Customer Reviews

Cautiva

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm giving five stars to this film not only to compensate the two stars given by another reviewer, but because the film deserves five stars. To appreciate this film you need to have an idea of the political unrest that Latin America - Argentina in this case - went through during the 60's and 70's, and the consequences of the political and psychological repression that still is affecting thousands of lives.

This film is quiet touching and tender, Cautiva is a straightforward, well told story with no-frills, a film that by no means appeals to the aficionados of Hollywood cinema.

CAUTIVA ('Captive') is a very effective film by young writer/director Gaston Biraben who has taken to task the impact of Argentina's 'Dirty War' of the late 1970s and succeeds in making a very personal story out of the horror of the 'desaparecidos' tragedy that stole from Argentina some of its brightest minds - and 'reassigned' the children of these 'disappeared ones' who were born in the prisons to political friends of the dictatorship. While the concept is gruesome as history and as content, Biraben manages to recreate that terrifying period of time in terms of the present. This retrospective study makes a huge impact.

Cristina Quadri (the deeply impressive Bárbara Lombardo) lives with her parents in Buenos Aires, attending a Catholic girls' school, seemingly a happy young teenager. One regular day she is called to the principal's office and told she must visit a judge, a frightening concept for a young girl who is forced to go without informing her parents. The judge informs her that she is not 'Cristina Quadri' but instead 'Sofía Lombardi', the daughter of a couple who 'disappeared' in 1978 as political prisoners. A recent blood test Cristina/Sofia thought was a follow-up for a post-op check was actually a test to match her blood with that of the newly discovered true parents' family. Cristina, stunned by her lack of true identity, confronts her 'adopted parents' and struggles with the officials who insist she be returned to her blood relatives. Cristina becomes close to another 'adopted' girl and the two explore their roots, finding that they were born in prisons and then given to police officials to be placed in homes. The transition from adopted to blood family is the path the film explores: despite the comforts of present life the girls must know their origins to fully realize their identities.

The cast is uniformly strong, the concept of the film works well as Biraben snaps us back and forth between the World Cup Soccer Game in Buenos Aires in 1978 that contrasts so gravely with the concurrent underground disappearance of the intellects of the country, and the performance by Lombardo holds the credibility of the story well. There is a fine music score by José Luis Castiñeira de Dios that combines a suite for cello and piano with elements from Mozart's Requiem very effectively. This film has been awarded many prizes since its appearance in 2003: the prizes are justly deserved. Highly recommended viewing. Grady Harp, December 07

A little disappointed" apparently was expecting and wanting a different kind of movie than the one she saw. It's not a documentary about the inhumanities of the "Dirty War." It's not a thriller about one of the perpetrators being brought to justice. It doesn't, as another reviewer pointed out, have any car chases or any other shoot-em-up action. It's the story of a teenage girl plunged into crisis, her lifelong certainties, including her loving "parents" and godfather, swept away. Told by a federal judge that she's actually Sofia Lombardi, not Christina Quadri, that her biological parents were abducted by federal police and never seen again, and sent to live with a stranger who insists she's her grandmother, she at first fiercely resists and wants only to be reunited with the only parents she's ever known, who genuinely love her. But she eventually, with the help of another girl whose father was disappeared, becomes obsessed with her mother's fate and her own origin. Thanks to her digging and the help of that friend she begins to find out bits and pieces of her parents' fate until, in a scene heartbreaking in its quiet intensity, she discovers the when and where of her own origin and is given a glimpse of the love and courage of her doomed mother. The sparse but pivotal answers she obtains change forever her view of past and present, and of the people, one in particular, who had heretofore had a formative influence in her life. The loose ends are not tied up. She gets just a glimpse of her mother during a critical two-day span. But that very indeterminateness, and the fact that she found out anything at all, is part of the power of this deeply moving film.

The young girl who plays the lead here does an amazing job of showing the jolt she goes through when she is torn away from her adoptive parents and told she was the child of people who disappeared during Argentina's '70s military dictatorship. Her love for her 'parents' turns to loathing over the course of the movie as she learns the ugly political truth and returns to what's left of her blood family. This is a pure character study. You don't see much of Buenos Aires, unfortunately. The flashbacks are handled adeptly. Very high quality film-making that teaches us something instead of numbing our brains.

For once, we get in the same room with what happens to the offspring of the Argentinian' disappeared'-- where they are placed, by whom, and what happens to their choice re surrogate parents.

Although I had the opportunity -- living in Santa Fe, NM -- to see an exhibition of the art of their relatives, it never entered my mind to reflect on the fate of their children (after they were identified and located).

Here's a credible moving picture of some possibilities, beautifully portrayed, primarily by the female actors. To imagine that even these children would have to deal with hateful backlash from the families of their peers feeds the unbearable tragedy of the '70s.

How do we all get reconciled -- if ever -- to our evil?

I recommend giving this DVD to someone of the younger generation, who can best identify with the amazing lead of the film. Her strength -- and understanding -- may be contagious.

Already told before in "The Official Story," this Argentine film revisits the fate of families with "adopted" children born to "disappeared" political dissidents in the 1970s. This time it is the child's version of that story, as a schoolgirl discovers and slowly comes to understand that the parents who have raised her in fact acquired her illegally, and that her actual parents were killed while being held in clandestine prisons by secret police. The telling of this story, for all the melodrama inherent in it, is very even-handed, measured, and focused on the difficulty of coming to terms with learning that one's entire young life has been based on a terrible lie. This film is nicely scripted and the performances are affecting and believable. Well worth watching, and heart-breaking as we learn of the two young lives snuffed out by the military authorities who ruled Argentina at the time.

Abductions, rendition and torture, secret prisons --the full apparatus of state terrorism emerged once upon a time in Argentina to fight a few revolutionaries and to intimidate the general population to accept selective suspension of human rights, in order to protect the powerful at home and abroad. Those who "disappeared" are dead and gone, but their survivors continue on. "Cautiva" presents a vivid, heart-breaking story that focuses on one such survivor, wrested at birth from her mother by her torturers. The sin of their inhumanity cannot be washed away. And the innocent must bear that pain forever. "Cautiva" is painful to watch and impossible to forget. But deep compassion requires we do not avert our eyes from this parable of our times.

This movie is excellent; however, if showing to school students - note that there is nudity in the section called "back to school." Educators may want to preview before showing.

I HAVE JUST FINISHED WATCHING THIS FILM AND I AM STILL OUT OF BREATH. BRUTALLY HONEST, SEARING ACCOUNT OF THE FATE OF CHILDREN OF THE DISSAPEARED IN ARGENTINA, IT BUILDS INEXORABLY (DOESN'T THAT OTHER REVIEWER KNOW NOT ALL MOVIE TENSION COMES FROM CAR CHASES AND GUN BATTLES?) TOWARDS AN OPEN-ENDED, BURNING QUESTION: ARE THE DISAPPEARED . . . FOREVER GONE? HAVING LOST FRIENDS DURING THAT PERIOD, AND HAVING TAUGHT SOME THAT SURVIVED IT, THIS MOVIE WILL STAY WITH ME FOREVER.

After the first half hour, I didn't care about the plot, the characters, or what would happen next. I thought this was too boring to continue, so I didn't. Seems like I have to kiss a lot of frogs before I hit a prince of a movie.