MOVIE REVIEW

Set in a time of national economic disaster, this is a stirring story of workers organizing.

By Kevin Thomas, Times Staff Writer

Director Avi Lewis and writer Naomi Klein's "The Take" is a compelling and suspenseful cautionary tale documenting the consequences of globalization that is universal in its implications. However, as it charts Argentina's spectacular economic collapse of 2001, this incisive documentary becomes a de facto update on Fernando E. Solanas' monumental 1968 "The Hour of the Furnaces," which charted Argentina's political, social and economic history with its gaping chasm between the rich, who identified with European culture, and the poor. Like Solanas, Lewis and Klein look beyond any flaws in Juan and Eva Perón as models for favoring national production over foreign control of the economy.

When Carlos Menem was elected president in 1989, he doubled the country's gross domestic product by privatizing almost all national assets, deregulating the currency markets and pegging the peso to the U.S. dollar 1 to 1. But the moves caused unemployment to soar from 6% to 18% as hundreds of thousands of workers lost jobs in downsizings. Public debt and corruption soared, but the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank continued to lend Argentina billions of dollars. By 2001 violence erupted as the government froze citizens' bank accounts and riots broke out, with the police and the military killing more than two dozen protesters. Once Latin America's wealthiest country, Argentina now has more than 50% of its population living below the poverty line. As its middle class, once the most prosperous in Latin America, started to evaporate, the country's leaders seemed determined to return it to the bad old days elucidated so thoroughly by Solanas.

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It is against this background that Lewis and Klein zero in on Freddy Espinosa, a charismatic tool-and-die maker at the Forja San Martin, an auto parts factory in a Buenos Aires suburb that had closed down along with many other Argentine factories.

Heartened by the success of workers who take over a closed ceramic tile factory in Patagonia and the seamstresses who do the same at a Buenos Aires garment factory, Espinosa commences the arduous and constantly uncertain process of getting his fellow laid-off workers to organize and plan to take over San Martin against ever-increasing odds. What they undertake, an enormous and complex task, an experiment in grass-roots democracy, reveals corruption and indifference in high places as Menem prepares to make another run on the presidency, which Espinosa and his friends see as dooming their endeavor.

"The Take" plays out like a Frank Capra movie with the "little people" taking on corrupt and indifferent officials. In the process the film strikes a strong blow for the dignity of labor and introduces an array of brave individuals.

'The Take'

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Adult themes, street-demonstration violence

A First Run/Icarus Films release. Director Avi Lewis. Producers Avi Lewis & Naomi Klein. Written by Naomi Klein. Cinematographer Mark Ellam. Editor Ricardo Acosta. Researchers Tomás Bril and & Joseph Huff-Hannon. In Spanish and English, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes. Exclusively at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.