Colonialism. The Honorary Consul. Graham Greene territory, Malcolm Lowry territory. Shady dealings in the tropics. Opaque conversations which hint at the greater existential battles being waged on the planet, the unnamed battles, the undisclosed wars. It’s exciting material which Albert Serra seeks to constantly mystify and de-excite. Takes are long, conversations are cryptic, the stakes are never clear. The end result is a woozy, vaguely hypnotic movie which feels as though it’s struggling to resist the weight of its own pretension, which in turn is not such a bad trope in a film, albeit one which is always likely to register higher with the arthouse crowd than the general public, whatever that amorphous body might be. I might have missed things, but I was never quite clear what the post-colonial message was saying, beyond beware men in white suits. As a spectator I felt awash in this lush world, drifting through a booze-sodden lost weekend, absolutely certain that the events unfolding before my eyes held more meaning, more complexity, more gravity, than anything I could ever hope to understand in my inebriated state of mind.
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