The new film by Christopher Hampton has provoked extreme reactions, but after having Argentina on his mind for 30 years, he has made his peace with the subject, he tells Belinda McKeon
Apparently, it's a Venetian thing - or so the organisers of that city's film festival assured Christopher Hampton after the press screening of his latest film, Imagining Argentina, ended in a cacophony of boos and jeers. But if the sensation of shifting ground which accompanies the film, as it darts, in its account of the Argentinian junta, between brutal realism and light-headed reverie, between torture and telepathy, was resented by critics, then it had the following night's audience rooted to the spot - until the closing credits, when they gave, says Hampton, the longest standing ovation he has received for any of his projects, including the 1989 Oscar-winner, Dangerous Liaisons.
The latter reaction must have balmed the wound somewhat, but as the film treks through its various national premieres - Ireland's last week was just the second after Spain, where the occasion was hailed as the return of native son Antonio Banderas, who plays the film's hero - the tension induced by the first night lives on. Having caught wind of its death - and resurrection - in Venice, audiences will inevitably approach the film expecting to come down firmly on one side or the other.
At the Irish screening in the UGC cinema, however, an overall response is difficult to gauge. The applause, though not rapturous, is certainly respectable, and no-one appears to walk out in protest. There are stories in the next few days, however, that some Argentinian guests found the whole thing offensive, and during the brief question-and-answer session with Hampton hosted by RTÉ Radio 1's Rattlebag, one Irish viewer demanded to know the point of filming, through English, a largely Spanish and Latin American cast telling an Argentinian story. The question of why Emma Thompson - her English colouring obvious beneath the darkly-dyed hair, her Shakespearean diction pushing through the Argentinian accent - was cast in the central role of abducted journalist Cecilia Rueda goes unasked. Nor does anyone venture to criticise the film's injection of mysticism and magic realism into the stark truth of what happened, between 1976 and 1983, to an estimated 30,000 people in Argentina. In the wake of Cecilia's disappearance, her husband Carlos (Banderas) wakes up with clairvoyant powers, which enable him to see, in dreams and visions, the fates of the disappeared and to begin a faltering journey towards finding his wife.
In conversation next morning, Hampton's tone is adamant, but not arrogant, as he explains that he sees no need to justify this mixture.
"I don't feel that it's illegitimate," he says. "I'm a storyteller, my business is fiction, and this is a fictional way of dealing with this particular subject."
Of course, in the first place, the choice is not his to justify, but that of the American novelist, Laurence Thornton. Hampton's screenplay, which he also directed, is an adaptation of Thornton's 1987 novel of the same name. The characters, the plot, the idea of Carlos holding psychic sessions in his back garden with the relatives of the disappeared, were all Thornton's. Hampton was offered the novel for adaptation after his success with Dangerous Liaisons and began work on it almost immediately. It has taken until now to bring it to the screen.
"When I read the book, I thought that it was rather a graceful way of dealing with the subject," he says. "I felt very strongly about it. And that's why, at the beginning, when I was writing the script, I fell out with the studio. There was a difference of opinion."
That there was. The studio was Columbia, hooked by Richard Gere, a fan of Hampton's since starring in his 1983 film The Honorary Consul. After a first draft, heavy on imagery and light on dialogue, was rejected by Columbia, Hampton brought the second draft to Gere, and worked closely with him for a time, but the two had opposing visions of the film. Gere saw it in a self-consciously conceptual light, a "more arty" light which Hampton couldn't abide.
"I felt that the whole thing had to be as realistic as possible, even the visions and the dreams," he says. "I didn't want to make a distinction between dream and reality; I was very impressed by the late Buñuel films, where he didn't change the style at all, how he went very plainly from real life to dreams to imagined scenes."
During lunch one day in Gere's Los Angeles hotel suite, Hampton broke a tooth, excused himself to have it seen to, and never returned. Columbia lost interest, Disney bought and then dropped the rights, and then, five years ago, during a phone conversation with Thornton, Hampton decided to option the novel himself. Myriad Pictures clambered on board, with the provision that Banderas be secured for the lead role, and, at the last minute, a Spanish company (Arenas) covered the financial shortfall.
So Hampton has fought his way thus far with the film, and judging by the ease with which he receives - indeed, anticipates - the more difficult questions to be asked of the result, he has grown used to the idea of fighting some more.
Apart from the psychic goings-on, another thread of the story with which some viewers may take issue is the prominence given by Hampton to the activities of the children's theatre which Carlos directs. Yes, they're children, so the crudity of their productions of Orpheus (he of the vanishing wife) and The Mask of the Red Death, the simplicity of their allegories, may be forgiven by their fictional audiences - but not so readily by Hampton's own audiences. He says he enjoyed making this aspect of the film because, having written, adapted or translated almost 30 works for the stage - including Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985), Art (1996) and, most recently, The Talking Cure (2002), starring Ralph Fiennes - he knows "how a theatre is run".
But are the theatre sections really so necessary? It's there that we see Carlos in those light-hearted and mischevious moments that follow implausibly upon his visions of the torture of his wife and child, and Thornton made much less of them in the novel. It is necessary, insists Hampton, because it illustrates Carlos's defiance, his willingness to provoke the authorities.
"And it provides a subtext to the whole piece, sort of indicates to the audience a way of reading the film," he says. "That it should be read as a kind of metaphor."
But that's just it. Many moments in the film - arguably its strongest - are not metaphorical. They are horrendously, unforgettably realistic. Thompson's character is tortured, beaten and gang-raped by her captors, and when Carlos's wilful behaviour offends the authorities, the couple's young daughter Teresa is torn from her bed and taken to be stretched on a rack and subjected to the same ordeal. These scenes, even a week on, are difficult to shake. It's not hard, however, to believe that Banderas's emotional breakdown, during the shooting of a climactic scene in Buenos Aires's Plaza de Mayo, was genuine, that this scene was shot in one take; the women who demonstrate with him in this scene are actual mothers of the disappeared, who still gather weekly to demand information about their children.
It's not hard to believe, either, that almost every Argentinian member of the crew on the film had lost someone to the regime. The stills photographer, who had himself been tortured, and whose father was murdered, informed Hampton that torture victims were always naked, with black sacks over their heads - a detail he decided, in the end, to omit in Teresa's case, "not for the sake of the actress, but for the sake of not distracting from the film".
But other truths are not shirked: Teresa's eventual fate, for example, is a terrible, nauseating moment.
"Yes, that happened," says Hampton. "Kids, just children . . . Nobody knows why so many inoffensive people were killed alongside those who seemed the natural opponents of the government."
Hampton remembers clearly his discovery of the full extent of what happened in Argentina. Researching The Honorary Consul, an adaptation of Graham Greene's novel about the kidnapping of an Argentinian diplomat, he went to Amnesty International's London office and was provided with all the files on the junta. He had gone through a similar process while piecing together, on a trip through South America, his 1973 play Savages, set during the military dictatorship in Brazil. That trip gave Hampton first-hand experience of that sense of helplessness which, at its best moments, pervades Imagining Argentina.
"There were five people whom Amnesty had lost touch with, and they wanted me to try to trace them - three in San Paolo, two in Rio - but I couldn't," he says. "I went to their addresses, inquired, but . . .'
Carlos's response to his own private horror echoes Hampton's response in the 1970s: to turn inward to the imagination. It's the one weapon, Carlos tells the general with whom he is locked in confrontation, that the regime lacks, and the weapon that will ultimately destroy it.
Whether, with the type of imaginative vision he resorts to, Hampton has shot himself in the foot is up to the film's wider audience to decide. For now, however, he is pleased. Having carried Argentina around in his head, and his conscience, for almost 30 years, he feels he has made his peace. Next stop?
"I'm very interested in South-East Asia, in the whole fallout from Vietnam," he says. "I'm less known for that side of my work. I have written a number of scripts of that kind that haven't been made, whereas the lighter things have. But that this film got made is encouraging."
• Imagining Argentina is now on release