Review by Beatrice On 23-Jun-2023
The Wayuu are an ethnic group in Colombia and Venezuela, speak the language of the same name, live in the Guajira Peninsula, and number about 300,000 people. A community with nomadic origins built by various families who self-regulate with their own laws governed by strict mutual respect and inescapable canons of honor.
It is the 1960s, and while Rapayet, amid rituals, traditions, superstitions and dances of defiance decides on his future wife, a local young man introduces him to Americans, looking like flower children but with anti-communist slogans, who have come to buy marijuana. She introduces him to the burgeoning new drug market.
Five acts punctuate the apocalyptic narrative of the capitalist rise of a community where some families get disproportionately rich and others remain on the margins.
The new laws of money do not stop defending the traditions that remain the progressively torn fabric of a civilization that is consuming its own memory.
And here is the rivalry between two of the most powerful families in the traffic that becomes fratricidal warfare, where respect and honor see the reflection of a specular reversal.
An adaptation to the opulence of the matriarch Ursula highlights the mechanism of the atavistic self-destructive defense of her own son, a native of the capitalist market and for this reason, contrary to any respect for tradition, willing to humiliate with bags of money anyone who does not bow to her consumerist enjoyments without respect for any law.
A true story, which in addition to anthropological changes, becomes a narrative of the attitudes of human nature.
Opulence brought by money introduces comforts that have become cathedrals in the desert because nature, all around, disappears.
And with it is introduced the naturalness of the inevitability of the event that jeopardizes the existence and culture of an entire people, unable to manage an impossible encounter between the ballad of tradition and the techno of consumption.
A clan struggle in a tribal culture accompanies magical thinking to the apocalypse of market laws.
Presented at the opening of the Cannes Fortnight, this Colombian film, shocks and surprises, although Ciro Guerra, three years earlier had already presented the wonderful El abrazo de la serpiente.
A narrative that of Guerra and Cristina Gallego upsets the canons of television formats on drug trafficking: the initial dance of seduction, continues to parallel the plot of tradition with the surgical amputation of its canons and rules.
The mystery of a culture cleverly constructed precisely because it is woven with superstitions, references, laws beyond any pseudo-enlightened comprehensibility that claims to order with the laws of reason something inviolable in turn violated by something inevitably more destructive than any logic of reason: money.
The abandonment of mystery, symbol, sacred, enigma, and madness brings in a different order within the established order, and the narrative converges on this very theme: cutting through the concluded horizon to suddenly find oneself in a void of habitual content.
The night to which I entrusted myself with open eyes is not nothingness, not pure and simple evil. Beyond good and evil, which have value as long as there is a choice to be made, night is evil only for the day, which, however, senses that it is not the whole. When I, relying on the day, shirk the night, I do not have the absolute awareness of a blameless truth, but I know that I have shirked a need that made appeals; no transcendence was heeded when the day and the day's fidelity were felt
23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice