Latinbeat, 9/13.

One of the gems of this year's series is also among the last films to be shown: Brazil's Mutum (Friday at 6:15 and again on Sunday at 2 pm; it's also screening in Toronto on Saturday at 4 pm). Directed and co-adapted by Sandra Kogut (with Ana Luiza Martins Costa) from the novel by João Guimarães Rosa, this is the very model of how to make a movie about a poor, rural family - and make it consistently fascinating, real, vital and important.

Kogut's camera goes everywhere the family goes - to work, play, talking, fighting, mourning - observing them tactfully but completely. Identification and acceptance become easy and natural, as we vicariously live their lives - which are circumspect, yes, but also full of drama and meaning. Kogut does not politicize anything, but by the end we have seen the dire effects of poverty and lack of education. We've also experienced real joy and discovery without a trace of condescension. This remote place (the Mutum area of Brazil), with its dust, crops, insects and animals, is so stunningly brought to life that we soon become a part of it. In contrast to the longer yet less engrossing and inclusive Fish Dreams, Mutum, without ever raising its voice, has us hanging on every detail. This is a movie I could easily see again. And again.

The second Argentine film in the Latinbeat series to deal with a missing mother, M - which, might stand for "Montonera" (Argentine guerilla fighter), Madre or maybe Marta, the name of the documentarian's mom - is a big improvement over the earlier-screened Fotografias. It is nonetheless a sometimes difficult slough, due to the enormous amount of written material we see on screen - newspapers, headlines, posters, graffiti, etc - almost none of which is translated, probably due to the copious subtitles of the vast dialog we see and hear. Shown Friday at 8:30 pm and again on Saturday at 5 pm, the film begins by telling us what happened to Marta (she was killed, going to her death with an almost naïve sense of expectancy, it would seem) and then doubles back to track how this happened and, especially, who was responsible. (The subtitles could have received better proof-reading, but you'll be able to figure most of them out.)

Writer/director Nicolas Prividera, who was a young child when his mother went missing, has managed to speak with an inordinate amount of people concerning her disappearance, and he has gotten them to talk perhaps as freely as could possibly be expected, under the circumstances. The interviewees include, it seems, some who may have had much more to do with this and other disappearances than they let on.  But, of course, we will never know. Which is what makes the movie both deeper and more frustrating than we - and poor Nicolas - can very nearly bear. Throughout, ideas flow freely about secrecy, responsibility, justice, family duty, bureaucracy and the "Peronistas" of both the left and the right (the existence of this last duo was news to me but does help explain why I have never quite understood just what Peron stood for).

Two hours and twenty-two minutes is a long time to spend looking for unlikely answers, but overall, the film proves worth our time. Just hearing Argentines talk and argue about what they knew and what they should have known - given the history of their neighbors Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, not to mention Franco's Spain and Peron's history in their own country - is bracing and can easily be applied to what has been going on here in the US over the past six or so years. Fascism in the early stages wears a prettier face than appears once its power has solidified.

Posted by dwhudson at September 13, 2007 3:48 PM