“Belén was never presumed innocent. She was always guilty.”
Those words, uttered by lawyer Soledad Deza (Dolores Fonzi) during a climactic courtroom sequence in “Belén,” serve as a thesis that captures the essence of the entire movie. Argentina’s official Oscar submission for Best International Feature, which Fonzi also directed and co-wrote with Laura Paredes, is a factually accurate legal drama about a precedent-setting court case that led to the 2020 legalization of abortion in the South American nation. But more than just a topical procedural thriller, the film also plays out like a Kafka novel about endless invasions of privacy and assumptions of malicious intent that converge to form a modern nightmare.
In 2014, a pregnancy that Julieta (Camila Pláate) didn’t even know she had suddenly took a turn for the worse. After rushing to a small hospital with severe stomach pains, she suffered vaginal hemorrhage and was quickly informed that she was carrying a fetus that was no longer viable. But as she was treated for a miscarriage, the scene was interrupted with cops accusing her of having an intentional abortion. She quickly became swept up in a legal nightmare that saw her sentenced to eight years in prison.
Fast forward two years later, and the women in Julieta’s life haven’t stopped fighting for her, but their insistence on her innocence falls on increasingly deaf ears in a legal system that has moved onto other things. But Deza, a lawyer who is considerably savvier than the public defenders that her case was previously foisted upon, takes an interest in the injustice and agrees to represent her pro-bono. The rest of the film follows the court case, with “Belén” (Julieta’s pseudonym to preserve anonymity in the case) becoming a revered national figure from young women who see a chance to rewrite the nation’s laws. Deza passionately dissects the systemic flaws of a legal and medical system that, in her words, sees “cops acting as doctors and doctors acting as cops” in order to prove her client’s innocence and set a precedent that she hopes will prevent anyone else from ending up in the same circumstances.
As a director, Fonzi seems to understand the narrative power of the material and is content to let it speak for itself without added flourishes. The bulk of “Belén” is a down-the-middle piece of legal storytelling that’s made even more straightforward by the fact that the true story happened so recently. From a structural standpoint, it’s a classic Hollywood story arc of injustice that begets a passionate legal fight that leads to an eloquent courtroom speech and ends with title cards about the long term victories that followed. But that might be more of a feature than a bug. It doesn’t take a particularly close read to understand why this movie was made now, and it’s hard to imagine the passionate audience for causal storytelling faulting it for narrative predictability.
“Belén” is a film that unfolds through unspoken words and communicative glances, with Pláate, and co-stars Laura Paredes and Julieta Cardinali all giving excellent performances as women who have spent so long running into authority figures they can’t trust that it takes them a long time to open up to the first competent person who sincerely wants to help them. And while much of the film’s message lies in the fact that the anonymous Belén became a universal symbol for thousands of people who saw themselves in her, its best storytelling comes in specific moments when we see the toll that this government has taken on individual people and the gradual process of unthawing when confronted with the possibility that someone genuinely wants to help them.
Perhaps a better film would have prioritized more of the personal over the universal and formulaic, but “Belén” seems more interested in being a rallying cry than a character study. On that count, it will almost certainly succeed, and audiences around the world might soon be chanting “I am Belén” as loudly as Argentine women did in 2017.
Grade: B
An Amazon MGM release, “Belén” is now playing in select theaters. It streams on Prime Video beginning on Friday, November 14.
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