A nation’s hidden history surfaces

The opening minutes of “Cautiva” (Captive), set in Buenos Aires in 1994, couldn’t be more unremarkable. Cristina Quadri (Barbara Lombardo), the daughter of a retired police officer, celebrates her 15th birthday, visits the doctor and attends school, where a classmate is dismissed for questioning the teacher. But attentive viewers will notice that the movie follows a rite of passage with the taking of blood, and that the ejected student was being punished for bringing up the country’s totalitarian past, a hidden history that will soon surge to the fore.

One day at her Catholic girls school, Cristina is ordered to pack up her belongings and is taken to a judge’s chambers, where the gathering of adults straining to look patient and sympathetic portends the disclosure of traumatic news. In a matter of seconds, her life is taken from her. Her parents are not her parents, her name is not her name and she’s not even 15.

As the judge calmly and bluntly explains, blood tests have shown that Christina’s real parents were among the ranks of Argentina’s “disappeared,” the tens of thousands who vanished into the custody of the country’s military junta between 1976 and 1983. (Documentary footage that introduces the movie, showing self-appointed President Jorge Rafael Videla shaking hands with Henry Kissinger in 1978, suggests that Argentina was not the only country at fault.)

Set more than a decade after the restoration of democracy, Gaston Biraben’s domestic detective story is less concerned with unearthing the country’s past than railing against its current amnesia. The hurt and anguish in Cristina’s face as she wrestles with the notion that her entire life has been a lie makes a blunt statement about the cost of trading justice for stability. According to a closing title, only 74 children of the disappeared have been located.

The trouble is that hurt and anguish also register in Cristina’s face when she’s eating dinner or talking to her friends. Even before the bottom falls out of her life, Lombardo’s heavy lids and perpetual pout suggest she’s never slept a full night. The movie gets a much-needed boost when Mercedes Funes, as the strong-willed student kicked out of Cristina’s school, returns late in the game.

The torpor of Cristina’s life, pre-bombshell, dulls the pain of its obliteration, but Biraben shows little sympathy for Cristina’s adoptive parents. The movie gives the woman who raised Cristina a teary monologue about her own failed pregnancy, but she and her husband are ultimately brushed aside in favor of a tendentious political awakening. If Biraben had devoted more energy to the human contours of his story, its metaphorical implications would have sorted themselves out. Instead, he herds his characters toward a foregone conclusion, reducing both their scope and his story’s power.

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MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes. Exclusively at Laemmle’s One Colorado, 42 Miller Alley (inside plaza, Fair Oaks at Union Avenue), Pasadena (626) 744-1224; Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills (310) 274-6869.