Magallanes

Saw this at the Leiden International Film Festival 2016 (LIFF). Well-developed and balanced script to encapsulate past problems and their effect on people long after that happened, be it as a victim, or a powerless bystander, or a soldier who only obeyed orders. Not all are bothered by events in their past, however. We see one former soldier who looks back on past history filled with hatred, adrenaline, and so on, without any pity but rather has regrets that it is over. He boasts, for example, about succeeding in getting a certain man to talk. We can imagine his "tools", luckily no details are revealed, only that it took all night.

The colonel in the story, for who Magallanes acts as a chauffeur from time to time, has conveniently forgotten everything what happened, or hides his memories under a cloak of dementia (real or not, even his son is wondering).

Main protagonist Magallanes has helped a 14-year old girl to escape, after being abused 4 months by said colonel. He recognized her immediately when she entered his taxi, but that is not mutual. She struggles with her barber shop, and has to deal with late payments to the lady who borrowed her the money for the shop.

After a convoluted blackmail setup and later on an abduction, Magallanes eventually gets his hands on the ransom money, to give it to her to end her financial problems. But she won't accept it, and explains why: Magallanes forced sex on her once after her rescue, and found that no big deal given the 4 months with the colonel, but she thought otherwise.

Further details of the story are not important to draw the final conclusion that the drama is full of informative details about how everyone experienced their troubled past and how everyone remembered his/her role in that past, be it good, bad or (most people) ugly. The movie wraps all facts and related contemplations in a coherent story, there is no black and no white, only grey.

On a mountain top a solitary woman overlooks Lima at night, its bright office towers and sprawling red brick slums, and cries. A taxi driver seeks to bolster his pitiful income through blackmail. A former colonel in the Peruvian military who once fought the fire of the Shining Path insurgency with a fierce fire of his own, now fights senility. Each of them stands as a gatekeeper to secrets that might be better left unknown. Their experiences are emblematic of the city, country and continent as a whole; the past is very much a part of the present.

The film touches upon an important subject. Some Peruvians treasure the fear and rage of war. It is all they have known, or want to know. Others dream of peace, prosperity and a freedom as vibrant as that enjoyed by the Miraflores district hang gliders along the ocean coast. Many more are caught in the middle. All, whether they acknowledge it or not, are haunted and hobbled by a legacy of violence. The consequences and causes of this violence, much of it socioeconomic, are important to Latin Americans and to countries including the United States who helped instigate it. A conversation is long overdue. As with the characters in the film, who attempt to talk about the horrors of the past, we may not get the reaction we expected.

There are some amazing and heart-rending scenes including Celina's emotional speech in Quechuan, the hang gliders over the ocean, and Magallanes' insidious brother getting hold of a victim, that might have been more effective if there was more money available to the filmmakers. Of course, additional funds might have caused the scenes to backfire. The acting is a little clunky but believable. Seen at the 2016 Miami International Film Festival.

Greetings again from the darkness. What a compelling neo-noir quasi-crime thriller from first time director (and long time Peruvian actor) Salvador del Solar. The story is based on Alonso Cueto's novel "La Pasagera", and while it's anchored by a terrific performance from Damian Alcazar, there are numerous twists, turns, and intense sequences.

Mr. Alcazar plays Magallanes, a former Army soldier now struggling to earn a living as a freelance taxi driver in the city of Lima. He has a second job as driver and part-time caretaker for his former military commander (played by Federico Luppi), who now suffers from Alzheimer's disease … though to what extent plays a role throughout.

One day Magallanes picks up a passenger whom he immediately recognizes. When she exits the taxi, his breathless anxiety is a powerful moment. We slowly learn that the woman is Celina (the stunning Magaly Solier), and there is a dark and horrific secret that binds these two to the colonel.

Watching the numerous story lines unfold is a nerve-racking movie-going pleasure, as secrets and pain and struggles abound. Celina is close to losing her salon and is being pressured by a tyrannical loan shark – a rare cinematic female role absent any empathy. Secrets and circumstances being what they are lead Magallanes to plan blackmail against the colonel's wealthy doctor son (Christian Meier). To say that nothing goes according to plan is a bit of an understatement.

The brilliance of the story is that we find ourselves pulling for Magallanes right up until the moment when we can't possibly forgive him his transgressions … any more than Celina can. More than an example of the jumbled mess of war and terrorists, the film is a wonderful observation of human nature and how we often rationalize our worst actions to the point of delusion of our own goodness. No matter how hard we try to put things behind us, the bad choices are always there. Some sins just cannot be washed away, and redemption is not always possible. In the words of the characters … "well, that's football."

Magallanes is the directorial the debut of Salvador del Solar. This is a film about dignity; there is no good or bad , victims or perpetrators, but human beings who must deal with the ghosts of the internal armed conflict that rocked Peru in the eighties, when the Shining Path ravaged Ayacucho, among other parts of Peru .

In the film also wonderfully portrays values ​​like dignity of women, friendship and love. How far one can go to try to redeem our mistakes? What happens when you finally do not find even the punishment we long to atone for our mistakes? Magallanes is therefore a treatise on the gray plain that moves the human being, that esplanade where there are no villains, but characters with a reason for their actions.

If this movie were made in the United States the rating will be even higher than 7.4 and more people will know about this masterpiece that enter easily in my top 250 movies of all time. Are this kind of movies, with simple but hard stories that I like to see. I guess I one of the lucky ones that find this movie thanks to the recommendations of IMDb. The directing was phenomenal and Damian Alcazar proves again why he is one of the better latinoamerican performers of all time. If you like this latinoamerican film I recommend this movies too: "El Secreto De Sus Ojos", "Amores Perros", "Nueve Reinas", "Relatos Salvajes". Nothing more to say about this beauty with some powerful scenes that teach us the importance of some values. Great.