There’s something fascinating about indigenous Peruvian
actress Magaly Solier. She has this vacant look, yet if we look closer
her character’s inner pain gradually escape through the forced passivity. She
made her feature-film debut Claudia Llosa’s “Madeinusa” and received
international acclaim for playing the young woman, burdened with a tragic past,
in Llosa’s “The Milk of Sorrow”. In the neo-noir/thriller Magallanes (2015),
she is once again given the role of a victimized woman. But, Solier conveys
this set of profound emotions through her eyes and through little fleeting movements, which
makes us to totally invest our emotions. Even when the narrative in Magallanes threatens to lose its complexity, the performances keeps us hooked
on.
Peruvian actor Salvador del Solar has made his directorial
debut with Magallanes. It is based on 2006 novel by Alonso Cueto (titled
‘Black Butterfly’). The central theme of the story is sins of the father or sins
of the past. In the nation’s prolonged period of internal conflict, from the early 1980s
to late 1990s (the conflicts didn’t fully recede till date), it is estimated
that at least 70,000 people were killed. The armed forces (trained specially by
US ‘counter-terrorist’ operations) created many emergency zones in its fight
with te guerilla forces, raiding villages of indigenous peasants and killing scores
of them. The place named ‘Ayacucho’ plays a vital role in the film. The gruesome events
once happened in this place occupy the center of protagonist’s moral crisis. The
Peruvian military committed many atrocities and human rights violations in
& around Ayacucho. Magallanes (Damian Alcazar) is part of the regiment
which participated in such barbarous acts. He now works as a taxi-cab driver and
as a care-taker for his once-powerful colonel (Frederico Lupi), who is afflicted with Alzheimer. Magallanes and his former colonel now live in the capital
city Lima. One afternoon, a woman named Celina (Magaly Solier) gets into
Magallanes’ taxi and after looking at her in the rear-view mirror, he is visibly
tense. She isn’t looking at him, but it is clear that the face he saw in the
mirror haunts his conscience. He averts his eyes when the woman gets off at her
destination.
Celina is being scammed by one of those vicious companies
that gives false hope to people to make them sell useless anti-aging, beauty products. She runs a salon business
and it is clear that she has lost hope in everything. Moreover,
Celina is burdened with a large sum of debt. In his den, Magallenes scatters
around the old photographs and documents, he had gathered in those days when he was part of
colonel's regime . In Ayacucho, when Celina was around 14 years of age, she was kidnapped
and kept as a sex slave at the colonel’s barracks for nearly a year. One
photograph shows her sadly sitting on the lap of colonel. Magallanes decides to use this incriminating
picture to extract some money from the colonel’s rich lawyer son (Christian
Meier). He enlists his sister to blackmail the lawyer on phone. The place for
receiving the money is all set. But his simple scheme to get the money brings
chaos. Amidst the chaos, the old feelings of guilt takes him to the doorstep of
Celina. Magallanes' quest to right the past injustice gets him and her mired in complexities.
The movie works well as a thriller about an amateur
blackmailer, trying to get back at the victimizing class. But, director
Salvador del Solar merely uses this genre framework to bring us closer to his
central intention: to indict the worst treatment unleashed on indigenous people
in the past. He uses the personal story of Celina to explore the country’s past
and the way subsequent generations’ have failed to come to terms with their patriarchs’
despicable activities. Although Magallanes’ reason for blackmailing seems so
simple, Solar turns his motivations ambiguous as the narrative progresses. When
his sister asks, “Why this idea now?”, Magallanes replies, “I’m tired of being
penniless”. In the later half, this simple desire to attain money is transformed and
he looks forward to right a wrong. We would expect the two individuals who were
wronged by the colonel to join together in a moral crusade. However, the darkness of
the past events is more complex than viewers could expect. Magallanes tells he
just followed orders. We could assume the horrors he must have witnessed (or
even committed) when he was with the colonel. And, as the man’s eyes expresses
a kind of unrequited love for Celina, the abyss of the past deepens.
Magallanes’ journey to redemption becomes more complex and it exhibits how much
his soul is fractured by the savagery of the past.
Del Solar’s frames keep a sense of unease (DoP Diego
Jimenez) as if the brutality of the past will jump out from every street
corner. The visuals could have used more subtlety, but the imagery never gets
fussy too. The performances are the soul of the narrative. Damian Alcazar
brilliantly portrays a character whom we can’t single-mindedly hate or just
forgive. He impressively wears an indelible expression of regret. Margary
Solier, as I mentioned earlier, is the primary reason to watch this film. At
times, Solier’s Celina seems to be catatonic, her expression remaining very
hard. It could even be ripped apart as bad acting. But, in a couple of dramatic
situation, the way she brings out Celina’s anger and sadness suggests us that
the earlier rigid expressions were the result of her, suppressing all those
damaging emotions. The greatness of her acting culminates in the film’s most
affecting scene, when Celina talks about her anguish in the native Quechua
language. Director Del Solar cleverly decides to not insert the subtitles. We
don’t know what she says, whilst we can understand what she may have said. The
ugly side of history may be kept in the darkness, but the indecipherable words
and perceivable emotions will haunt the nation’s conscience forever.
Trailer
Magallanes (110 minutes) is a gripping study of a man and
his country’s moral crisis which is elegantly presented within a thriller
framework.
★★★★
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