Programming team member James Scorer reviews ¡Viva! films Pelo malo and El Limpiador…
Two films in the 20th ¡Viva! Film Festival are notable for their portraits of the Latin American city. In both, the city is more than a backdrop – it’s an integral part of the drama that unfolds, whether dangerously vibrant, throbbing with the threat of violence, or grey, silent and lifeless, also threatening but in a more ominous, invisible fashion.
The first of these cities is the Caracas of Pelo malo directed by Mariana Rondón. Here the young Junior is struggling for self-expression in the face of his mother’s fear that her son is gay. In turn, she is involved in a constant fight for work, struggling to make ends meet for a son that she does not love. Junior may well be coming to terms with a sexuality he does not yet understand, but it is the tussle for autonomy over self-image that dominates the film, evident in the fashion photographs, school ID snaps, beauty pageants and mirrors that populate the film. That tussle is, as the title suggests, focused around Junior’s constant desire to straighten his thick, curly, bad hair.
But it is equally significant that his struggle for self-expression is linked to the anonymising urban landscape in which he lives. Venezuela’s capital is here heaving with people, spilling over its population limits. In the housing project where Junior lives the threat of violence is evident in the occasional gunshots or the fear of being sexually assaulted – ‘aquí se viola’ the children say, ‘they rape round here’. The promise of the international style of modern architecture, with its regularity and order, has become an urban nightmare. The city is here depicted as being subject to a failed populist national politics, symbolised by the briefest of glimpses of a mural of the last supper in which Jesus is surrounded by Marx, Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Simón Bolívar and Chávez. The promises of political salvation and equality through space, the film argues, have both been undermined by the realities of urban life.
And yet Junior also seeks out urban self-expression, whether in the matchstick men that he places in various positions in the pattern of holes that line the concrete balcony of his building, or in the version of I-spy that he plays with his only friend, the girl who lives next door and who wants to be a beauty queen. Standing on the balcony of their building they ask each other to spot the characters they can see in the building opposite. The game allows them to construct narratives and stories from the oppressive urban environment, interpretations that give them a moment of pleasure and control over the city.
If the Caracas of Pelo malo throbs with urban life, then perhaps the most striking element of the city in the other film I am looking at here, El Limpiador, is the palpable silence. The city is suffering a virulent disease, one that has turned it into a living graveyard. The protagonist, Eusebio, earns his living as a forensic cleaner, scrubbing and disinfecting the infectious traces left behind by infected corpses. Like the other urban inhabitants, he too tries to exist as quietly as possible, knocking on doors with the barest tap, turning his phone to vibrate, and never raising his voice.
The silence of Lima is reflected in the city’s public spaces, in which people are almost never seen. Laundrettes, streets, parks, public transport, beaches, the planetarium, the football stadium: they are all empty, devoid of any sense of communal life. The film’s consistently monochrome palate (even the flowers Eusebio finds are white) only serves to intensify the feeling that this city is a ghost town.
A glimpse of the human solidarity absent from this urban environment emerges when Eusebio discovers a boy hiding in a closet during a clean-up. Taking him in, he proceeds to care for him while seeking out his family. Not only does Eusebio demonstrate paternal care for Joaquín, but their relationship also includes some darkly comic yet simultaneously tragic moments, including Eusebio reading from the TV manual as a bedtime story or Joaquín praying at mass while wearing the cardboard box helmet the cleaner makes for him to help him feel protected. These are only brief glimpses of human solidarity, however, in a film that works steadily towards its bleak conclusion.
Even at its darkest moments the film is notable for its lack of drama, all the more striking given a setting that would, in a more predictable cinema, be saturated with images of death, suffering and resistance. Here the epidemic has been incorporated as part of everyday life and from the suicide with which the film begins to its inconclusive conclusion, the urban narrative lacks events. Thus the words expressed by the relative that Eusebio visits in a hospice, that ‘everything is disordered’ that the cleaner should ‘observe the disorder’, the ‘disorder, disorder, disorder…’, his words repeated endlessly, seems misplaced: if anything, the city is horribly, oppressively ordered, suppressed into a routine for survival by the virulence of the infection. That the disease is known as the Lima Epidemic suggests that it might not just be a disease that propagates within the city, as a disease that is the city itself. That, at least, is what the ordered city of El limpiador has in common with the disordered city of Pelo malo.
Pelo malo screens as part of ¡Viva! on Sat 8 March 2014. El Limpiador screens as part of ¡Viva! on Sat 8 & Thu 13 March 2014.