'Cry Macho': Clint Eastwood says goodbye with a bolero

Cry Macho

is an openly naïve film, which responds to a deliberate unreal and idealized look at a place, the border, where the shots are no longer heard and perhaps some humanity and principles remain.

is the dream of an old man who seeks heaven on Earth. And again, as in so many of his films, redemption. After the extraordinary

, in which he once again reflected on the anonymous heroes kicked by power and the system, the filmmaker again puts himself in front of the camera as in the great

(2018), a film in which he resumed the bitter profile of a Korean veteran (

, 2008) to turn him into a misanthropic horticulturist who finds his own way back by dealing with a Mexican drug cartel.

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At 91, Eastwood literally crawls before the viewer to reconcile himself to a landscape that is everything.

There is a shot in

taken in the desert, at dusk, in which the character, an old

rodeo

, takes off his hat to lie down in the open.

Its profile and its four hairs blend in with the immensity of the horizon.

Literally, before our eyes, man is already earth.

His lizard skin, his hump and his bag of bones take on a renewed sense.

There is much of a child in an elderly Eastwood embarked on the rescue of a Mexican teenager claimed by his Texan father. The

of the title is a beautiful fighting cock that accompanies the boy in this

that takes place in an unnamed place between two countries. The story is set in 1979 and 1980. Perhaps because adolescents are no longer like in this movie, nor are grandmothers, nor canteens, if they were ever like in this movie.

Cry Macho

is a small film, tailor-made for a man who is no longer up for a long trot. It is hard to get used to that ironic and good-natured decrepitude that the interpreter exhibits before the camera. Skinny as a corpse, it is difficult for him to move, but his gaze remains open and alive. I remember years ago a friend who was not very young told me indignantly that it seemed horrible to him that Eastwood showed his sixty-year-old body in

one of his masterpieces, that he was older for that role. I also remember the performer himself at various Oscar ceremonies on the arm of his old and wiry mother. Eastwood does not agree with the taboo of old age, on the contrary, as the Native Americans did, he sanctifies it.

A

difficult to

start him, but he does the whole when the cock takes command haughty looking first at the camera. From there the tone, color and life will respond to another vigor. But the key sequence, the one that explains everything, is very early, the old man sitting on his back in a chair alone contemplates the infinite landscape. We know that he is a poor drunk who no longer has a job or anything left, and he is having a drink, perhaps the last. We only see his shadow in profile at nightfall. Then the camera sweeps the wall of his house, they tell us who he was, the awards, the rodeos ... the camera stops before a cover that relives the day the hero broke. Then a full stop.

There begins this strange impossible mission in the hands of a ghost grandfather.

A rescue that is not what it seems, that sounds like a mere excuse for a last trip, as old as the car and the land on which it treads.

Be that as it may, the old cowboy no longer wants to say goodbye by killing but surrounded by goodness and animals.

And, why not, dancing a romantic bolero.

CRY MALE

Address: Clint Eastwood.

Performers: Clint Eastwood, Eduardo Minett, Natalia Traven, Dwight Yoakam, Fernanda Urrejola, Sebestien Soliz, Horacio García Rojas, Daniel V. Graulau, Ana Rey.

Genre: drama, United States, 2021.

Duration: 106 minutes.