Storm the Heavens might be an English translation for the title of this documentary. It is constructed around the killing of Trotsky in Mexico in 1941, tracing the life of his assassin, Ramon Mercader. In the process it moves from Spain to Moscow to Paris to Mexico and finally Cuba, following in the footsteps of Mercader’s peripatetic and curious life. Following the assassination he spent twenty years in prison in Mexico, before being released and sent to Moscow, where he didn’t settle, moving finally to Cuba, where his grandparents had come from. The film recounts a vivid, restless story, collecting anecdotes from Mercader’s family, but also Trotsky’s US bodyguards, Parisian friends of Mercader’s lover, Silvia, and a host of astonishing figures who made up the Spanish exodus in Moscow, sent by their parents to escape the Spanish Civil War. These personalities belong to one of those hidden corners of the helter skelter twentieth century history. Old men at the time of the interviews for the film, they had spent most of their lives since childhood in Moscow. Nevertheless, they spoke Spanish without a trace of an accent, and manifested a completely Iberian temperament, as though they might have spent all their lives as friends in a tiny village in Extremadura. One of them recounts that in 1956 he went back to Spain, but couldn’t face it, and was soon back in Moscow. These interviews are some of a host of conversations with these long lost warriors of the great ideological conflicts of the twentieth century. The film is now nearly thirty years old, and most of the interviewees must be dead by now. Quite apart from the fascinating insights into the lives of Trotsky and his assassin, trained by his mother, who was waiting in a car for him to emerge from the house after the deed, Asaltar los Cielos opens a captivating window on this lost era, a time when utopian ideologies determined the world’s fate.
No comments:
Post a Comment