invasion (w&d hugo santiago, w. jorge luis borges, adolfo bioy casares)

Hugo Santiago’s futuristic thriller is most famous for being written in part by Borges. It is considered to be elliptical, confusing, opaque. The premise of the film is an imminent invasion of a city called, Aquileia, clearly Buenos Aires. An elderly man, Don Porfidio, is trying to organise resistance. He has secured a consignment of weapons and has enlisted a crack team of brooding tango singers to lead the resistance. The crack team, lead by the extremely brooding Lautaro Murúa, plans and executes a heist, but gradually they are picked off and the resistance appears to have been thwarted, until the revolutionary coda at the film’s conclusion.

There’s been quite a lot of writing about how Borges was a closet supporter of the dictatorship, but it’s not hard to read Invasion as a corrective to that viewpoint. Julian, the hero, is killed in a football stadium, (the Bombonera), in an eerie echo of the repression that would come during Pinochet’s overthrow of Allende in ’73, with the murder of Victor Jara in the Estadio Chile. The final scene, when young people collect weapons to combat the invaders, feels like something inspired by the events of 68 (and the Tupas). However, the film is sufficiently cryptic to allow for alternative readings. The only clear discrepancy between the invaders and the defenders is that the defenders wear black and the invaders white gaberdines.

On a less overtly political level, the film reads as a metaphysical struggle between a dogged band of ciudadanos and their alien attackers. The final sequence which shows invasion by plane, car, boat and horseback is gloriously deranged. There is perhaps a suggestion of Nolan in its black and white philosophical underpinning, but it is also reminiscent of other avant-garde texts from that era, ranging from Point Blank to Last Year at Marienbad to Alphaville and even Performance, a film which acknowledges its debt to Borges at one point. This was an era of experimentation, with filmmakers willing to manipulate genre to fit their intellectual preoccupations. Invasion fits snugly into this tradition, aided and abetted by its Troilo score and tango sensibility.