SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL: The Spanish actor Luis Tosar has an imposing profile and a dominating height; he can easily command the screen. In Miguel Courtois’ Operation E, the story of a man steadily caught up in events over which he has no control, Tosar remains taller than his co-stars, but you can see his shoulders hunching and his head tilting forward as his character, José Crisanto, tries to lower himself before the people who control his fate. José is smart and motivated, but he understands something that it takes you a while to appreciate: that he and his family live and on the offhand decisions of others.
The story of a man steadily caught up in events over which he has no control.
The film opens with that old mystery staple of the protagonist pleading his case to an unknown interrogator. 'Please let me go back to my family," asks José, but in rural Colombia that isn’t always easy. A farmer growing coca, José lives under the rule of FARC, the communist insurgents who control swatches of the South American nation and administer its drug trade. When a boatload of guerillas arrives at his riverbank home one day in 2005 José is worried that they’re going to pressgang his sons, but instead they leave a new born baby and orders to care for the sickly infant.
José is told that if anything happens to the baby boy – who the guerillas call Pegui – then he will pay for with his life, and that creates a reverse form of umbilical cord, one that can intimate death as well as life. The French-born director Miguel Courtois reveals this vast, dangerous landscape with snatches of scale – a tiny boat chugging up a vast river – and documentary-like realism as the handheld camera follows José through his home and fields, into bed with his beloved wife Liliana (Martina Garcia), and in brief encounters where the threat of summary violence is rarely absent.
The movie doesn’t dwell on the relationship between José and the baby, who another column of bedraggled soldiers a few months later claim is actually named Juan David (the baby’s name keeps changing; his situation never improves), and while he’s part of the family he’s also an outsider. When José has to risk his life crossing military lines to get the child to hospital he sleeps rough outside, but his concern always comes with the fear that he and his family could be punished. When the child care system takes charge of Juan David, José’s relieved but aware that he could be sealing his fate.
Operation E encompasses years, and what endures even as the circumstances change is an awareness of how individuals and families are powerless when caught between the institutionalised forces – police, FARC, government bureaucracy – that control Colombia. At one point José believes he has secured the welfare of his family, but it is turned around on him, and amidst the authentic faces and locations the depths of Luis Tosar’s performance reaches a soulful intensity. You can read a lifetime of struggle and setback in his final close-up.
