‘Belén’ Review: Argentine Abortion Rights Drama Lets Modern History Do the Talking

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.