text: Search For Truth In Disappearance, Death Of Parents - tribunedigital-thecourant
  Search For Truth In Disappearance, Death Of Parents
  In the politically repressive Argentina of the 1970s, the parents of young Albertina Carri were among thousands of individuals kidnapped, tortured and eventually murdered in the military junta's so-called ``dirty war'' against leftists.
  Almost three decades later, Carri has used documentary film in an attempt to come to terms with her parents' deaths and ascertain the truth of what happened. The result is ``The Blonds,'' or ``Los Rubios,'' a quirky, sometimes ingenious and often frustrating film that ultimately says more about the subjective nature of truth than it does about the fate of the Carris.
  From its first frames to its last, ``The Blonds'' is nearly void of the factual information, historical overviews and archival footage common to more traditional documentaries. Carri makes little attempt to set the stage for what happened to her parents or to track down and confront those responsible. There are no ``gotcha'' interviews or triumphant apprehensions of evidence.
  The young filmmaker's approach is intuitive and psychological and borrows more from the French New Wave, in particular the attitudinal filmmaking techniques of Jean-Luc Godard, than from documentary models. Carri's ``Blonds'' is a self-reflexive construct comprised of multiple layers of truth and half-truth. The filmmaker is casually introduced on film, but her role rarely extends beyond filming the young actress who plays her in the movie. Carri tracks Albertina (Analia Couceyro) as she interviews former neighbors of the Carri family, drives around with the film crew, studies or responds to interview footage on a computer monitor, visits a police station and a jail, or addresses the camera directly in scripted monologues. The overlap between the real Albertina and Couceyro's Albertina is continually in play so that at one point, the filmmaker is shown coaching Couceyro through a monologue. At another point, the film crew tapes a particularly upsetting interview in which a former neighbor recalls police burning Mr. Carri's face with cigarettes. When the interview wraps, one of the film crew suddenly remembers that the real Albertina just heard all of that.
  The effect of these scenes colliding is the celluloid equivalent of an echo chamber or a funhouse mirror. ``Truths'' in one scene are invalidated in the next. One neighbor's vanity, betrayed in her obvious care with her makeup, suggests what? That she is more interested in being filmed than in telling what she remembers? Another former neighbor seems most concerned that her lack of involvement in what occurred be well understood.
  Carri must have grown frustrated that her attempts to get at answers led nowhere and what she ultimately chose to dramatize is the subjective, elusive, complex, contradictory nature of the truth. The film's title is taken from the assertion by one former neighbor that Carris were a family of blondes. The fact that film audiences have seen Albertina Carri with her dark hair and dark eyes means viewers call into question the neighbor's recollected ``truths'' as surely as the filmmaker does.
  Interspersed between the footage filmed by and with the crew are short scenes of homegrown animation in which children's toys act out vignettes. The effect is both inventive and wistful, as if the toys harken back to the time before the tragedy. Less effective are sequences involving phrases written in black against a background of what might be folded white cardboard. Carri's panning shots of these phrases, the origins of which are not identified, are awkwardly inserted into the rest of the picture and tend to slow it down.
  There were times at the start of ``The Blonds'' when I thought the film seemed amateurish and sloppy, more accidental than controlled. The production values throughout never rise above those of a student film. But Carri gets at something in an original way. She has essentially invented a film form to accommodate her frustrated search for truth and her eventual decision to accept all the truths of her parents' story -- the real ones, the invented ones, the ``blond'' ones, and the misapprehended ones, because, in the end, it is all she has.
  ``The Blonds'' deserves the patient indulgence of audience members who, before film's end, will share the frustration and longing of a young woman whose parents were taken from her and whose fates remains a mystery.
  THE BLONDS (``Los Rubios'') is directed by Albertina Carri. In Spanish with English subtitles. Running time: 89 minutes. Not rated with adult material.