No habrá más penas ni olvido

Plot synopsis:
Ricardo Guglielmini is the mayor of Colonia Vela, a small country village in an undisclosed province of central Argentina. He plots with Héctor Suprino, a local Peronist spin doctor, and Reinaldo, a union leader, to get the town's deputy mayor, Ignacio Fuentes, kicked out of office, due to his increasing popularity, which threatens Guglilemini's decades-long hold on the mayorship.
Fuentes is told that he has to fire his assistant Mateo because of his Marxist sympathies. Fuentes, despite disagreeing with Marxist ideals himself, declines, refusing to be politically strong-armed. Taking advantage of this, Guglilemini publicly accuses Fuentes of aiding communist guerillas as an excuse to fire him or get him to resign. When Fuentes refuses, Gugliemini sends the police to arrest him, but Fuentes, rather than cave in to the pressure, takes to arms and then barricades himself in the town hall, along with his allies and friends; Mateo, Corporal García, Juan, Rodrigo, Moyito and Crazy Ceres. Guglielmini orders the police to storm the building, which leads to a massive stand-off between the local police force and Fuentes' men. The counter-Fuentes operation, led by Chief Llanos and Sub-Chief Rossi, initially only attempts to threaten Fuentes into surrendering, but soon evolves into a real shootout when members of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, led by Rogelio Almeido, show up and intervene. During the shootout with the AAA, Moyito is killed and several police officers are wounded, which leads to a temporary ceasefire and a deadlock. Juan sneaks out through the back to look for the local crop duster pilot, Cerviño, in order to convince him to help Fuentes by conducting an aerial attack as a distraction so he can sneak more ammo and explosives into the building.
As night falls, a group of delusional local leftist guerrilla youths, led by Matilda Gómez, gather in an abandoned warehouse and make a completely unrealistic and blatantly flawed plan to use the conflict as a means to start a civil war in Argentina, take over the government and convert the country into a communist state. They start out by kidnapping Chief Llanos and holding him for a ransom of several tons of explosives and weaponry. Not wanting to give more resources to the communists, Guglielmini abandons Llanos and declares Rossi the new police chief. Rossi leads a new attack on Fuentes, this time using bulldozers as cover to advance on the town hall. Rodrigo and Crazy Ceres are killed during this attack and Fuentes, García and Mateo are barely saved because Cerviño arrives in the nick of time and sprays pesticides all over the police with his plane, causing them to temporarily disperse.
The guerrillas attack the local union with a pipe bomb, killing Reinaldo, which prompts the AAA agents to abandon the fight against Fuentes and instead attempt to kill the guerrilla troopers. Famed local Radical former senator Prudencio Gúzman attempts to negotiate with the communists for Llanos' release, but the peace talks fall through and Llanos is ultimately executed.
The police regroup and prepare for a third attack. In order to buy some time and distract Rossi, Mateo turns himself in while Fuentes, García and Juan prepare a bomb with the explosives the latter had previously brought in. Regardless of Mateo's surrender, the raid proceeds and, when the police storms the town hall, the bomb goes off, killing several police officers and giving Fuentes, García and Juan enough time to escape through the back. In retaliation, Almeido kills Mateo. Despite managing to escape the town hall, the trio are soon found by the police and Fuentes and García are taken captive. Juan, however, manages to escape. Desperate, he contacts the guerrillas, who promise to help free Fuentes and García if Juan shows them where he keeps his explosives stash. Juan additionally convinces Cerviño to cause one more diversion with his plane.
Juan and the guerrillas, this time led by Matilda Gómez herself, carry out an attack on the school. First, Cerviño uses his plane to drop manure on the police, distracting them long enough to allow Juan and Matilda to sneak into the building. Once inside, they bust García free, but due to AAA reinforcements, they're forced to leave Fuentes behind. The AAA and the communists face off in a massive shootout inside the school, which ends with most people on both sides dead.
Cerviño and his plane are followed by one of the few surviving AAA members, who shoots him when he lands. While fleeing the shootout at the school, Matilda and the other three surviving guerrillas get blown up by Almeido, who finishes them off in a suicide bombing. Suprino severely beats Fuentes and then Guglielmini tries to talk him into taking the blame for the whole ordeal. When he refuses, Guglielmini and Suprino leave, letting Rossi execute Fuentes. While leaving town, Suprino realizes Guglielmini plans to frame him for inciting the whole incident, so he runs him over with his truck before escaping.
When morning finally dawns, García and Juan go to Cerviño's house, where they find him, wounded but still alive. To comfort him in his dying moments, they tell him Fuentes won the battle. Cerviño makes them promise to tell General Perón about him if he ever returns to the country, after which he dies. Once they've buried Cerviño, Juan and García begin to head into the countryside while discussing the many ways they could convince Perón to return. The song "Mi Buenos Aires Querido" begins to play as the credits start rolling.

Tags: violence, comedy, satire, murder

Review:
Examines Basis Of Modern Argentine Politics.. Based on a satire by novelist Osvaldo Soriano, this bitter work is also set in the author's abstract rural Argentine village of Colonial Vela in 1974, the year of Juan Perón's death, and is intended as an allegory relating to events that led to a military takeover of the government. It features Federico Luppi whose stated liberal political ideals assured that he would have a lengthy period of cinematic unemployment. Serving as microcosm in a kettle for national turmoil, perceptions of Perón held by two disparate political factions in Colonial Vela are at cross-purposes with right-wing Perónists attempting to oust a municipal clerk whom, although apolitical, is accused of being a Marxist, with a result that his superior, the town administrator (Luppi), comes to the clerk's physical defence against massed forces including the mayor, chief of police and union organizers, along with a collection of hardcore rightists. Farcical humour is employed by director Héctor Olivera, but always in company with cruel violence, disconcerting to a viewer who is not only alert to what may occur next, but also incapable of divining what that may be, thanks to excellent acting by Luppi, Rodolfo Ranni as police chief, Héctor Bidonde as head of the collective right-wingers, and indeed the entire cast is spot on the corrosive intentions of Olivera. This production was shot in the province of Buenos Aires while the ruling generals were yet in power, and was released in the midst of the election period in 1983 when leftist radicals retired the Perónists, an event that this work helped bring about, in large part due to a graphic depiction of right-wing death squads, murdered hostages and torture, being most certainly a film of seminal importance to those having knowledge of the Perónist period; an English language subtitled version is available with translation from the Castilian original being adequate, despite the clumsily created title. In all respects, this is a tightly made effort, not for fans of Evita, either the person or the musical feature.. The dirty little war. Osvaldo Soriano, the author of the novel in which this film is based, got his title from the lyrics of a famous popular tango. His satire was against the military regime that came into being after the second Peron government, a dark period for Argentina, indeed. Hector Olivera directed the film with great sense of style. The screen play was an adaptation by the director and Roberto Cossa.The story takes us to a small town in the interior of the country where a man, who works for the city, has been singled out as being a communist and must be eliminated from his job. The mayor, Ignacio Fuentes, a man of principles, decides to confront the bullies that are trying to impose their own values and have the support of the big man in town, Suprino, who is dead set in purging the bad element from the municipal government, even though Fuentes, is a man that has followed Peron.The confrontation turns violent as Fuentes and his loyal employees do the impossible to resist the attack Suprino, and Llanos, who is in charge of the army, start shooting with all they have. The hand of a strong man is behind all they are doing. Guglielmo, a rich and powerful man wants to have the rebels killed. There is a funny incident in which an aviator, Cervino, loads his small one engine plane with manure and flies all over the people that are fighting Fuentes and drops his "odorous" cargo.The DVD we saw recently is of poor quality. Not having seen the original print, we can't make any assessments, but the story suffers as the dark colors predominate, leaving us in the dark during some key scenes.A great cast was assembled for this film. Some of the best Argentine actors of stage and screen can be seen in it. Best of all, Federico Luppi, who makes Fuentes the best thing in the movie. Hector Bidondi is seen as Suprino. Lauraro Murua plays Dr. Guglielmi, the man behind creating the conflict. Miguel Angel Sola, Victor Laplace, Tacholas, Ulises Dumont, Rodolfo Ranni, are seen in key supporting roles.The film reflects a sad moment in the history of Argentina.. The beginning of the Dirty War. Prior to his return to Argentina in June 1973, former president Juan Domingo Perón, living in exile in Spain, summoned the left wing of his Peronist Party (Montoneros, Peronist Youth and other groups) to create the conditions that would press the military government into allowing him to come back to Argentina and to be a candidate in national elections. Since his overthrow in 1955 he had been banished from Argentina and the Peronist Party was not allowed to participate in elections.The Peronist left, especially the Montoneros, carried out their assignment to perfection creating, by means of guerrilla actions, a climate of tension and uncertainty that convinced the military that the return of Perón was the only alternative to an outright civil war.At the head of his party Perón won the elections in July 1973 by a large margin. Almost immediately he began to appoint to key government positions members of the Peronist right and of organizations like the AAA = Argentine Anticommunist Alliance. There were rumblings from the Montoneros and the left. In May 1974, in a stunning betrayal, Perón disowned the Montoneros in a public speech, in fact expelling them from the Peronist party. The speech had the (intended or unintended) consequence of encouraging the AAA, the military intelligence services and the police to hunt the Peronist left down. It was the official start of the Dirty War, which became especially murderous when the military took power in 1976, lasted until 1981 and cost 30,000 lives.Osvaldo Soriano's novel No Habrá Mas Pena ni Olvido narrates the initial stages of the Dirty War in the fictional small town of Colonia Vela. The title of the novel is taken from the lyrics of a tango sung by Carlos Gardel in the thirties and still known by heart by Argentines of all ages; it literally translates into (a place or a time where) "there will be no suffering or forgetting" and it is associated with Peron's return, that happens sometime before the action takes place. The novel can be qualified as "perfect"; it is short and to the point, intense and deeply moving.Soriano (a journalist in Jacobo Timerman's prestigious but short lived newspaper "La Opinión") took the Argentine literary establishment by storm. He was an admirer (but not an imitator) of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and his writing style was seldom seen in Argentina outside of pulp fiction; relentless, nonstop action peppered with black humor, supported by spare, at times telegraphic dialogue. Characters come to life through their actions more than through their words. Director Hector Olivera has done a very good job of putting Soriano's novel on screen, although some of the most violent action is better described (as in the book) than shown. He is supported by an excellent cast, the best Argentine actors of the time: Federico Luppi, Ulises Dumont, Julio de Grazia and the veteran Lautaro Murúa in a short but essential role. The other actors are equally excellent.Olivera has been involved (either directing or producing) with more than fifty Argentine movies from 1951 to 2010, most of them through his own production company, Aries Cinematográfica founded with director Fernando Ayala in 1956. Most of this movies have been straight commercial fare, some box-office hits. With the profits, Olivera has been able to produce/direct quite a few quality films. A Funny Dirty Little war is one of them. See the film, then read Soriano's novel if possible in its original Spanish.