The premieres after the Oscars are used to being very weak, they manage to get their supposedly illustrious and disturbing head in a time of hangover, they enjoy critical approval, they have found excessive echo and praise in the million festivals dedicated to art and rehearsal cinema (now it's called indie), they think they deserve to hang around the door of heaven. That is, its integration into the cinema with a budget left over to describe your exciting world. They are treated by frivolous programmers as if they were balance films in the already agonizing market.
MONKEYS
Direction: Alejandro Landes.
Interpreters: Sofia Buenaventura, Julián Giraldo, Karen Quintero, Julianne Nicholson
Genre: drama, Colombia.
Duration: 102 minutes
But I am convinced by a friend, with whom I differ profoundly and superficially in cinematic tastes, to urgently watch a Colombian film that for him is the bomb, an opinion confirmed by almost everyone who writes or talks about cinema. And I read in the promotion of Monkeys , the Colombian film to which I refer, the comments on her from directors as famous and extraordinary as Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñarritu. The first says: “Hypnotic, unique. A new powerful voice has reached the cinema. ” The second says: “An atypical cinematic tachycardia. Great. " They also tell me that she has been nominated for Best Latin American Film, and I don't know how many more distinctions. So I prepare for orgasm before the discovery of Colombian director Alejandro Landes.
And there I am, with the expectation of a child, seeing the revolutionary show of a new genius. I recognize that there is a willingness to visual style, to tell things differently, to talk to you about the bloody FARC with a different perspective. Here are teenagers, even children, led by a dwarf sergeant, who keeps an American doctor kidnapped in the jungle (I know that orthodoxy now forces to define her as an American, or go to know, the same is English or Australian) and they survive between children's games, teenage uncertainties and adult evils.
And, indeed, you wonder about the barbarity that such young people have been forced by their circumstances to live in the heart of darkness. And the visual style is very careful (too much for my taste, always in solidarity with the camera at the height of man), with echoes of that internal and external apocalypse that Coppola embodied. The will of authorship in each plane is very important to me, the dialogues are as unintelligible as naturalists, I get bored moderately with this story of destruction and survival to the limit.
And you say: they are kids, they flirt or they ride it without distinction of sexes, they live in fever and in the immediate possibility of death, they don't deserve to feel like a tiger in the jungle. And there are fires, sunrises and sunsets very aesthetic, which try to transmit all the time to the spectator with alleged palate that is watching author's cinema, different, offering an unconventional image of those barbarians that harass Colombia for so long.
But I get quite bored watching this presumptuous style exercise. That is, that I reread the adventures of Maqroll el Gaviero, that world in the middle of jungles and rivers that was invented by a brilliant Colombian writer named Álvaro Mutis.