curandero 1944. Somewhere far away, as if in another, parallel and alien world, the Second World War rumbles with cannonades and volleys, taking with it into the bloody whirlwind of the men of a tiny village located at the junction of the borders of the United States and Mexico. Seven-year-old Antonio begins to gradually learn the world around him and the people in it, to learn the true essence of people, and the main companion of Antonio in this difficult business becomes for him came to the village as if from nowhere curandero Ultima.
Having passed numerous independent film festivals in the United States, that outside of it and having received only a limited release, the film “Bless Me, Ultima” in 2013 became probably the best and most interesting feature-length film work of the famous American director, actor, scnarist and producer Carl Franklin, in a very long career of which there was a place as very good, but clearly not outstanding thrillers, such as “Special Crimes” and “Out of Time”, or sentimental tearful melodramas, as “True values”.
The film “Bless Me, Ultima” in contrast to the previous directorial creations of Carl Franklin, which in fact belongs to the category of fruitful Hollywood prospectors and nothing more, is an example of restrained, integral and balanced both in terms of style and the main plot content of cinematic creation, because Karl Franklin as a director and screenwriter managed to brilliantly transfer the famous novel of the same name by the writer Rudolfo Anaya to the cinema language, creating at the output a tape that can be successfully attributed to the category of poetic realism.
“Bless Me, Ultima” is a film that is essentially not tied to any of the genres, because it is both a western, although devoid of any classicism, and a universal drama about the maturation and formation of a person in the microcosm of a single Mexican village, in which various superstitions and mystical manifestations live and live, in the grand reality of whose existence there is hardly any doubt. But at the same time, the film of Carl Franklin combines features and based on ancient Mexican views mystical narrative, in which tokmo for the sake of audience attraction there are elements of horror and fantasy. However, these fascinating elements remain as bait, because for Franklin mysticism as such is secondary, and he is interested in the drama of a small person, because all the events taking place in the film - cruel, lyrical, terrible - the viewer sees through the eyes of the seven-year-old hero Antonio, convincingly executed by the young talent of Luke Ganalon. And the war in the film is nothing more than a distant background, a kind of background, a completely otherworldly reality, while the real reality for Antonio becomes the world of witchcraft. Paradoxically, the real world, with all its problems, sorrows and a heap of misunderstandings, gives way to the world of mysterious rituals and superstitions, which appear in the tape as a flair of poeticization.
However, Carl Franklin does not forget about psychology, saturating his work with accurate and capacious characteristics of the main characters, dissecting and allowing them to be in development, changing in the face of new times. But the film does not manage to descend to the low everyday or naturalistic black, all the cruelty of the world around Antonio is successfully hidden and presented to the audience very subtly and intricately, turning at the output of “Bless Me, Ultima” into a primordial, imbued with authenticity and self-sufficiency parable, almost a fairy tale about a boy, the will of fate and a kind white witch Ultima, who has been nicknamed La Granda, who has hitherto intangible, invisible, demonic, a real novel about the most terrible poetic life in his childhood. Not all of them are magicians, not all of them are magicians. Although the shadow of Ultima will always be akin to a guardian angel for baby Antonio, who fully entered the bustling world of adults with the onset of the eighth moon and the eighth sun.