Another mediocre Argentinean film to ride into town on a wave of inexplicable critical approval, Cautiva cowers in the shadow of Andrés Wood’s artful and daring political drama Machuca, the story of a revolution and its effects on two boys from very different social strata. Gastón Biraben’s film is an impossibly safe and drawn-out melodrama about a teenage girl, Cristina (Bárbara Lombardo), who learns that her real parents mysteriously disappeared during Argentina’s military regime in the 1970s. Pulling her from Catholic school one day, a federal judge flips a switch on the brown-eyed girl’s life, and though she is resistant at first to the truth about her identity, Cristina will go on to live with her biological grandmother and go sleuthing for information about her leftist parents, finally confronting her adoptive guardians about their ideologies and how the former police chief and his wife came to possess her. Biraben wants to throw his main character for a loop but doesn’t possess the necessary patience to show how her life of privilege is an affront to her biological mother and father’s politics. The truth will set this girl free, but her activist spirit is easily and unimaginatively stirred. One thing Biraben does have patience for is the sort of dramatically-scored flashbacks and scenes of legalese familiar to his country’s telenovelas.
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