Vanishing Point

Already a noted dramatist through his own work (most famously, for The Philanthropist and Savages) and successful translations of Ibsen and Chekov, Christopher Hampton reasonably imagined that landing an Oscar for his screenwriting duties on Les Liaisons Dangereuses would open certain doors. Surely Academy Award glory would facilitate the playwright and director’s dream movie project documenting the dreadful fate of The Disappeared in 1970s Argentina? The considerable gap between his 1989 triumph and the emergence of Imagining Argentina suggests otherwise.

“I think I was quite naïve,” recalls the director during a recent visit to Dublin, “because it doesn’t make a difference. It genuinely does make a difference to what they pay you, but it really doesn’t make them any more likely to go ahead with your projects. They judge a script by what they think will attract a large audience. That’s their job. And my stuff is always on the margins. Still, at the time I was just grateful for the pay-rise.”
In the intervening years, Hampton has produced many screenplays and two films as director – The Secret Agent (1996) with Bob Hoskins and the acclaimed Carrington (1995), a moving portrait of the relationship between the writer Lytton Stratchey and painter Dora Carrington – but it has taken 15 years and innumerable delays to bring his ‘Disappeared’ project to fruition.
“I first wrote the screenplay for Imagining Argentina as long ago as 1989,” explained the 58 year old, “because I’ve been interested in South America for quite a while. I wrote a play about the extermination of Brazil’s native Indians some years ago (Savages), so we started off in Brazil and made arrangements to go into the reservation where the Indians lived. Within hours we had been arrested. And the entire region was like that. It was incredibly volatile. Brazil had a military dictatorship, Chile had a Marxist regime and it was a pretty lively time everywhere. So that had a tremendous impact. And then I found the book Imagining Argentina by Lawrence Thornton and that seemed a great way in to the story.”
The resulting film is a brave, though frequently uneasy marriage of disturbing political fact and parlour spiritualism featuring Antonio Banderas as the director of a subversive children’s theatre in 1970s Argentina. After his outspoken journalist wife (Emma Thompson with a permatan – the phrase ‘how now brown cow?’ springs astonishingly to mind) becomes one of the estimated 30,000 government abductees during the notorious Guerra Sucia (Dirty War), Banderas develops a psychic connection with many of ‘The Disappeared’ and he follows his visions in an increasingly desperate search for his spouse. This supernatural plot device grants the protagonist insight into his wife’s repeated rape and torture, but little recourse to action.
The magic realism underlying the film has predictably engendered scorn from certain quarters, and famously the film was roundly jeered at the Venice Film Festival.
“Well, I’ve thought about this a lot,” says Hampton. “It seems to me that that entire aspect of the film – the central theme of clairvoyance – rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way. When I first read the book it seemed like a very strong way to tell the story – that the power of imagination becomes a last line of defence against political oppression. The one thing they can’t take away from you.”
It is, however, an extremely difficult tone to pull off, particularly on film, where only The Spider’s Strategem stands out as a success story.
“That’s true,” agrees Hampton, “and it’s funny, but some early Bertolucci films were very much in my mind when I was writing the film. Of course, another film I was thinking about was Vertigo. If you are writing a film about a man running through a featureless landscape in search of a woman, then you have to think about Vertigo. I found myself looking to Costa Gavras as well – the enterprise of trying to bring a half-forgotten political fact to a big audience.”
A second area of contention emerged after the film premiered in Spain. “One of the questions that I was repeatedly asked in Spain was why I hadn’t indicted the Americans for their interference in South America, and of course that’s something I’m mindful of. I wrote the screenplay for The Quiet American which is extremely critical of US interference, but in the instance of Imagining Argentina, it was something I was happy to let the audience figure out for themselves. I was interested in the running of the regime and the act of ‘disappearing’ people. That was a unique and horrible contribution to 20th century infamy.”
By tackling such a difficult and little-discussed subject, Imagining Argentina joins a (very) slowly emerging sub-genre of political films with a south-of-the-border setting, including The Dancer Upstairs and Salvador. Like those features, Hampton isn’t expecting enormous box-office returns, but he remains anxious to get the message out.
“I was absolutely staggered and rather appalled that so many of the young Spanish and Latin American actors that I talked to tended not to have heard of this at all,” Hampton admits. “They would actually ask me if I had made this up. It’s scary because this was only 25 years ago. And when we did that thing that you have to do with your film – preview it in a mall – in the middle of California – less than ten percent of the audience were aware this was anything more than fiction. How on earth can something like this be prevented from happening again if it’s already erased from history?”

Imagining Argentina is out now