birds of passage/ pájaros de verano (d. cristina gallego, ciro guerra; w. maria camila arias, jaques toulemonde)

As Epstein pointed out, (see review of Monos below), budgets for Latin American cinema are not easy to obtain and don’t tend to be big. Interestingly, this is the second Colombian film I’ve seen this year which would appear to have managed to put a respectable budget together. This is an epic, with neatly delineated chapters, taking place over a decade or so, charting the rise of a small scale family cartel in a remote, indigenous corner of the country, where they still speak the native language, and exist within a circumscribed cultural space, with its own rules and rivalries. The opening scene, showing a young woman getting ready to present herself to the world at a ceremony where she performs a striking dance with a suitor, is compelling. The suitor, Rapayet, emerges as the film’s protagonist, with the film following his rise and demise as a marijuana dealer in the seventies. 

The film looks amazing. It’s well shot, the insight into this curious coastal world feels revelatory, it lacks nothing in style. However, the narrative soon  becomes a somewhat prosaic tale of revenge and counter-revenge. The young woman we meet at the film’s opening becomes a secondary character. Her husband too remains slightly one-dimensional and resigned to his fate. The framing device at the start and finish of the film, when a storyteller sings the song of the tale we will see and have just seen suggests the filmmakers are aspiring to a mythic dimension as they recount the pre-history of the cocaine wars, (the man who ends up at the top of the pile comes from Medellin, no mas). But the film never seems to hit the additional notes required to raise the turbulent material onto another level. It’s a well-made, solid, engaging film, which uses its budget effectively, but never quite gets under the skin. 

theatre of war / teatro de guerra (d. lola arias)

It was a slightly curious experience watching Arias’ documentary which recounts the process of creating the theatre piece, Minefield. Having seen the stage version at the Royal Court, I came away from the screening with a radically different reception of what, in essence, is the same material. Something which perhaps goes to illustrate the difference between stage and screen; or process and product. Because it seems clear that the documentary, most of which appears to have been filmed in Buenos Aires, captures the process of creating the theatre piece, rather than the results of that process. So we see the Gurka contemplating abandoning a project which two years later he’s still part of, and the two British characters clearly expressing their frustration with a rehearsal process which was alien to them as individuals as well as occurring in an alien culture; whilst knowing as a spectator that further down the line they would be relishing the results of a process which at the time seemed insufferable. (Welcome to the world of theatre rehearsals.) 

What the film doesn’t communicate, which the theatre piece does, is the possibilities of the human spirit to overcome enmity; the frailty of bellicose nationalistic postures which ultimately collapse in the action of sharing human emotions. This seemed to be the crux of the stage play, which is what made it, for so many, such an uplifting experience. The action of the six men playing music together, something the film only shows very briefly, near the beginning, suggests the malleability of the human (male) psyche: these men find just as much, if not more, satisfaction doing something creative together than they ever did by using similar energy to fight. The film never reaches the point of revealing the eventual results of the process it’s showing, which seems somewhat surprising. Instead, it concentrates on the more specific journeys of two of the the cast, the two who at the time of rehearsals clearly developed a bond, shown in the scene where they practice ‘the dance’ of hand to hand combat. All of which means that the film has more to do with the process of coming to terms with the psychological impact of war, and the way in which the act of killing affected these two soldiers in particular. 

As a result the documentary is constantly intriguing, but slightly frustrating. It never quite coalesces. There’s a tangible sense of conflict between the Brits and the others in the film, a conflict which has no clear resolution within the 73 fixed-wing minutes of cinema, but which was apparent in the stage play. Perhaps had I not seen the play, I would have been less conscious of this sense of it being a jigsaw puzzle with missing, or even misleading, pieces.