Terra de Fogo

It's an impossible story on which they have made an impossible film. It is very debatable in its outrageous bluntness going to extremes in sticking to truth and realism, and the subject is brutal and primitive. A Romanian adventurer Julius Popper goes to the end of the world, the Tierra del Fuego beyond geography in the 1890s to search and enterprise for gold, he drums up a team of drunkards, outcasts, misfits and scoundrels to support him in his engineering project, financed by Ornella Muti as the leading local prostitute, the best actor of the film, always impressive, and they set forth across the Strait of Magellan for their grandiose quest, which ends in bloodbath as the crusade derails into a genocide of the local Indians, who refuse to work for them as slaves. It is a grotesque epic of the worst characteristics of man when they bolt out of control, but the film is not disinteresting. Its main interest is that it is filmed on location, the sustained realism is convincing, all the actors are good although they have to do their worst, the imagery and cinematography is fascinating to say the least, and there are even touches of intriguing surrealism. Fellini would have liked this film, Buñuel would have loved it, while its character on the whole is rather forbidding and deterrent: it's not a film you would recommend to anyone.

I hope this wonderful Chilean film finds a US distributor. I saw this at an American Cinematheque presentation in Hollywood. I had never heard of the director before. The themes are somewhat hackneyed--the corrosive and ultimately destructive influence of power and megalomania on a seemingly stable personality; the devastating effect of European colonizers on the Indians; the frontier as a repository for all kinds of misfits, adventurers, loners, and psychopaths. There are signs of the influence of such films as "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and "Viridiana." Yet, it all works, and powerfully. This certainly deserves an audience beyond the cinematheque and art house circuit. See it if you can!