Saddled with the prosaic English-language title Buenos Aires 1977 at its Cannes premiere some eighteen months ago, Chronicle of an Escape, the fourth feature by Argentine filmmaker Israel Adrián Caetano, now promises American audiences the same uplifting conclusion — someone's a-gettin' outta somewhere, somehow — that homegrown viewers knew to expect. Which is just as well, really, since the film's chief characteristic is its unrelenting grimness. As that other title makes clear, Chronicle is set at the height of the country's junta-ruled nightmare, during which approximately 30,000 citizens were kidnapped and murdered for alleged crimes against the state.
One of the few survivors was a soccer goalie named Claudio Tamburrini (Rodrigo De la Serna), who was somehow mistakenly identified as an agitant, scooped off the street by a cadre of thugs, and held prisoner in a rather charming-looking (from the outside, anyway) villa just outside the capital, along with several dozen other unfortunates. Naked and blindfolded, the men are interrogated daily over a period of months, then simply vanish. When only four, including Tamburrini, remain, they finally make a break for it — still handcuffed, still naked.
Based on Tamburrini's memoirs, Chronicle of an Escape feels scrupulously, nauseatingly accurate in its unstinting depiction of deprivation and torture, but it also seems to have no other purpose; the film belongs to that large, undistinguished subset of historical dramas that achieve little more than informing viewers that the events onscreen did in fact take place. ("Painting testimonial pictures," to borrow a phrase from Mr.
Paul McCartney.) Caetano's previous films, which include Bolivia (2001) and the underseen A Red Bear (2002), were quirky character studies, so it's particularly disappointing that he fails to individualize his victims, who come across as an undifferentiated mass of abject-yet-courageous masculinity. Still, the climax is undeniably stirring — you can't get much more vulnerable than running naked and panic-stricken through a driving rainstorm with your hands cuffed behind your back — and the torture sequences, which are ugly exercises in pure sadism, may serve as a useful corrective to Jack Bauer's exploits over the last six years of 24. Nobody here knows the location of the virus or the four-digit code that will disarm the dirty bomb. They know only pain. — Mike D'Angelo