comfortable, upper-class high-school teacher, her businessman husband (Hector Alterio), and their adopted 5-year-old daughter (Analia Castro).
Their placid life is rocked by the return of Alicia’s old friend Ana, who was tortured and forced to leave the country when the dictatorship came into power some years earlier. Her story, powerfully told, gives the naïve Alicia a jolt.
But most disturbing is the news that, when undesirables were kidnapped or killed by the government, their babies were sometimes taken and given to other families. This remark changes Alicia’s life, because she is now haunted by the thought that her daughter might have been stolen from someone else. It seems that when her husband brought the infant home, he told Alicia never to ask any questions about it. The remainder of The Official Story has Alicia asking those questions, in a search for the truth about her daughter.
The film pinpoints a universal human trait, the urge sometimes to believe what we want to believe rather than what is true. Alicia is galvanized by the sudden discovery of the truth, in contrast to years of carefully avoiding thinking about it. The film implies that truth is always available – we simply prefer not to see it all the time.
One of the nice touches is that Alicia is a history teacher, and that she is herself the purveyor of an official story, one which her young, long-haired students sometimes contradict.
Director/co-scripter Luis Puenzo has made the smartest kind of political movie. It’s a film that makes its points not through strident preaching but by telling a human story. The radicalization of Alicia is an emotional journey, for the character and the audience.
Norma Aleandro, who has already won some awards for her performance, including the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival, gives a rich, full embodiment of the heroine. She goes from the complacent bourgeois, her hair tied back in a tight bun as she dishes out discipline to her class, to the burning detective, her hair flying in wild curls as she discovers the layers of lies.
For both Puenzo and Aleandro, The Official Story is a strong piece of work, and deservedly places them in a prominent position in world cinema.
First published in The Herald, December 21, 1985
It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. I had remembered that Aleandro was nominated that year, too, but she was actually nominated for Supporting Actress a couple of years later, for Gaby: A True Story. Puenzo went on to make a couple of English-language pictures, the toe-stubbing Old Gringo, and an adaptation of The Plague, which I do not know if I saw. Putting it together for just one classic film is something, though, and this one is a classic.
WHAT A FEELING! 