There's loads of art-film technique in Albertina Carri's memoir-essay The Blonds. The Argentinean writer-director juggles film and video, black-and-white and color, fiction and documentary, dialogue and narration, jump cuts and long takes. She blends in extended pans of dusty farmland, as well as animated interludes in which Playmobil figurines run through stop-motion re-creations of events from her past. The film trades on the aesthetic ideas of Jean-Luc Godard and Abbas Kiarostami, but though there's a big poster of John Waters' Cecil B. Demented on the wall of one set, Carri doesn't have much in common with Waters. The kind of people who populate his films would find The Blonds pretty damned pretentious.
Of course, pretentiousness doesn't automatically negate merit: The Blonds grapples with tough subject matter, and earns a little leeway in its approach. The film is ostensibly about Carri's parents, who were kidnapped and executed in 1977, when she was 4 years old and the "dirty war" raged across her homeland. Carri interviews people who might have known her parents, visits the sites where military juntas carried out torture, and reflects in voiceover on what it was like to grow up without parents in a modernized nation still recovering from civil war. Except that it's not really Carri doing the reflecting. She's hired an actress (Analía Couceyro) to play her, and a significant amount of The Blonds is spent showing Carri making the film: directing Couceyro, consulting with her crew, and wondering aloud about the ways in which art can distance people from real horror.
Does it work? Only in snatches. Those Playmobil animation segments are strangely haunting (especially the one in which Carri imagines her parents being abducted by aliens), and Carri gets a lot of mileage out of the faulty memories of her interviewees (like the former neighbor who gives the film its title, by misidentifying what color hair Carri and her sisters had). But The Blonds relies a lot on pre-existing knowledge of Argentinean history, and it counts on patience with the sort of "what is truth" head games designed to dazzle undergrads. It doesn't seem appropriate to criticize someone's childhood trauma as artistically unworthy, but Carri made the first move in that regard, positioning herself as the heroine of a personal drama in which genocide is just another occasion to engage in coffee-shop philosophizing.