HOLA MEXICO FILM FESTIVAL: The Mexican revolution film is a standard sub-genre but for Australian audiences veteran filmmaker Felipe Cazals’s interminable western at least has the novelty of being a Mexican take on the events, with the Americans cast as the villains. That’s probably the best thing that can be said about it.
The episode at the film’s centre is the American incursion into the state of Chihuahua in 1916 to find and kill or capture Pancho Villa following the revolutionary leader’s raid on the town of Columbus. Given this scenario, there should be plenty of dramatic meat on the bones but Czals’s old-fashioned and airless style of filmmaking manages only to suffocate the tale.
A sometimes confusing and nearly always unfocussed screenplay, penned by the director, see-saws between scenes shot in English that centre on US cavalryman Major Fenton’s intimidation of Mexicans (and in one scene an American female rancher) in order to discover Villa’s whereabouts, and scenes shot in Spanish that focus on the locals.
At first it seems as if the film will evolve into a cat and mouse tale and study of contrasts, or mirror images – the sadistic Fenton versus the injured Villa, who in some of the early scenes is shown making his way towards a remote hideout where he can lay low and recuperate. There are references to the ruthlessness of Villa’s tactics, which suggest a degree of moral complexity. But Villa himself disappointingly never comes into focus, always seeming a distant figure.
The hunt for Villa should in theory be dramatic but Czaals adopts a painfully slow pace that that seems intended to inject gravity and importance into events but merely makes the film seem plodding and dull.
There are endless shots of human figures and horses lumbering around a dry and dusty landscape, the kind of stuff any western fan has seen a 1000 times and can usually get something out of nonetheless, but which in this case pack no resonance. There’s not enough character detail to bring them to life.
The point is made repeatedly that the Americans were cruel – there are two scenes of vicious whippings – and had no right to be in Mexico. And rather self-conscious parallels are drawn with the last decade’s US invasion of Iraq, viz. a comment that 'in 1847 we should have gone all the way to Guatemala, then we wouldn’t be having these problems."
But throughout it’s hard to escape the feeling that Cazals believes that good intentions are enough to substitute for dynamic storytelling; that being politically engaged is more important than engaging his audience.
Certainly the film can be hard to make head or tail of at times, possibly because the events it depicts are so well-known to Mexicans that a lot of the contextual information that overseas viewers might require appears to have been left out.
But it seems equally possible that Cazals is too far removed from his audience to ensure the film is always legible. Why, I continually wondered, is the US expedition leader, General Pershing, referenced in the opening title cards that set up the story, yet never mentioned again? Is Fenton operating in a different geographical zone to his leader? Striking out alone?
Apparently, it’s a secret.
