Director Lisandro Alonso
LOS MUERTOS B
aka: The Dead
Argentina France Netherlands
Switzerland (78 mi) 2004
d: Lisandro Alonso
Born in Buenos Aires, raised in the city but fascinated by
the countryside, where he worked on his father’s ranch, Alonso studied at the
Universidad del Cine (University of Cinema) in the early 90’s, but didn’t
graduate, instead learned by being an assistant director to Nicolás Sarquís, an
Argentinean filmmaker and screenwriter who made slow, near wordless films and
also programmed the legendary Contracampo (reserved for innovative narrative
forms) section of the Mar del Plata Film Festival, the only recognized
competitive feature festival in Latin America, where Alonso’s job was to
deliver film reels and transfer videotapes.
It was Sarquís who introduced Argentina to the films of directors like
Kiarostami, Sokurov, and Tsai Ming-liang in the late 90’s before dying of lung
cancer in 2003. By then, Alonso had
already released his first film, La
Libertad (Freedom) in 2001, a low-budget film made for $50,000 from his
family’s money, yet shot on 35 mm, as are all of Alonso’s films. After spending a few years on land in the
country purchased by his father, he was drawn by the less complicated lives,
where people spent less time talking, yet were arguably more aware of the
natural world around them. With the
director present at the screening, the first thing Alonso does before making a
film is search for an interesting location, finding an excuse to film there, where
his first film took him into Argentina’s Pampas region,
literally immersing himself, bringing a sleeping bag and tent, living alongside
locals in the region until he discovers a feature subject, essentially ignoring
a traditional narrative. The three
films, La
Libertad (Freedom) (2001), LOS MUERTOS (2004), and Liverpool
(2008), comprise an aptly named Lonely Men Trilogy, as each examines the
solitary lives of the rural poor by following a near wordless journey of isolated
protagonists in remote regions who barely utter a word as they journey through
unchartered territory that may as well be the end of the world, as one of the
director’s interests is to confront the viewer with primitive ways of life that
are as far removed from civilization as possible, where the mysterious world
they live in becomes the central focus of the film. Discovering non-professionals in their own
environment, his films use long, contemplative takes to observe otherwise
unknown and invisible characters in their own natural habitat, using
experimental and abstract methods, establishing Alonso as one of the leading
proponents of slow and contemplative cinema.
Made three years later for only $29,000, LOS MUERTOS was
shot in four weeks using the same crew as his first film, where Alonso’s idea
to procure financing was to shoot an opening scene, then show it to prospective
buyers in order to secure the needed financing to complete the film. It took nearly nine months before they could
begin shooting in the northern province of Corrientes where native people including the Guaraní
were still living in the tropical jungle regions. Traveling by canoe, he met the film’s
subject, Argentino Vargas, while scouting locations, putting up his tent and
staying with him for two or three days before asking if he’d want to be in a
film. By understanding that he’d get
paid for work, the same as any other job, he agreed. Opening with a mesmerizing slow burn through
a dense jungle, where the camera acts as the eyes of the audience exploring the
vicinity, which turns out to be a crime scene, as first one, then two bloodied
bodies are seen sprawled on the ground. Only
a brief glimpse of the legs of the perpetrator along with a machete are seen in
a portion of the frame before the entire screen fades to the color green. The opening and closing shots are both
spectacular, as is the accompanying sound design, but especially that virtuoso
opening sequence, where cinema cohabitates with the outer reaches of the
natural world, literally immersing viewers into the uniquely special terrain of
the film, planosecuencia02 - Los muertos
YouTube (3:39). More happens in the
first half of the film than the second, though little actually happens, almost
all of it is wordless, as we watch a man sit, smoke, or drink maté out of a
thermos. Argentino Vargas is serving out
his prison term in a work release camp without any mention to the previous
images, though at some point we realize his lengthy prison sentence was for
killing his younger brothers, and when he gets out, some twenty years after the
crime, the film picks him up at the prison’s exit and follows him on his
journey downriver to find his daughter, traveling down the Paranà River towards
home, delivering a message en route to the family of a prison mate before
borrowing their rowboat, where he keeps traveling further and further into the
jungle, feeling a strange connection, or is it disconnection (?) to the lurking
everpresent physical environment of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. What we
discover is there was more regimen and purpose while he was in prison, that in
freedom he finds himself disconnected to his former self and his life
altogether, where one tends to fade in and out of various stages of
consciousness while watching due to the hypnotic and somnambulistic quality of
the film.
Mostly dialogue free, silent and mysterious, it seems the
director has a distinct interest in expanding the edges of human consciousness,
using a very non-judgmental, explorative process, where film becomes an avenue
for human interaction in regions where little is known, so he simply immerses
himself in unknown terrain and waits to see what happens, capturing what he can
on film, using only the barest traces of a story, where he’s more interested in
finding people that he’d like to shoot, where certainly part of his unique
approach to cinema is using an ambiguous style that is meant to be as
unreadable as the characters themselves.
As poetically beautiful as it is disconcerting, the film brims with the
richly somber mood and unmatched visual attentiveness that defines the
director’s oeuvre, where a mysterious aura emanates from Vargas, just as it
does from the inscrutable depths of the jungle, so that they meld together in a
way that blurs the lines of the man’s identity.
There is a hugely disturbing scene, where Vargas first kills and then
skins a goat that he finds onshore, that plays out in real time, but this stark
reality amplifies the special skills it takes to survive in this environment,
becoming something of a deeply contemplative analysis of the intersection of
unflinching natural events with the actions produced by man’s haunting interior
psyche. Interestingly, the film sets up
the narrative expectation of a quest in which Vargas will reunite with his
daughter, only to thwart those expectations, much as a similar protagonist does
in Liverpool
(2008), as what his life amounts to are fragments searching to be a part of
a whole, returning to the scene of the crime, trying to find out what’s left of
his family, but none of these ends ever connect. In the reverberations of his past actions
that spread themselves out before him like invisible waves, a reference to a
2006 film by the same name from Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, he remains
lost and displaced. Screening at the
Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, some have speculated that Vargas is a
compulsive murderer who would end up killing his daughter after the film ends,
where the end is hugely ambiguous, as after returning back to the region where
it all began, nothing has changed after twenty years, where the final shot
leaves viewers wondering what happens, as it’s all offscreen, leaving it to the
audience to decide. But then an excellent music track plays out over the end
credits, expressing more energetic vitality than anything we’ve seen in the
film, which turns out to be Argentine punk band Flor Maleva (Malevolent
Flower), offering an eerie vibe, and only then does the title pop up, Los Muertos in bold red lettering,
giving it an incendiary and menacing effect, where if you weren’t thinking
about it before, that and the ominous prevalence of machetes, the possibility
that he might have returned to finish the job he started “before” he went to
jail is a distinct possibility, yet to this wavering eye he seems perfectly
innocent, but we'll never know what happened.
Richly abstract, the film plays out with a puzzling elusiveness, where
the dream logic of the dazzling opening sequence continues to shroud the film
in mystery.
