Latin lessons

Movies from the other America

by Peter Keough

THE NEW ENGLAND LATIN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL, At the Museum of Fine Arts, April 9 through 18.

To judge from the films screened in this year's Latin American Film Festival at the Museum of Fine Arts, the inspirations of Gabriel García Márquez and Magical Realism, not to mention Luis Buñuel and Surrealism, still possess the creative spirits of our neighbors to the south. That and an ambitious radical politics, especially among the younger directors.

For better and worse. Certainly José Araújo succumbed to a bad case of high seriousness in his first feature, Landscapes of Memory (1996; screens April 11 at 12:15 p.m.). Set in Araújo's eminently photogenic home region of the Sertão, a stark, impoverished desert terrain in northeastern Brazil, it relates the heavyhanded political-Biblical parable of Maria, an old woman who, believing she's an incarnation of the Blessed Virgin, gathers up a posse of female apostles in a messianic quest to redeem her land from the drought-inducing "Dragon," a creaky metaphor for patriarchal capitalism.

The cinematography is ravishing. Araújo, despite his penchant for cameo visits by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and earnest peasants singing politically edged folksongs, has the makings of a poet of landscape. But the scenario suggests what Buñuel might have done had he combined Las Hurdes with The Milky Way and completely lost his sense of humor.

More conventional and successful is Argentine director Marcelo Piñeyro's Wild Horses (1995; screens April 9 at 7:30 p.m.). A male-bonding, anti-corporate variation on Thelma & Louise, it involves an old man's revolt against the system and a young yuppie who is drawn into abetting him. Septuagenarian José holds up a bank to recoup the $15,000 it defrauded him of. He gets more than he bargained for: half a million in laundered funds and Pedro, a ponytailed executive who insists on being his hostage. Their flight to the south, though heavy with Borgesian resonance, is a bracing romp that draws the media, sympathetic citizens, and sinister hitmen in its wake. Until the title horses make their operatic appearance, the film sizzles with its humanity, humor, and insight.

That other films in the festival fail to take Horses' hint to lighten up is evident from their unwieldy titles. Venezuelan director Ramon Chalbaud's exuberant, overwrought Pandemonium: The Capital of Hell (1996, screens April 10 at 5:45 p.m.) evokes the grotesque, nightmarish sensibility of Mexican cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo but boasts little of that movie's disturbing substance. It's the tale of dadaist DJ Adonai, a troglodyte who has no feet but whose other appendages are overactive. He broadcasts from a dilapidated Caracas slum occupied by his John Waters-like extended family. Although the film is visually intriguing, Pandomonium's efforts to be sexy and anarchic are mostly adolescent.

More ethereal is Puerto Rican director Alfredo E. Rivas's first feature, The Nightingale and the Rose (1997; screens April 11 at 2:15 p.m.). A talkier, more metaphysically pretentious version of Ghost with an aside to Wings of Desire, it's the tale of Maurice, a 150-year-old ghost with a crush on the mortal Dafne. He solicits the afterlife "Committee" to allow him a last fling on earth, with the expected ironic consequences. As terminally romantic as its title suggests, the film could have used a dose of Beetlejuice.

Not all the awkwardly titled movies here are awkward in execution, especially two that deal with those old cinematic verities memory and desire. Although Venezuelan Alberto Arvelo's One Life and Two Trails (1997; screens April 11 at 4:15 p.m.) courts sentimentality with its opening image of a barefoot boy running through the rain, the film does a masterful job of intermingling past and present as it relates the memories of a country schoolteacher on his 50th birthday. This Everyman's unpretentious story -- he was torn from his mountaintop home and loving mother as a child and placed in a seminary school -- touches limpidly on universal themes of loss, love, and persistence; a shot as simple as a toy village washed away in the rain achieves unexpected power.

Walter Lima Jr.'s The Oyster and the Wind (1996; screens April 18 at 3 p.m.) also explores the flux and ecstasy of the adolescent heart, in this case from the female point of view. Marcela is the only child of a dour, embittered lighthouse keeper on a desolate island. Except for visits from the occasional grizzled sailor, she's cut off from the world, so she conjures up Saulo, an erotic, vaguely sinister wind spirit. Eventually the sailors find the lighthouse abandoned, whereupon they piece together through diaries, artifacts, and other clues a tale that is part The Tempest, part Picnic at Hanging Rock. Like the best films in this festival, The Oyster proves that magic and realism work best when the artist is true to both.