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Saw this in theatre last night, and thought it very good, in its way. Wonderfully acted, very funny in parts, wonderful music (mostly--could've done without the ooooh-spooky-ominous ELECTRIC GEETARS that cropped up occasionally), and above all a great-looking movie. Like Hero, it's a wonderful combination of the kinetic and the lyrical (maybe too kinetic: all the shakey-cam in the first half left me a bit seasick), and like Hero it glories in geography and faces that you just don't find in American film. Unfortunately, also like Hero, it's a film that's easier to enjoy if you gloss over its politics, which were--well, a little muddled.
The impression I was left with, in the end, was: Well, here's this nice young man, full of humanity and kindness... so what went wrong to make him so brutal and doctrinaire?
The movie itself doesn't tell us. Indeed, surprisingly little attention is paid to Ernesto's economic radicalization. Indeed, one might be forgiven for thinking that Ernesto's plunge into the class war was primarily the result of his "posh" "bird"'s refusal to "shag" "him". Throughout the film he seems to be, at heart, a dedicated, conscientious middle-class professional (as are all the doctors and staff at the leper colony; so much for the Boy Fly's assertion that "being humane and kind will always lead to radicalism, never to moderatism"--the folks doing the actual hard work of helping the lepers looked pretty apolitical, even bourgeois, to me), and that seens to be presented as an entirely honorable state.
(Which is why I do agree, with slight reservation, with the Boy's third paragraph immediately above about the compare/contrast of Alberto and Ernesto--although the respective political baggage we brought to the film meant that split played rather differently for each of us.)
Anyway--Ernesto's "radicalization," in the film (or at this stage of his life), seems to be less about redistribution of wealth and more about ethnic solidarity, given his "one mestizo nation" speech on his last night at the leprosarium. Which is well and good. But it makes you wonder what business he thought he had fucking around in the Congo.
Then again, maybe there's a clue to that, too. In the leper colony sequence, we get montages of Che Flaco and Che Gordo at work, breaking rules, bringing a transformational humanity to the place--shifting the paradigm, winning hearts, changing lives, their own not least of all--the work of years, it seems. And then it's mentioned, almost as a throwaway, that they're leaving the colony after having been there for all of three weeks.
Wonder how long it took Che to "get" Africa? A couple of afternoons? A fortnight, tops?
And don't even get me started on the "Magic Negro" factor, where encounters with a downtrodden minority happen primarily so that Our Heroes can Learn A Valuable Lesson...
Still, I enjoyed it immensely while I was actually watching it. |
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