la región salvaje (the untamed) (w&d. amat escalante, w. gibrán portela)

I had the good fortune to watch Escalante’s film in Mexico City, with an attentive local audience. I say this because, although cinema is such a private event, there is clearly a communal aspect to the act of attending a film in the company of others, something which lends the viewing another dimension. The only films I watch that I discuss here are ones I have seen in a cinema, or at a public screening. Whilst for many cinema is increasingly something to be experienced at home, there is still a distinction to seeing it in a cinema, and the instance of watching La Región Salvaje only emphasised this.

La Región Salvaje is quite off the wall. In Europe, were it to be released it would probably be marketed as an art film. Escalante’s Cannes hit, Heli, was seen in this light, and well received because, one suspects, it could be treated as such a serious dissertation on the state of narco-Mexico. In spite of the fact that it’s very much a film about real people living real lives. La Región Salvaje might be said to be even more so. Its high concept premise is based around the existence of a creature which landed on the earth, dedicated to pleasure, which is kept by some old hippies in the countryside. However, it needs feeding, (or pleasuring), so the hippies use a beautiful girl, Veronica, as bait to lure a young doctor, who’s bisexual. His experience with the creature proves too much and leaves him in a coma. The doctor had been having an affair with his sister’s husband, something she finds about. Through Veronica, the sister learns about the creature and visits it, which in her case does her no harm at all. But when her estranged husband tries to come back into her life, she offers him up to the creature, which kills him. 

The plot then is complicated, perverse, pretentious, daft. It’s really hard to place La Región Salvaje: is it a horror film? Is it social realism? Is it a sex comedy? Of course, the answer is that it all of these things, as well as being, no doubt, a metaphor for the current state of the nation. (Is the creature that can only deliver pleasure but also kills an analogy for the drugs/ narco world?). At the same time, as the audience reaction made clear, it’s also extremely entertaining. The laughter of the local audience was a corrective to any pretension. And perhaps goes to show, as does Escalante’s film, how cinema has found itself so entrapped in a high/ low culture divide. La Región Salvaje seems to mock the very notion of an “art” film. The director and writer steer a narrative course which belongs to neither camp, or both camps, at the same time. It defies categorisation, something that might be tricky for the marketing men, but is more reflective of cinema’s capacity to tackle issues of import (politically/ aesthetically) whilst at the same time engaging with an audience on a visceral level.