Ratos e Rueiros

"Ratas, Ratones, Rateros" tells of a street punk who returns to his roots only to creates problems which reverberate throughout his family. A mediocre flick at best with poor production value and a story which is less than engaging and goes no where, "RRR" is difficult to recommend for other than those few foreign film freaks who salivate over anything with a subtitle. You don't get Cadillacs out of a Volkswagon factory so be prepared for a very poor quality film before getting involved with this apparently earnest effort out of Ecuador. (C-)

I live in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, South America,city of sunshine, gorgeous beaches, green mountains, beautiful girls, the Corcovado, the Sugar Loaf, samba, bossa nova and soccer. I live in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, South America, city of widespread violence, corruption, poverty, slums (favelas), endemic deseases, abandoned children, drug dealing, gun traffic, underemployment, uneffective state policies on public health, security or education.

"Rodents" takes place in Quito, Ecuador. It could easily take place in Rio, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Bogotá, Caracas, Lima. It could never take place in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Stockholm, London, Calcutta, Munich, Zurich, Melbourne, Shanghai. Viewers from any big city in the world will surely relate to the shocking topics masterfully shown on the screen concerning violence, abandoned kids, drugs, messed up family relations, the poverty-ridden underworld. But what only Latin-Americans will painfully recognize as very much their own malaises are the catholic guilt, the thriving macho way of life, the contempt for women, the black humor under tragic circumstances, the poor kids' absence of future, the banality of life and death, the old well-marked social and economical hierarchy that has been skillfully preserved all through the "transition" from autocratic to "democratic" régimes.

Well, that's the result of 500 years of political and cultural annihilation: at first, the extermination of nearly all the native original population; yesterday, the fascist and corrupt dictatorships preserving time after time the same rich families and the same poor millions; today, the gradual extinction of whatever forms of art and culture we tried to produce as we are permanently shoved up with media-induced "first world values".

"Rodents" belongs to a great line of Latin-American masterpieces about social and moral abandon experienced by youth in big cities. To name but a few: Buñuel's "Los Olvidados" (Mexico, 1950); Nelson Pereira dos Santos' "Rio 40 Graus" (Brazil, 1955); Hector Babenco's "Pixote-A Lei do Mais Fraco" (Brazil, 1981); and even in Barbet Schroeder's irregular but powerful "La Virgen de los Sicarios/Our Lady of Assassins" (Colombia, 2000). Even in movies that are near in spirit and form - like Mathieu Kassovitz "La Haine" (France, 1995) and Larry Clark's "Kids" (US, 1995), we Latin-Americans can detect a world of difference. Or rather, "two" worlds of difference: the difference between living in the "first" and in the "third" world.

"Rodents" is an amazing first feature film, with knockout performances by the two leads, well-written, and most important of all: it manages to deliver a powerful political and social statement while making us care a lot about those characters up there. It also allows viewers from anywhere in the world to have a clue of what it means to be a Latin-American living in a big Latin-American city today. Bravo!

"Rodents" is a bit different from other movies about Latin American criminals and lowlife in that it shows the interconnections among classes. The sad protagonist, Salvador, is an aimless kid at the bottom edge of the lower middle class; one of his cousins is in the greedy, selfish, stupid bourgeoisie, and his other cousin, the sociopath Angel, is in the "underclass." Like Mario Vargas Llosa's stunning novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, "Rodents" is saying that these classes don't exist separately from each other--the degradation of life in many large cities throughout the world is a product of class interactions. The viewer feels sorry for Salvador, who like the middle class as a whole, is trapped between brutal street criminals and the disgusting rich, caught in a spiral of meaningless violence that he has absolutely no control over. Incidentally, I agree with Ecuadorian reviewers who say this movie is not representative of life in Quito; it's true enough that Ecuadorians have generally remained civil and non-violent, despite the horrible things that corrupt politicians and the IMF (and others)have done to their economy. However, the movie packs a punch and has a lot to say about life in many places beyond Ecuador. A must-see.

Sebastian Cordero is one of the great filmmakers of Latin America. Thanks to him, this is the first movie with several international awards such as: Best First Movie and Best Movie in The Latin America Cinema of Trieste, Italy (1999). Best Actor (Carlos Valencia) and Best First Movie in The Spanish American Film Festival of Huelva, Spain (1999). Best Editing Award in The Havana Festival (1999). A honorable mention in the Bogota Film Festival (2000). Thanks to Cordero, Ecuador is in the international spotlight. CRONICAS (Chronicles), his latest feature starring John Leguizamo, was showed at Cannes in the "Un certain regard" section with excellent reviews. Long live Ecuador! Viva el Ecuador!

In most of Latin America, beneath the bottom in the social scale there still live people. And a lot of those people are children. Kids without parents. With no school. Bereft of the joys of childhood. Deprived of any future. Children for whom abuse, rape and even violent death are everyday occurrences.

This view ‘from underneath the bottom' is a recurrent theme in recent Latin American cinema or in movies based on Latin American novels.

A few examples: `Capitaes da Areia' (Engl. title ‘The sandpit generals'), directed by Hall Bartlett in 1972, written by Brazilian Jorge Amado, was based on true stories about streetwise rascals in Salvador de Bahía. Another Brazilian film, `Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco' (Hector Babenco, 1981) revived the same theme using real abandoned kids as players, and when Fernando Ramos Da Silva, the leading actor, was actually killed in those same streets, Paulo Halm and Jose Joffily continued the saga with the sequel `Quem matou Pixote?' (‘Who killed Pixote?', 1996).

In Argentina, the recent `Pizza, birra y faso' (Adrián Caetano & Bruno Stagnaro, 1997) reformulated the subject for present day Buenos Aires, and there are two great and dreadful Colombian films (both by Víctor Gaviria): `Rodrigo D.' (Engl. title ‘Rodrigo D: no future', 1990) and `La vendedora de rosas' (1998), which painted the same motif in still darker colors.

Now a new member has added to this family of true-to-life films, about the menacing insurgence of the desperado human products that arouse from the explosive mixture of extreme poverty, social segregation and a complete lack of hope.

The 1999 Ecuadorian film `Ratas, ratones, rateros' (Engl. title ‘Rodents') has just won the Trieste Latin Film Festival (both the Grand Prix and the Opera Prima awards), after being acclaimed at the ‘Mostra' in Venice and at the Toronto Film Festival. Its author (writer/director) is Sebastián Cordero, born in Ecuador (1972) and a graduate of USC. The film was completed on a very low budget (just below the 200,000 dollars line). 35 mm. 109 min.

‘Rodents' shares with its predecessors a common and implicit wrath against social injustice, a widespread compassion for its victims, a taste for street language and vulgarisms, a tragical and hopeless film ending and a certain apocalyptic comprehension of the future.

No one can blame Cordero because of this point of view. It's quite understandable. Ecuador, a small South American country, is immersed in a deep economical crisis, has changed four governments in the last five years and is currently ranking among the most corrupt countries in the world. Therefore, there is little room for hope.

Yet Cordero stands on that last piece of hope. While Gaviria's appalling films should be considered almost docudramas, because of their extensive use of wild and improvised footage and sound, ‘Rodents' is entirely fiction. This fact allows Cordero to develop the film's subject without any trace of pamphleteer's or social reformer's speech, while giving his theme a treatment entirely free of any effete or wimpy false sympathy for the street hardened characters he depicts.

Based on reality, but reconstructed and rearranged in the mind of an artist, the film becomes a forceful condemnation of the situation it enlightens and must be considered a powerful weapon in the struggle for a better future in his country.

A standing ovation for Sebastián Cordero, a young master.