Gaston Biraben's political thriller Cautiva (Captive) concerns itself with what happened to the children of the people killed after the 1970s military coup. Cristina Quadri (Barbara Lombardo) is the model of a perfect student. Smart and affluent, her life is in perfect order until, one day, she is called from her class and made to appear in front of a judge. The judge informs her that her real parents were killed in the '70s. Cristina is forced to go live with her grandmother Elisa (Susana
Campos), who has spent the past 20 years attempting to locate Cristina (whose birth name was Sofia). Although, at first, she is hurt, bitter, and confused, Cristina/Sofia eventually grows to care for Elisa and begins to research the fate of her parents. Captive was an award winner at the 2003 San Sebastian Film Festival. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi
The Argentine thriller Cautiva features a solid performance by 23-year-old Barbara Lombardo that goes a long way in making up for the telenovela script.
The debut feature of Gastón Biraben, Cautiva is most potent in its first hour, as it bears witness to the disorientation and distrust experienced by a young girl whose life is suddenly turned upside down.
This powerful film in the New Directors/New Films Series about a girl's alienation is also an attempt to grapple with the horrors of Argentina's recent history.
An almost Kafkaesque story of the daughter of two "disappeared" parents in Argentina discovering her true identity. Similar to "The Official Story" but with a key difference. The daughter is a teenager rather than a 5 year old and hence more vulnerable to
Neither Biraben's script nor his direction leave room for doubt as to how he feels about the nightmarish past, but he's smart enough to know that even justified outrage sometimes has to be tempered with the complexities of human intentions and realities.
Sporadically artful yet stupefyingly dull -- there are some segments that are so beautiful and monotonous that they very nearly hypnotise us...into a coma.
In "Cautiva," it is 1994 and Cristina(Barbara Lombardo) has just turned 15. She is a nautrally curious teenager in Argentina, living on the outskirts of Buenos Aires with her parents(Osvaldo Santoro & Silvia Bayle) and attending Catholic school. All of that changes when she is pulled out of school one day and brought
to the office of Judge Barrenechea(Hugo Arana) who calmly informs her that everything she has known is a lie and that her real parents were a pair of architecture students who were disappeared by the military junta. And in the process, he introduces Cristina to her real grandmother(Susana Campos). In response, Cristina makes a break for it... "Cautiva" is a very compelling movie whose only major fault is an inexplicable scene. In normal circumstances, we can presume that adoptive parents may have a stronger bond with their children than their blood relations who gave them up. But in Argentina, where babies were taken from their parents during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983, the right thing to do is to reunite them with their original families.(Contrary to what a schoolmate of Cristina's thinks, something is being done to right the old wrongs.) In the end, Cristina is not only questioning her identity but also the identity and history of her country which up to this point she had been kept largely ignorant of. See, the personal is the political. By the way, are their any human rights abuses that Henry Kissinger has not had a connection with?
March 1, 2008
Walter M.
Super Reviewer
great movie about argentina's "disappeared" and the fallout from the last dictatorship there in the late seventies.
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