Garage Olimpo

Maria (Costa) teaches literacy to the Buenos Aires poor, belongs to an anti-junta political cell, and lives with her Italian immigrant mother in a grand old house with a shy lodger, Felix (Echeverría), whose tentative advances faintly tickle her. One day the goon squad abducts her to the Garage Olimpo, an anonymous metal shuttered workshop which contains a hive of concrete torture chambers; it'll be several long weeks in hell before Maria sees daylight again. Felix is employed here. He's good at his job, too, and works over Maria, but afterwards, and around the edges of her torment, a bond is forged between them. This dramatisation of the mass 'disappearances' under the military dictatorship of the late '70s induces appropriate queasiness. The psychological dynamic between torturer and victim isn't as strongly realised as that in Death and the Maiden, but the power of deceptive appearances and unthinkable realities - authoritarianism underground - certainly leaves its mark.