E-Mail This Article to a Friend Public works The Take doesn’t cry for Argentina BY PETER KEOUGH
	The Take Directed by Avi Lewis. Written by Naomi Klein. A First Run/Icarus Films release. In English and Spanish with English subtitles (87 minutes). At the Brattle Theatre February 4 through 10.

Canadians Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein are a pair of self-described "activist filmmakers" who made the rounds of anti–International Monetary Fund demonstrations from Seattle to South Africa. As they put it at the beginning of their slick, lucid, and convincing debut feature, The Take, they would "breathe tear gas by day and hot air by night." The hot air, I presume, came from the bullying talk-show hosts to whom they tried to make their arguments. One host did have a point, Klein acknowledges, even though he didn’t let her get a word in edgewise. Did the protesters have any alternative to offer?

So they set out to find an economic model superior to that espoused by the IMF, a search that took them to Buenos Aires, the victim of "the model," the multi-national corporate privatization scheme espoused by President Carlos Menem in the ’90s that led to a brief boom and an astounding bust. When Enron was declaring bankruptcy, so was Argentina. The banks froze the savings of ordinary people while the multi-nationals that had pillaged the economy took the money and ran.

Factories closed by the hundreds. Unemployment reached 60 percent in some areas. The Take opens with a montage of rusting plants, derelict equipment, boarded-up stores, young women "in worn designer clothes" and their children foraging in the dumpsters of a Burger King. "Welcome," announces Lewis in voiceover (the two filmmakers alternate as narrators, a he-said/she-said that sustains the illusion of dialectic) "to the globalized ghost town."

Okay, so the system didn’t work so well for a few South Americans. What are we supposed to do, cry about it? The unemployed workers didn’t think so — they started a movement to occupy idled factories and start producing again as cooperative businesses before the absentee owners could sell off the properties as scrap. Their motto was "Occupy. Resist. Produce." Over a period of three years, they turned around some 200 companies, defying police and court orders, employing thousands, and enjoying the overwhelming support of the community.

Lewis and Klein focus on one such enterprise, the Forja San Martin auto-parts factory, where 30 laid-off workers cut through a padlock and occupied their former working place. The film then becomes a step-by-step textbook on how to transform a derelict business into a worker-controlled paradise. The occupiers network with those in other plants who have made the transition. They engineer a deal with a worker-owned tractor factory to obtain raw materials and manufacture the parts they need. But to get the machinery rolling, they must first get a judge to grant them permission.

This process unfolds with brevity and clarity and a surging enthusiasm and suspense. Sometimes, Lewis and Klein might be a little too brief, as when they cut from a black-and-white newsreel of Argentinians vacationing by the seashore in the golden days of Juan Perón to the ’90s downfall of Menem’s model. I’m no expert in Argentine history, but I suspect that in the four intervening decades there may have been other factors at work besides globalization.

One factor that gets scant attention is ideology. Lewis asks one organizer if what they are doing couldn’t be called stealing. He responds that it is "expropriation." Lewis acknowledges that there have been similar such instances of expropriation, in Russia and Cuba, for example. But he makes a distinction. In those cases, the expropriators were despots and bureaucrats; here, they’re the workers. Isn’t this an idealized Marxism? The workers, claims one spokesman, act out of necessity, not ideology. Still, after watching loving montages of factory machines in action that recall the Soviet Eisenstein era, one can’t help humming a few bars of the "Internationale."

Worse, the attitude of the filmmakers and that of the movement itself to existing democratic political structures seems a little naive. While the Forja people are struggling with their court order, an election takes place, and Menem, last seen in jail for corruption, makes a comeback. One of the activists dismisses the election as a distraction and vows she won’t vote. The problem with Argentina, she suggests, is that people look for a savior instead of saving themselves. Fair enough, but how is it that the elected representatives of the legislature become the people’s last hope?

Throughout the film, the favored drink of all the activists is Coca-Cola. As her daughter drinks from a Mickey Mouse cup, the wife of one activist worker laments that she can’t recall the last time she saw a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Even if the workers manage to unite and seize the means of production, you fear the masters of corporate consumerism will have the last laugh.