AMAZONS (1986)

Sword and sorcery, a genre distinct from Tolkienesque "high fantasy," had its heyday in the 1980s, heralded by John Milius's Conan the Barbarian. The fad quickly faded in the U.S. but persisted elsewhere, fed by numerous Italian filmmakers and the likes of Roger Corman, who put an Argentinian protege, Alex Sessa, to work on Amazons, a film doomed never to live up to its Boris Vallejo poster. This film has a comparatively authentic pedigree, adapted by fantasy author Charles R. Saunders from one of his own stories, though from what I can tell the African-inspired story has been whitewashed, as they say now, to accommodate a caucasian cast of actors.

What we have here is a good kingdom, defended in part by an army of amazons, under attack by the forces of the evil sorcerer Kalungo (Joseph Whipp). Kalungo's powers are awesome: he can cast lightning from his fingers and bring multiple bolts blasting down on his enemies. In closer quarters, he can pull Jedi-style force tricks, inflicting suffering on his enemies without taxing the special-effects budget. The good wizard on the other side is no match for him, but the problem with evil sorcerers is that they often have unique vulnerabilities. Kalungo, for instance, is susceptible to the Sword of Azundati, the sort of legendary weapon that tends to be found on fantasy worlds. Fortunately for him, at least in the short term, it takes an arduous quest to find the sword.

Doubly fortunate for the evil one, the amazon general who orders the quest (Danitza Kingsley) is his secret ally, spy and lover. She assigns two warriors to the task: her own daughter Tashi (Penelope Reed) and Dyala (Windsor Taylor-Randolph), the daughter of her old dead rival. Tashi's mom killed Dyala's mom some time back, but not before the latter cut one of her hands off. Still carrying a grudge in her artificial hand, the general orders Tashi to kill Dyala once she has the sword. The shared dangers and mutual rescues involved in a quest draw the younger women together, however, and when the supreme moment comes, Tashi can't go through with it. Instead, she sacrifices herself when the were-cat sent by Kalungo to stalk the questers attacks, leaving Dyala to pursue a lone course of vengeance against the sorcerer and the traitorous general.

Amazons is cheap stuff. Whatever Saunders' intentions, the idea on the production side seems to have been to provide a platform for topless shots and a number of clumsily staged fight scenes. No one on screen impresses as a warrior or a performer, but at least Taylor-Randolph (perhaps better known as Mindi Miller) goes enjoyably over the top during Dyala's climactic fight with Kalungo, prefacing the final blow with a mighty "NOW! YOU! DIIIIIEEEE!"  There's clearly some imagination at work here, from the savages who sacrifice a pack of passive priestesses and ride a slave-drawn wagon with additional slaves as human hubcaps to the bizarre idea introduced near the end that Dyala has a spirit tree that can be chopped down to kill her -- except that it ends up falling on the traitor general who'd been chopping it down. But the production tends to homogenize whatever ideas Saunders had to the literal generic level, while the actors do next to nothing to bring those ideas to life.

One thing I did like about the picture was its unromantic treatment of its two heroines. Amazons proves to be a story of female friendship. Neither Dyala nor Tashi has a boyfriend, while the one amazon who consorts with a man is a traitor. In the film's happy ending, the sorceress who was custodian of the Sword of Azundati arranges for the martyred Tashi to return to life. She and Dyala ride off together, in theory to find more adventures. Depending on how you imagine amazons, they can be battle buddies or something more intimate, but that's up to you the viewer -- especially since the characters were never seen again on film.

ESCAPE FROM PATAGONIA (Fuga de la Patagonia, 2016)

Javier Zevallos' screenplay, co-directed with Francisco D'Eufemia, has been described for American audiences as a "gaucho western," but it struck me more as an Argentine variation on The Naked Prey, only with less nakedness. It's based on a real-life exploit of Francisco Moreno, a 19th century explorer of Argentina's Patagonia region. Moreno (Pablo Ragoni, in the left foreground above) was captured by a hostile tribe but escaped just before he was scheduled to be put to death. In the film, as presumably in life, he has two helpers, a white man, and a civilized native, each more worldly than the scholarly Moreno in some respects. It seems for a while as if Zevallos means for these characters to articulate contrasting viewpoints relevant to the story (and to Argentine history) as a whole, but about halfway through the picture Moreno is separated from them when the trio come under fire from some hostile whites. Whether these men are outlaws or merely settlers is left unclear. In any event, Moreno is shot in the shoulder, falls into a river and is carried downstream. Now, concerned lest his wound grow infected under primitive conditions, he has to make his way back to his friends or to the nearest fort, whichever might come first. Starting over, he encounters an army deserter who may or may not have murdered a family of natives. The one constant, of which Moreno is unaware until the end, is a native pursuer, his own godson (Gustavo Rodriguez), who has come (after a history related in flashbacks) to realize that while Moreno himself may be a man of good intentions, his work mapping the region is too useful to the more dangerous whites from Buenos Aires for him to be allowed to continue.

It's really a simple survival story told with admirable brevity, coming in at only 80 minutes. Apart from Ragoni, the real star is the Patgonian landscape, often showcased in a way that reduces Moreno and his various friends and pursuers to tiny figures whose movements remain legible thanks to Lucio Bonelli's cinematography. The number of tracking and following shots suggest that Terrence Malick's The New World was a big influence on the directors, and that strikes me as a good choice of influence. More modest in its ambitions than the American film, Escape From Patagonia is an engaging window into an area of world history still largely unexplored by American moviegoers.

THE INNOCENTS (Los Inocentes, 2015)

Not to be confused with the Hollywood ghost story adapted from Henry James, Mauricio Brunetti's film puts a supernatural spin on the slavesploitation subgenre and is ultimately more effective as a horror film than a slavery expose. Argentina managed to abolish slavery without civil war in the 1850s, but Los Inocentes, like a miniature echo of Lincoln's Second Inaugural, shows a generation paying in blood for the blood drawn by the lash.

The screenplay by Brunetti, Natacha Caravia and Andres Gelos is flashbacky in a manner appropriate for a film haunted by curses. The main story, set in 1871, sees Rodrigo (Ludovico Di Santo) return to his father's plantation with his pregnant bride Bianca. The plantation is pure South American gothic, with Rodrigo's mother Mercedes, after whom the place is named, a madwoman whose moaning is muted only in the Madonna's presence, while the old man (Lito Cruz) is a brutal boor dripping with contempt for his son. Some of the old slaves have stayed on as servants, despite the plantation's horrific history. The flashbacks show how Rodrigo's childhood slave playmate was hanged for daring to play on a swing, and how a slave woman was burned at the stake for the double offense of getting raped by the planter and burying a statue of the Blessed Virgin in a superstitious attempt to end the drought that the planter blames on persistent slave paganism. These dead haunt the present but seem to target Rodrigo and Bianca more than the old man.

Los Inocentes isn't EC Comics-style American horror in which the dead avenge themselves on the truly guilty. It's more effective as a horror movie for having its curse reach out indiscriminately at the plantation family. The suffering of innocents is precisely what should be horrible about a curse, but to the extent that Americans expect the guilty to suffer, or assume that those who suffer are guilty of something -- like all those teenagers Jason Voorhees supposedly punished for premarital sex -- those who watch the Argentine film on Netflix may be taken effectively and shockingly by surprise by the direction it takes toward the end.

The picture benefits from Hugo Colace's moody cinematography and a cast whose costumes and performances fit the period nicely. Lito Cruz's vicious patriarch is especially impressive, a secular horror of privileged vice in his own right. You feel he's done a good job destroying his family before the ghosts even get started, and his lustful attention to Bianca is nearly as scary as whatever the ghosts have in store for her. There's something inscrutably blank about his expression when we last see him, facing the ultimate fulfillment of the curse, that makes you wonder whether he understands what's happened and why. We know and wonder why he, of all people, is left standing, but it should be clear to viewers that he hasn't exactly gone unpunished.

JAUJA (2014)

International man of cinema Viggo Mortensen returns in a role that allows him to try Spanish again, after his mixed reviews for Captain Alatriste, as well as his ancestral Danish. Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso and co-writer Fabian Casas have crafted a tale that resembles The Searchers on the scale and in the tone of Meek's Cutoff, with a folkloric if not fairy-tale quality that should have tipped me off that something more or less than meets the eye was going on. There's a studied primitivism to this period piece; leave out the fine color cinematography of Timo Salminen and it could have been made almost the same way one hundred years ago. Alonso works in long takes, in scenes that aren't built around dialogue, requiring Mortensen in particular to do a lot of non-verbal business to help define his character. The director likes to show characters taking their time coming toward us, then taking their time moving away from us. He emphasizes the spatial relationships between his characters. In an early shot, a soldier is bathing and masturbating in a small natural pool. While he works himself over, a figure appears in the distance from screen right. A cut reveals this newcomer as Mortensen, whom we watch puttering about as the soldier, now in the distance, dries up, dresses, and approaches him. There's something inherently old-fashioned about the pacing that enhances the period feel of the scene. Alonso has an effective style that looks superficially like an absence of style.

 

Mortensen plays Gunnar Dinesen -- is there a homage to Karen "Isak Dinesen" Blixen of Out of Africa fame there? -- an engineer and advisor to the Argentian army, apparently concerned above all with keeping his daughter (Viilbjørk Malling Agger) away from that wanker and other soldiers. His efforts avail him not, as Ingeborg elopes with a younger, better looking soldier. We're in Searchers territory once Dinesen heads out alone in pursuit of the couple, with all three in danger from renegades. Gradually it seems to become a different kind of quest, or else a different kind of story altogether.

 

Alonso's neo-primitivist storytelling leads you to believe that Jauja is some sort of naturalist narrative, but all along there's something almost too quaint about it. It could be the curved corners of the old-timey 1:33 aspect-ratio frame, which made me think of 19th century photographs. Maybe there's something too obviously archetypal about it, apart from the most obvious Searchers references. And maybe a spoiler warning is in order, since at a certain point, when Dinesen encounters an old woman in a cave, Alonso's tale becomes something more like a dream, or a blood memory half-recovered in a dream. The film ends far in time and place from Patagonia, but the message seems to be that dreams, myths or archetypes can transcend distance, or else that the distance between present and past, or history and dream. is even less. You can complain that this takes you right out of the picture, if you wanted to know what happened when Dinesen caught up with his daughter. But maybe a point is being made about your offended sense of linear time when a film finds reason to remind you that it's only a film, and all of it only fiction. You may try to reclaim some sort of linearity by figuring out who the girl in modern dress is, and the director himself leaves clues that point to the relevance of the Dinesen story to the present-day epilogue. But there's no denying that Jauja is the sort of film that will leave people asking "Is that it?" in way that questions whether there was ever an it to it. I suspect that there is an it to it after all, but I'm not sure yet whether there's enough of it to justify the tease that Jauja perpetrates. There's still the beautiful cinematography, the admirably laconic direction, and a fine, fully committed physical performance from co-producer Mortensen, and the twist, if you want to call it that, doesn't take any of that away. Watch the film for those, and judge the rest for yourselves.

On the Big Screen: THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (2009)

The Academy Award for Best Foreign Film has never been a reliable indicator of the actual best film made outside the Anglophone world in a given year. The nomination process, each country choosing one representative film and the Academy nominating five from the whole, inevitably excludes many worthy contenders. Sometimes the award is a consolation prize for a film also nominated for Best Picture (Life is Beautiful, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon). Much of the time having something to do with the Holocaust guarantees a victory. Sometimes the Academy makes an inspired choice. For 2006, for instance, I assumed that Pan's Labyrinth would win easily, and was shocked to see the Oscar go to The Lives of Others. Once I finally saw the latter film, however, I conceded that the better film, by a small margin, had won.

I didn't see any of the 2009 foreign film nominees until the weekend before the Oscar telecast. The night before, I saw Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon and acquired a rooting interest in it. A few weeks later the French nominee, Un Prophete, came to town and impressed me nearly as much. By then, of course, I knew that both formidable films had been outvoted by an Argentine mystery directed by a veteran of American TV dramas. From the description, El Secreto de sus Ojos didn't seem in the same league as the other two movies. But remembering my experience with Lives of Others, I resolved to see it when it finally reached Albany.

The film is set in 1999, 25 years after the brutal rape and murder of a young woman. A retired detective, Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin), is struggling to write a novel based on the case and the loose ends lingering after a quarter-century. One of those is his relationship with his superior, Irene Hastings (Soledad Villamil), now the district attorney. Another is the fact that the murderer was caught, had confessed, but was set free by a shady government which had black ops work for him. His whereabouts remain unknown as Esposito writes. He has a personal stake in the story because either the killer or his black-ops cronies murdered Esposito's partner, the lovable alcoholic Sandoval (Guillermo Francella).

Until the halfway point, there was little about El Secreto to distinguish it from the sort of TV fare director Juan Jose Campanella specializes in. There was some stylization at the start as we see scenes from Esposito's novel drafts, which we'll later see as scenes from his life, as if through filters, murkily. There's also some now-conventional non-linearity as the film switches back and forth from present to past and/or novel. But the story itself seemed like the stuff of television until it opened up in dramatic fashion. Sandoval has an insight on the murder suspect based on references in his letters: the man's a fan of a particular futbol team. This sets up an awesomely scaled CGI-assisted tracking shot that starts high above the city and descends into the bowl of the futbol stadium, swooping into the stands to identify Esposito and Sandoval in the middle of a massive crowd, searching for their suspect. Against all odds, they find him, setting off a spectacular foot chase, filmed mostly with hand-held cameras in long takes, with a semicomic detour into a men's room and a climax that takes the action onto the pitch in the middle of the game. It's at least the best cinematic use of a soccer stadium since Jafar Panahi's Offside and it brought the Argentine film to life for me.

Campanella follows up with a sequence that takes him back into TV territory, as Esposito and Hastings try to psyche the suspect into confessing. The opportunity here is to take the action to a level TV doesn't allow. Hastings plays the "bad cop" with reverse psychology, questioning his guilt by belittling his manhood, taunting him as a "pygmy" endowed with no more than a "peanut." You know you're not on TV anymore when the enraged suspect jumps up, unzips, and displays the total package to refute the prosecutor's claims before admitting his crime and punching her in the face. Javier Godino as the murderer nearly steals the movie in this single scene as he progresses from plausible protests of innocence to viciously defensive machismo under constant prodding.

For me, these scenes were the peak of the film. They seemed to point toward more sinister developments once the government springs Godino, but a scene in which he makes an intimidating display of a gun while sharing an elevator with our hero and heroine is practically his last appearance in the movie. He remains an implicit menace almost until the end, but his story resolves itself in a manner almost too Gothic to take seriously. But solving the mystery of what happened to the man gives Esposito a fresh chance to take the chance he couldn't bring himself to take back in the Seventies with Irene Hastings, who fortunately seems still willing after all those years.

This time around the Academy showed no special insight. El Secreto is not in the same league as White Ribbon or Un Prophete. It wasn't a bad film at all, but I ought to be able to say something better about a film now deemed the Best in its class. If you watch it you will most likely be entertained, but beyond that I can't make any claims for its greatness.

PIZZA, BEER AND SMOKES (Pizza, Birra, Faso, 1998)

That's what a life of crime would get you, at least if you were a young punk at the bottom of the pecking order in 1990s Buenos Aires, the milieu portrayed in this low-budget collaboration between Israel Adrian Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro. It's reported to have been a very popular and profitable film on its home ground, but it never had a theatrical release in the U.S. That's odd considering how films like Amores Perros and City of God went over with the art-house crowd hereabouts, but perhaps this effort wasn't violent enough or narratively creative enough to compare with those influential films -- or maybe it simply came out too soon. Nevertheless, my mandate to explore as wide a wild world of cinema as possible made this a necessary stop when I saw the title at the Albany Public Library.

We start right in with a carjacking as two kids force a taxicab passenger to pull his pants down so they can rifle his pockets while the cabbie drives helplessly. The action is interrupted by a traffic jam. One of our carjackers comes down with a bit of road rage when another cabbie starts yelling in his direction, so he steps out of the commandeered vehicle and shoots out one of the offending cab's tires. Back in motion, they dump the passenger out at an on-ramp, his pants still down. The cab continues to an isolated location, then stops. The kids and the cabbie get out, and the cabbie starts kicking the hot-tempered one in the butt. He's their boss, you see; he sets up passengers for them to rob and takes the lion's share of the loot. But the kids are tired of the arrangement. They don't make enough money, and one of the gang, Cordobes, has a pregnant girlfriend.

It soon becomes a very familiar story. The kids --Metabom, Frula and asthmatic Pablo -- dream of the big score that will move them up in the world, with Cordobes particularly looking to give his baby something to start with in life. On their own they do petty crimes: robbing a legless guitarist of his busking revenue or starting fights in an employment line so they can pick pockets. But they need someone to set up a big score for them.

They think they have their man in Ruben, who hooks them up with guns ("One of these rods doesn't work, I don't know which") and a '71 Ford Fairlane to knock over an allegedly trendy restaurant. But the restaurant is overrated and the getaway car breaks down. Fortunately, a cop who happens on the scene is happy to take a bribe and ignore events. But Ruben rips them off worse than their old boss. Their last chance, it seems, is to hit a dance club. From there Cordobes hopes to elope with Sandra and start a new life. Will he make it? Yes and no....

Pizza, Beer and Smokes is the sort of film we've seen all over the world, and isn't a particularly distinctive example of the genre. After seeing it, I can see why it might not have seemed exportable. It is less a self-conscious portrait of crime and poverty in Buenos Aires or the sort of film that an American audience might consider enlightening than a straightforward reenactment of the youth-crime genre in an Argentine setting. Inevitably it would mean more to an Argentine audience than for foreigners, who might be frustrated by the fact that it isn't really "about" Argentina. That doesn't mean it lacks local color. One of the most entertaining bits is the kids' discussion of an obelisk that dominates their part of town.

It is The Obelisk of Buenos Aires, erected in 1936 to mark the city's 400th anniversary. It had seen better times by 1998, and has seen better since. At one point the kids break into it and climb to the top. Earlier, they discuss its sexual symbolism. Unfortunately, I don't remember which characters were talking.

A. I once knew a chick who got horny with the obelisk.
B. What do you mean, horny?
A. I don't know. She said it was like a huge penis which captured all the dick waves in the city.
B. That friend of yours was a bit of a whore.
A. Whore? I dated her two years.
B. Like I said.

That might not be an accurate translation, since misspellings and other slips abound in the English subtitles. But somehow that didn't seem inappropriate for this sketch of gutter life. If you've liked this sort of thing from other countries, you'll probably like it from Argentina as long as you appreciate the modesty of the project. For my part, I'll be looking for more Argentine films that might give me a better sense of the nation's cinematic culture.

Here's an untranslated trailer that gives some of the flavor of Pizza, Beer and Smokes.