Reviews

Films

El Violin

Directed by Francisco Vargas, starring Angel Tavira, Gerardo Taracena, Dagoberto Gama

From Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot to Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi, the juxtaposition of weapon and musical instrument, the gun in the music case, has been potent. The musical instrument is the polar opposite of the weapon - a force for good, surely? - and yet also more dangerous, more destructive: the means of subversion, of mobilizing rebellion.

First-time feature director Francisco Vargas produces a variant on this traditional theme in his bleak drama, shot in a soupy monochrome and set among the guerrilla revolts in Mexico in the 1970s. Although the film takes its time coming to the dramatic point, it exerts a powerful grip, and this is largely due to the remarkable performance of its 83-year-old star, Don Angel Tavira, a non-professional actor and musician with natural charisma and presence. Vargas first filmed Tavira while making his 2004 documentary Tierra Caliente ... Se Mueren los Que la Mueven (Tierra Caliente: The Best Are Dying Off), about Tavira's own efforts to preserve the traditional music of his forefathers. He brings him back here in fictionalized form in this feature-length expansion of an original short.

Tavira plays Plutarco, an ageing patriarch of natural self-possession and dignity, who farms a tiny plot of land and earns a few coins as a street musician with his violin, despite the fact that he has no right hand, and must laboriously tie the bow to his wrist- stump. His son, a guitarist, is an activist in the peasant guerrilla uprising.

The film begins with a scene of pure horror: thuggish soldiers have ransacked their village, torturing its suspected guerrillas and raping its women.

Some villagers have managed to flee, including Plutarco, his son Genaro (Gerardo Taracena) and grandson Lucio (Mario Garibaldi); they arrive at a rebels' redoubt in the mountains. But all their ammunition has been left behind in the village, buried under Tavira's crop, and there seems to be no way of recovering it.

With the courage of someone facing death anyway, Plutarco arrives at the army checkpoint, humbly asking to be allowed to reap what remains of his harvest. The brutish Captain (Dagoberto Gama) demands that Plutarco play the violin that he carries around with him. He even wants to learn the violin himself. So, just as Plutarco hatches his plan to smuggle the ammo out in his violin case, he realizes that he will need the instrument to placate the capricious captain, and even finds himself establishing an unlikely and unwanted bond with him.

It is a very good story, and it grows on you. There are moments of high drama and tension. Another sort of movie would find a feelgood way of resolving the story; Vargas' vision is more grim and more realistic, but it is persuasively real, and in Tavira the director has found a natural star of the screen.

Princesses

Directed by Fernando Leon de Aranoa, starring Candela Pena, Micaela Nevarez, Mariana Cordero

The eponymous Princesses of Fernando Leon de Aranoa's film are a pair of whores in Spain, and there is little irony in the title. Caye is lower-middle-class and Spanish, and her family thinks she has an office job. Zulema is an illegal immigrant with a child back home in the Dominican Republic and pretends she works in a cafe. Most local prostitutes resent Zulema and her kind for their exotic allure and lower rates, but she and Caye become close, supportive friends. Both are attractive, have 24-carat hearts and while they're not exactly happy hookers, they belong to a sentimental movie tradition that enjoyed a particular vogue in the 1950s and 1960s in such whores' operas as Le Notti di Cabiria, Never on Sunday and Irma La Douce. The Guardian

(China Daily 01/09/2008 page20)