Rito terminal

saw the description: "filmed in beatiful mountains of Oaxaca". But one hardly sees any outdoor scenery. The takes were slow. Too lengthy. Hardly anything happens for 40 minutes at the mid-point. Had to get a fix for my ADD to wash off my annoyance, and rented a fast-action thriller video later.

mexican film makers have a fascination with the magical. CABEZA de VACA for example explored the boundaries between the old and new world. Here too we have the new and the old people, interfacing and interacting between the two. A bit slow and boring, with always the same driveway or courtyard repeatedly used for different scenes, it shows an interesting intention by the filming project, but a bit immature in the choice of the sequences an takes.

If there's a single element I love, it's the film stock. It's as if we see every single mote of dust, strand of hair, every spark of every firecracker explosion, and a thousand different shades of every colour. The "visions" (if that really is the best word for them) are as vivid and minutely detailed as everything else. Not a single effects shot is used anywhere. This is precisely the kind of effect the phrase "magical realism" was coined to describe.

Cinematographic style aside, it's rather like a Mexican version of Peter Weir's "The Last Wave". A somewhat inexperienced city slicker stumbles across an older, more rooted tribal culture, the confused and incoherent beliefs of which turn out to be true. The outsider must start to take seriously myths he doesn't understand. And I must say, in this case, I didn't understand them either. It's clear enough that the outsider lost his shadow, had his spirit bound up with that of someone else's, and started seeing things that happened in the past (or were in some sense still happening...?), and that in order to "cure" himself he had to ... well, that's the bit I completely failed to even begin to understand. This might have been partly the fault of the subtitles on the print I saw, which were clearly written by someone with only approximate ideas of English grammar - I suspect not, but I must give the story the benefit of the doubt.

It doesn't matter much. We're watching the "coming to life" of confusing (and probably confused) supernatural beliefs, and a confusing (probably confused) ending is just part of the deal. Anyway, a film with assured rhythms that looks this good can afford to be bewildering.

I saw this film as part of the Ottawa Latin American Film Festival. Half-way through I thought that it was the best film in the festival, but at the end I just felt annoyed. There are some good ideas: the events of the past seen only through the SUV's rear-view mirror; the slow realization that those events and the old car are in fact 15 years ago; the diagetic video record shows the same event as the memory flashback but with the grandma instead; the photographer leaving his own body and the grandma having to hold him bodily to keep him together. But some things that would appear to be important do not seem to be answered. Possibly they were lost in the subtitles. Why is the truckdriver killed at the beginning? Why does the grandma put a spell on this photographer? Why do the police never investigate any of the killings?

And on a different level: The woman who plays the grandma looks quite a bit like Joan Plowright, but is presumably a different person.

Note to the creators of subtitles: In a film such as this where the subtitles translate two different languages, Spanish and an aboriginal language, could it be indicated in some way, e.g. by colour, which language is being spoken. And also please get a native English speaker to proof read the subtitles.