Gotta admit I’m a little jealous of Radley right now — I’ve always wanted to visit Argentina. One of my favorite college experiences was when took a Latin American literature class from a terrific prof who had Fullbright to Argentina. I developed a profound appreciation for the country and its struggles as exemplified by some of it’s better literature.

But lately I’ve been thinking about one of the lesser known pieces of art dealing with Argentina. In the aformentioned literature class, my prof showed us an interesting little independent film about the country’s political predicament that I still think about a lot.

It’s called Apartment Zero. It’s the first film written and produced by David Koepp, who’s been the screenwriter on a few films you might have heard of.

Set in Buenos Aires, Apartment Zero is usually described as a psychological thiller about the emotionally tense and suspicious relationship between two roommates — an Argentinian who runs a revival movie house and an American who may of may not be a serial killer. It’s a great little film and well worth seeing.

However, few people seem to understand the film is an allegory for American foreign policy and a complex an interesting one at that. That alone makes it highly relevant now, and a good reason to seek it out. (For some reason, I started thinking about it the other day w/r/t the Giuliani/Ron Paul fracas at the last Republican debate.) There’s a new DVD version of it with a commentary by Koepp and Steven Soderbergh that I would love to hear.

Anyway, I heartily reccommend netflixing it, or buying a copy — it’s only $13.49 for the DVD over at Amazon.

And FWIW, another good film about Argentina is Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden. I don’t think it’s as good as Apartment Zero — but it’s no less relevant to the current U.S. foreign policy debate. Death and the Maiden has a lot of very interesting things to say about the consequences of using torture as a political instrument.

To be fair, I seem to remember both films have something of a left-wing slant, which is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. The left likes to pretend that the only bad Latin American dictators that ever existed were Argentina’s right wing military junta and Pinochet in Chile. Meanwhile leftists like Castro are still dragooning journalists and homosexuals into jail. And given Hollywood’s political proclivities, you’re also unlikely to see a film about about how troubling the Sandinistas’ wholesale massacre of the Moskito indians was.

Still, both films are very well done and excellent discussion starters. If you’re troubled by the recent developments in American foreign policy, I couldn’t really think of a better double feature.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 11:30 am by Mark Hemingway and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.