‘Back to Buenos Aires’ Review: Marco Bechis’ Return to the Screen Covers Similar Ground to Earlier Works but is Only Fitfully Effective

The return of Marco Bechis to filmmaking after 10 years is a welcome surprise, and the terrain he covers in “Back to Buenos Aires” is a familiar one for the veteran Chilean-Italian director who himself was caught up in the nightmare of Argentina’s military dictatorship. Set in the present, with frequent flashbacks, the film tells the story of an Italian doctor involved in Argentina’s resistance in the 1970s who reluctantly goes back to the country to give testimony about his three-plus years in the Garage Olimpo concentration camp. Stylistically looking like an uneasy hybrid between horror and film noir, Bechis’ return fails to satisfy on multiple levels, including the emotional one, though there are a few memorable scenes and the crux of the tale is potent.

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It’s no coincidence, of course, that the prison where Mariano Guerra (Adriano Giannini) was held, Garage Olimpo, is also the name of Bechis’ 1999 film. “Back to Buenos Aires,” however, is a very different movie, less visceral and more hallucinogenic, but also less gripping. It’s a film that tries to come to terms with survival guilt, avoiding pat judgments but hinting rather too strongly at the possibility of redemption through confession. Pervaded by silences that mirror the decades of silence that allowed war criminals to walk among us, the story unfolds through a back-and-forth of past and present, keeping pace with the revelations and Mariano’s increasingly fraught state.

Multiple messages on Mariano’s answering machine in Italy ask him to return to Buenos Aires to testify, but he keeps ignoring them, incapable of coming to grips with his Argentine past. The pressure is building, making him more and more edgy, until he finally agrees to go — cue a stunning sequence of shots filmed from his plane seat. Once landed, he and other witnesses pile into a van, but recognition doesn’t lead to conversation, which Mariano avoids at all costs. (One can’t help compare the loquacious Iranian survivors in “It Was Just an Accident” with the nearly mute Argentines here.) Housed in what looks like an old-fashioned congress center, the group take meals together but barely talk, for doing so would force them to revisit the trauma of the past as well as confront their own actions while in prison.

Even before we know the details, it’s clear that Mariano’s resistance to testifying springs from the shame of collaboration. That guilt, eating away at him for decades, comes boiling to the surface when he’s visited by Evelyn (Veronica Gerez, in a poorly written role), the daughter of a woman who disappeared during the dictatorship. He rejects her request for information about her mother, though not convincingly since his nerves are so shot he can barely avoid trembling. Even when the lawyer (Marcelo Chaparro) for those testifying has him look through photos to see if he can identify some of the people who ran Garage Olimpo, he feebly claims not to recognize anyone.

Bechis plays with the claustrophobia of the congress center as well as the courthouse, both locations lit with a deadening flatness that contrasts sharply with the few outdoor scenes, especially when Mariano spies a short, balding man leaving the courthouse and, in great agitation, follows him to the hospital where he works. It comes as no great surprise that Dr. K (Adrian Fondari), as he was known in Garage Olimpo, was Mariano’s chief tormentor, the man who wore down his will to such a degree that he became a passive collaborator when so many other prisoners were killed.

Bechis accompanies these scenes with flashbacks to when medical student Mariano (Eduardo Hoy) was working for the Resistance together with Muneca (Olivia Nuss), whose daughter Evelyn is the woman in the present putting pressure on him to reveal what he knows about her mother’s disappearance. The scene where Muneca is taken away is one of the most effective in the film, especially when it melds past and present. This shift between the two time periods creates an effective dialogue as we learn what actually happened in the prison, less graphically represented than in “Garage Olimpo” but still conveying the brutality inside.

Back in the present, the testimony of Amalia Mendez (Ana Celentano), her dignity unbowed as she recounts the sexual assaults she endured, helps to center the film at a moment when it really requires a strong, articulate voice. Mariano is just too shaky, his trauma too much on the surface, making us question how he ever remained a functional doctor. Multiple elements in “Back to Buenos Aires” don’t quite come together, starting with the peculiar mise-en-scène, which evokes horror movies — empty dully lit corridors, eerie silences, isolated characters — and film noir with shadows cast by old-fashioned blinds and lots of cigarettes. Flashback sequences are inevitably given a very brown tone, since no evocation of the 1970s would be considered believable unless brown predominates.