Nobody's Wife, written and directed by María Luisa Bemberg, whose Camilla and Miss Mary have received widespread recognition, is a film about a woman's search for identity. When an upper-middle-class woman, Lenora, accidently learns of her husband's affairs, she leaves him and her two sons. It is an act born of integrity, a refusal to live a lie, but as her encounters with family and economic institutions reinforce her social non-existence, it becomes a gesture of active resistance. She will be "nobody's wife." The story of Lenora's move from family home and a blind life centered on pleasing others, to a desire to create life outside "the system" clearly grew out of feminist critiques of patriarchy. Bemberg struggled for four years to have her script approved by censors critical of her depiction of the family. The first half of the film sensitively focuses on Lenora; her husband is most notable for his absence. But his presence is felt in all her encounters-whether with her mother urging her to forgive and forget, or her employer refusing her a loan because she doesn't have credit in her name. Made in 1982, under the military regime, Bemberg's critique was seen by Argentinians as extending from family to state, her protagonist, as "a symbol of rupture." Kathy Geritz