Garage Olimpo was a distressing and highly suspenseful film. The film seemed to be told nonlinearly, but there were moments that happened consistently. The moments where a clip of traffic and driving would appear was specifically timed. There was never any physical torture shown, it was just alluded to that it was happening to each of the hostages. As an audience member the aspects of the story being non-linear in itself felt like a sense of torture and suspense. As someone watching the film I could never understand the horrors Maria went through, but the confusion and the painstaking act of waiting was delivered well within the movie. The fact that the inmates had to all wait until they were fed, electrocuted, or made to labor was a sense of torture, because it emphasizes the lack of physical autonomy they were all are experiencing. All of the hostages waited for help or for the hope that someone may come to save them and like many people even outside this system they were lost within the bureaucracy of a “government” agency.
The second aspect I noticed was the idea that not only Maria was experiencing torture, but that Felix was as well. This made me wonder if his love for Maria was enough to constitute torturing himself? His consistent attempts to try and eke out a normal existence and relationship between the two of them was always in vain, because underlying the entire movie they both knew that neither of them would escape the situations they were in. In the end he still sent her away knowing she was going to die. Maria herself was captured and locked away for teaching people how to read and write. Just by committing this act she was considered a danger to the state, and forcibly tortured under a military dictatorship. The idea is to eliminate anyone seen as politically opposed, and use terror as a way to maintain order. The questions that arose for me here was, why did these groups of people get to decide what order is and how it should be executed? That is why the torture in this movie could not justified, many of the people carrying out the torture didn’t seem to know why it was necessary to enact these punishments, treating it as just the way of life. So, I don’t believe the system or the people within it were qualified to determine what constitutes torture.
Work Cited
Bechis, Marco. “Garage Olimpo.” IMDb, IMDb.com, 2 Sept. 1999, www.imdb.com/title/tt0201631/.