Ritorno a Buenos Aires

 

Physical pain has no voice, but when it finally finds a voice, it begins to tell a story.
— Elaine Scarry 

Marco Bechis once again returns to the original ground of his cinema: the Argentine military dictatorship, the disappearance of bodies, torture, the erasure of identity. It is a subject that belongs to his own biographical experience and that had found one of its most radical cinematic forms in Garage Olimpo, before becoming, in Hijos/Figli, a reflection on memory, identity, and the children of the desaparecidos. 

In Ritorno a Buenos Aires, however, Bechis makes a significant shift. He does not look only at the victim, but at that dark zone in which the victim is forced to collaborate with his own executioner. 

Mariano Guerra was abducted, tortured, and sexually abused. But precisely because he survived, he carries with him a guilt that does not entirely belong to him and yet that he cannot erase: that of having been turned into a collaborator of the system that was destroying him. His life is spared, but the price of survival is entering the machinery of repression. The doctor who holds him captive sexually abuses him while simultaneously using him within the detention center. 

It is here that the film introduces another dimension: the violated body does not belong exclusively to the female victim. Sexual violence also crosses the male body and becomes a tool of annihilation, humiliation, and control. Under the Argentine dictatorship, the rape and torture of women were also intertwined with the abduction of the children of pregnant detainees, babies born in clandestinity and then separated from their mothers and handed over to families connected to the system of power. It is one of the themes Bechis had already confronted with extraordinary force in Hijos/Figli: it is not enough to eliminate a person; their lineage, their memory, even their right to know who they are must also be erased. 

But Mariano introduces a further complication. He is not merely the body upon which power exercises its violence: he is the survivor whom power seeks to turn into a cog in the machine. 

Because of its moral ambiguity, his condition recalls that of prisoners in concentration-camp systems who were forced to perform functions in the service of their persecutors. The comparison does not erase the historical differences, but it illuminates the film's central question: where does responsibility lie when survival is granted in exchange for collaboration? 

Mariano returns to Buenos Aires precisely because the past cannot be filed away with the documents of a trial. The other survivors become mirrors in which he must recognize both what he was and what he did. The geographical return coincides with a return into his own memory. 

It is a territory Bechis knows profoundly. And indeed the film recovers some of his strongest themes: memory as a site of torture, the body as a surface upon which power writes its own law, survival as anything but a reconciled condition, identity destroyed and then reconstructed through storytelling. 

Where Ritorno a Buenos Aires is less convincing is in the cinematic construction of this material. 

Compared with the precision and radicalism of Garage Olimpo and the force of Hijos/Figli, the screenplay here presents a number of solutions that feel forced. The shifts between present and past, rather than always producing a genuine fracture in memory, sometimes seem simply to explain what the film would like to convey. Some situations are also constructed so explicitly that, at certain moments, they verge on an involuntary sense of unreality, almost bordering on the grotesque. 

And this is precisely the film's most evident limitation: not the story it tells, but the way it chooses to tell it. 

Because here Bechis has extraordinarily powerful cinematic material at his disposal: a man who is simultaneously victim, survivor, and collaborator; a man whose body has been violated and at the same time used by the system; a man who must return before those who remember that same violence from a position different from his own. 

The problem is that the form does not always manage to sustain this complexity. 

When, instead, the film abandons the need to explain and allows the body, the silences, the encounters, and the memory to emerge, it recovers the strength of Bechis's cinema. It is then that the dictatorship ceases to be a historical event and becomes once again what it has always been for him: something that continues to inhabit survivors long after the regime has ended. 

Ritorno a Buenos Aires is therefore a necessary return, but not a completely successful one. Bechis returns to his own ghosts and observes them from a new angle: that of the victim forced to become a collaborator, of the violated male body, of the guilt born from survival. These are immensely powerful themes, but precisely for this reason the distance becomes all the more apparent when compared with the works in which Bechis had succeeded in transforming the memory of dictatorship into a cinematic form of absolute complexity and precision. 

The larger the prisoner's pain, the larger the torturer's world.
— Elaine Scarry