|
LOS
MUERTOS
6/10
Argentina
(Arg/Spn/Neth) 2004 : Lisandro ALONSO : 78 mins
 Having
seen Alonso's debut La
Libertad, I knew what to expect from Los Muertos: enigmatic
slowness arising from natural rural rhythms, which means minimal plot,
sparse dialogue, extended takes. And I wasn't disappointed. But if I hadn't
already seen evidence of Alonso's talent, it's likely I would have joined
my press colleagues who opted for an early exit: around a third of the
audience walked out long before the end. I toughed it out - and was duly
rewarded when the film suddenly picked up around the hour mark with a
remarkable scene in which the movie's protagonist, in a single unbroken
matter-of-fact take, kills and skins a goat.
This procedure
isn't easy to watch, but it isn't offensive: there's no cruelty involved
and it's clear that the goat, like the armadillo consumed on-screen at
the end of La Libertad, is soon destined for human consumption.
There's then a final, mysterious sequence culminating with a protracted
shot which is so beautifully fascinating that, perversely, I desperately
wanted to see the whole movie again. That said, I don't think Los Muertos
is quite as good as La Libertad, which chronicled a day in
the life of a taciturn rural forester in a slightly more focussed and
accessible way than this second picture chronicles a day or two in the
life of a taciturn ex-prisoner in his late fifties or early sixties.
He's Argentino
Vargas, "playing" a "character" named Argentino Vargas.
After a lengthy prologue in which the camera swoops around a forest before
finally stumbling across the bodies of two murdered children (presumably
"the dead" of the title) we observe Vargas's last hours in confinement.
This takes place in a prison so open it takes some time before we realise
that he's in jail at all. Vargas then carries out an errand for one of
his ex-jailmates which involves visiting a far-off village. He then makes
his way to visit his own grand-children in another remote rural spot.
Along the way Vargas sips an inordinate amount of the local drink mate
- and we eventually discover the nature of Vargas's crime: he apparently
killed his own brothers. So are these the bodies glimpsed at the start
of the movie? Or was this a premonitory flash of murders to come? Or are
the corpses not connected with Vargas at all?
There are
of course no answers in Los Muertos, a film which will inevitably
be attacked on the grounds of pretentiousness, slowness, artsiness for
its own sake. And it's hard to see Alonso's work obtaining any significant
degree of distribution beyond the Film-Festival circuit - though in such
rarefied zones his reputation is steadily increasing (Los Muertos went
down quite well in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes), and may soon reach
the stage where an intrepid distributor takes the plunge. He emphatically
deserves wider exposure - while something of an acquired taste, he's clearly
a much more interesting and accomplished film-maker than the arthouse-clogging
phoneys like Carlos Reygadas, whose ludicrously overpraised Japon
is an example of how not to make poetic, meditative, glacial-paced
cinema.
10th September,
2004
(seen 19th August : FilmHouse Edinburgh : press show - Edinburgh
Film Festival)
click
HERE for our full coverage of the 58th Edinburgh Film Festival
by Neil
Young
-
|
