The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis (La Larga Noche de Francisco Sanctis) (2016)

A Long Look at the Dirty War (For Those Familiar With It)

            Based on a novel of the same name by Humberto Constantini, The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis (La Larga Noche de Francisco Sanctis) runs just a brief seventy-eight minutes yet it feels much too long. It would have made an excellent short film, but it makes for a generally slow feature film.

            First-time directors Andrea Testa and Francisco Marquez drag out a single tension-filled day in the life of a middle-class worker living a quiet life in Buenos Aires. The opening scene expertly shows (and refrains from “telling” at any point in the film) the audience everything to know about the daily life of Francisco Sanctis, portrayed by Diego Velazquez. In a single take with a still camera, Sanctis and his wife hurry to prepare breakfast for their two children. The four of them barely fit in the cramped kitchen, let alone within the frame. Like a typical family, they are running late in their morning routine. The children complain like children do, and Sanctis talks about his anticipated upcoming promotion like a proud breadwinner does. It is evident that this average man lives a mundane life. The drama and impetus of the plot is whether Sanctis will break out of this banal lifestyle.

            He is soon given such an opportunity when an old acquaintance, Elena, phones him at work ostensibly to talk about a poem he wrote in college.  This phone call misled me, as I assumed this poem was about love and this call about an affair. The dialogue with his co-workers hint at an affair as well. After all, extramarital sex is seemingly the most common theme in the films screened at Cannes this year.  But this film was one of just a few I saw that contained no sex. Rather, this was a suspenseful encounter about politics, though the average American viewer would not have realized it. For this reason especially, this arthouse feature is not immediately accessible to a general audience below a certain age.

            The first thing you need to know is that the film takes place in 1977 under the rule of a brutal military junta, right in the midst of the Dirty War. The protagonist uses pay phones several times, but the viewer is never explicitly told what year the film takes place. Perhaps the old fashioned costumes and mustache might suggest that the film takes place in the 1970s, but it was very difficult to confirm my suspicions about the context of the plot otherwise. Testa and Marquez make a very bold assumption that the audience is familiar with the Dirty War. While that may be true of Argentinian audiences, and even Western audiences who lived through it, the typical young American viewer is not well versed in the Dirty War. I can say with certainty that the Dirty War is not included in the American high school history curriculum. Thousands of Argentinians who were thought to oppose the military dictatorship were disappeared, often never heard from again. They were thrown into prisons and flung into the ocean from helicopters left to drown. In this period of terror and uncertainty, everyone was scared and no one could be trusted for they could be spies of the government.

 The only reason I was familiar with it (and was able to form a hypothesis about the plot while watching it) was because I have seen The Official Story (La Historia Oficial), one of the first films released internationally about the Dirty War, in which it is revealed that children of the disappeared were given to families with close ties to the military for adoption. Without the necessary background knowledge, the viewer is left completely in the dark, figuratively and literally. And even with this knowledge, I could only make assumptions as the dialogue is necessarily cautious and consequently vague. This vagueness feeds suspenseful mystery. Viewers clamoring for explicit answers never get them as the mystery lingers past the end credits.

            There were a few specific words that tipped me off, but they could have easily been missed. The first was the name of the military branch that Elena’s husband works for, which sounded aerial in nature, implying death flights (vuelos de la muerte). The second was the use of the word “taken” though the more common term in the context of the Dirty War, “disappeared” (desaparecidos), is never used and the mysterious “they” is never specified. Lastly, Sanctis’s left-leaning poem uses the word “comrade,” revealing his past political activism as a student and providing a motive for why he might be interested in helping Elena warn two people in imminent danger, though Sanctis is unsure just how imminent, adding to the suspense. Talking about the Dirty War without coming right out and being explicit is a means of testifying. If we are to read this film as a primary source on contemporary Argentina, why this film had to be made at this point in time, such testimony is necessary for national healing. It is impressive that these ideas could be conveyed with minimal dialogue, evidence of strong storytelling ability. It is not easy to read between the lines but it is quite rewarding.

            The opening scene in the kitchen probably has more dialogue than any other scene in the film. It is used to introduce the viewer to the ordinary Sanctis family which is implicitly put at risk.  If Sanctis acts on behalf of the strangers and gets caught, he will be disappeared, and his wife probably would be too. And yet if he does nothing, the strangers will surely die as a result of his inaction. It is an impossible moral dilemma. The rest of the movie is characterized by long silences, filled only with ambient street noises, though even those are infrequent in the empty streets of suburban Buenos Aires in the middle of the night. There is no score to fill these silences either, forcing the viewer to simply marinade in the silence of an uneventful night—and that is why the film feels so long, and how it so masterfully builds suspense.

            The reason for the excruciating silence is that everyone is scared. Everyone tries to keep to themselves, because it is not worth the risk of engaging with a stranger who might betray you. An extended scene on a bus gives each of the eight passengers a solid fifteen seconds each to themselves. Each individual is terrified, doing nothing but sitting silently afraid.  Make no mistake—it is suspenseful but you must be prepared for a very slow burning film. The directors succeed in creating this atmosphere of fear that will compel those in the audience who can understand the tension. The uncertainty is unsettling, disquieting. The haunting mystery of the unknown nags at you incessantly. I think that is why despite my slight confusion the movie lingered with me.

The scenery is extremely dark, with just street lamps periodically providing a slight orange tint. This fosters a bleak atmosphere building suspense and quiet anticipation.  The viewer feels the tension and fear that Sanctis does, not knowing what or who may be lurking around the corner or in the shadows. Maybe I have just seen too many scary movies during the Festival, but the dark quiet alleyways made me shiver. Testa and Marquez convey the horror that the Dirty War was by using elements of the horror genre. Thankfully, no one ever does jump out from the shadows, but it is the suspense that something could take you by surprise that keeps the viewer scared.  

Unlike other films about the Dirty War that focus on the disappeared themselves, Testa and Marquez look at a man who is uninvolved in politics.  This is a study in the dilemma ordinary Argentinians simply trying to get through life faced on a daily basis. Sanctis faces a tough situation, one that the viewer as an ordinary person can sympathize with. We suffer along with Sanctis and question our own convictions asking what we would do in his situation. He did not ask to be dragged into this dangerous situation and yet he cannot simply do nothing. He struggles with this internal struggle as he meanders through the city. He perhaps wavers a little more than is necessary to convey the same message. The lack of dialogue hinders the viewer from getting inside Sanctis’s thought process, which would have made for some more eventful scenes. The viewer is left to simply read Velazquez’s facial expressions. A monologue would have been helpful though understandably out of character.  But if you have a family, maybe you do not exactly need Sanctis to spell out his dilemma. The viewer is (probably intentionally) forced to look inside himself to transpose his own thought process to Sanctis. Nonetheless, I think the message is clear that the dark reality of politics is inescapable no matter how far removed one may wish to be from conflict. We can comprehend the horror on a personal level because ordinary viewers can plausibly place themselves in Sanctis’s ordinary shoes. The viewer may have no stake in politics, but neither did Sanctis. And that is what is so scary about this situation, if you can comprehend it.