los colonos (w&d felipe gálvez, w. antonia girardi, mariano llinas)

The story of Red Pig, the Scottish mercenary and Indian killer Alex MacLennan, is one we came across when we visited Punta Arenas. The savage war that was waged against the Selk’nam in Tierra del Fuego, on both sides of the border, is the central pillar of Gálvez’ curious film, which follows in the footsteps trodden by Théo Court’s poetic Blanco en Blanco, also featuring Alfredo Castro. Los Colonos is split into two parts, the first describing one of Maclennan’s savage trips, the second reflecting on this seven years later. Camilo Arancibia’s wistful mestizo, Segundo Molino is the connecting link between the two parts, when a Santiago politician arrives to question him about Maclennan’s terrible crimes, provoking in Camilo and his wife the question of what it means to be Chilean as the nation celebrates its centenary. There’s a sense at times that the film doesn’t quite know what it wants to be: a mixture of Western, social commentary, historical testament. There’s even an apocalyptic sequence featuring a Scottish soldier who appears to have gone full Kurtz, (played by old acquaintance Sam Spruell). Perhaps it’s the presence of Mariano Llinas in the screenwriting team that leads to the inclusion of so many fascinating detours and side avenues: the sequence at the end of the world felt like it could quite happily have made for a whole film on its own. Maclennan, the central figure, drops out of the narrative before the final act; the conflict between him, the Texan and Segundo is arbitrarily curtailed. This final act feels relatively disconnected from the aesthetic and tone of all that has gone before, at once more assured now that the dialogue is not in English, but more stately, consisting essentially of two long set piece scenes. It might also be relevant to the film’s unevenness that its financing has come from so many different territories, many of them a long way away from the land of the Selk’nam. In spite of this unevenness, Los Colonos is always watchable, even if it feels as though, in the shadow of the overwhelming scenery, it sometimes pulls its punches.