Movie Reviews : ‘Pencils’ Draws a Sharp Picture of Brutality

The greatest ally of brutality and evil is often a discreet silence: the veil dropped over institutional violence by its minions, the hypocrisy that Montaigne once called “the debt vice pays to virtue.” Hector Olivera’s “The Night of the Pencils” (Goldwyn Pavilion) breaks that silence, cancels one of those debts, tears aside a veil.

The film is a sobering re-creation of one small but horrifying segment of a dark episode: The “disappearance” of tens of thousands of people during the military regime that took over Argentina in the mid-’70s after Juan Peron’s death left the country in chaos.

The ranks of these “disappeared” eventually swelled to more than 30,000 not officially arrested and never to stand trial. All but 9,000 of them remain unaccounted for.

Luis Puenzo’s 1985 Oscar-winner “The Official Story” recounts this period from one viewpoint: A woman outside who suddenly perceives the reality beneath the curtain of evasions and lies. “Pencils,” however--a much less accomplished film, but a scarier one--gives us the other side of the story: horror from inside out.

In the film, based--like “Official Story”--on a true incident, five high school students are swept up in a nocturnal La Plata raid by masked, unidentified officers. They are thrust into solitary jail cells, bound, blindfolded, given slops to eat, beaten and tortured by electric prods--and the girls among them are raped and in one case, impregnated by the guards.

The story of “The Night of the Pencils”--which took place in September, 1976, and was revealed more than four years later--comes from one of the six, Pablo, who almost inexplicably survived.

Was it influence? Blind luck? One of the six--Claudia, the girl Pablo loved--was the daughter of a former mayor of La Plata; even her father’s prominence couldn’t rescue her. Pablo--officially arrested, officially incarcerated and, years later, released--finally carries the pain of the other five and of the 20,000 or more whose stories had no living witness other than their guards or persecutors.

In the past, Olivera has shown visual sweep (in “Rebellion in Patagonia”) and a sharp satiric sense (in “Funny Dirty Little War”). Here, he is mostly content to be self-effacing, to try to bring us as close as possible to the physical reality of the arrests and incarceration. The film is staged like a mock-documentary: The characters, especially the teen-age prisoners, remain archetypal. Other than Pablo and Claudia (played by the angular, intense Vita Escardo), they may tend to run together in our memories.

The movie makes you angry, brings out pity, but it doesn’t make you bleed. Yet, because of its honesty and compassion, “The Night of the Pencils” (Times-rated Mature for intense theme and treatment) becomes a powerful experience--particularly in the prison scenes. As we watch these helpless kids suffer and weaken, as the gray, dead, unseen prison closes in around them--becoming their only world, their only tomorrow--evil becomes a little less abstract, brutality more palpable and real.