Symphony of struggle The film-in-the-film design gives any film some extra sound. It is as if you came to a concert and in between musical numbers you can clearly hear the melody coming from the next hall. The script, prepared for 8 years by Paul Laverty, is unique. While watching, you seem to be transferred from a new hall with a modern system of acoustics and lighting, to a classic dome hall with floor lamps in the Baroque style, but continue to listen to the same concert.
The film crew, working on a historical film about the Spanish colonization of South America during Columbus, faces the neo-colonization of the descendants of the Quechua Indians by the government and multinational corporations. In the changed scenery, the place of gold is taken by ordinary water (even harvested rain), which is subject to urgent privatization for a loan from the World Bank. Violent popular protests in Bolivia’s Cochabamba, symbolically coinciding with the Millennium, are replaced by filming with no less vivid scenes of the exploitation of Indians.
Many heroes appear before the viewer in two incarnations. One of the first fighters for Indian rights Bartolome de las Casas five minutes later suddenly becomes a frightened actor, anxiously looking at the street clashes. And the local resident Daniel with equal desperation confronts both corrupt power and greedy conquistadors. The role of Daniel went not even to a professional actor, but to a very colorful Bolivian carpenter Juan Carlos Aduviri, who passed the casting and became for the viewer an embodied symbol of the unbroken national power of hundreds of generations.
Perhaps it is this power that turns petty producer Costa, who pays Daniel $2 an hour, into a man ready to save someone else’s life.
Laverty’s talent unites two historical layers in a tense symphony of the eternal struggle for justice. The bright socio-political content of which is noticeable in all his scripts written for the films of Ken Loach. Who knows how much more poetry and meanings would have been revealed in this story if Alejandro González Iñárritu, who worked with Paul for three years, had taken up directing.
9 out of 10
Original