The Case of Lisandra P.

When psychoanalyst Vittorio Puig is arrested for the murder of his lissome young wife, Lisandra, his longtime patient Eva Maria Darienzo agrees to pursue her own inquiries—never suspecting the danger into which she’s plunging—in this diabolic danse macabre set in Buenos Aires in 1987 from Grémillon (The Confidant). Though she has no investigative background, Eva Maria, a volcanologist who began therapy because of crippling depression after her grown daughter became one of Argentina’s desaparecidos, has learned harsh lessons about duplicity, cruelty, and betrayal during the junta’s reign and its aftermath. More ugly truths await as she throws herself into unravelling the mystery of Lisandra, in large part by listening to secret tapes of Dr. Puig’s sessions with other patients, and she discovers that almost nothing is as it seems. Though Grémillon occasionally gets swept away with some characters’ obsessive musings, for the most part she spins a cunningly plotted tale that is by turns cerebral, suspenseful—and ultimately shocking. [em](Jan.) [/em]