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Indies & Imports
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The Latin Chronicles
Columnist Pam Grady examines the recent renaissance of Latin American cinema, with help from Crónicas principals John Leguizamo and Sebastián Cordero.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
By Pam Grady
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Miramax Films
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Miramax's Secuestro Express
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In Sebastián Cordero's Crónicas , John Leguizamo plays a Miami-based tabloid TV show reporter who becomes part of the story he is covering when he trades favors with a prisoner languishing in a Ecuadorian jail in order get the inside scoop on a series of child murders. The crimes in Caracas-born Jonathan Jakubowicz's Secuestro Express are nearly as horrific as the first-time feature director paints a lurid picture of his hometown.
What begins as a kidnapping of a wealthy young couple soon spirals into a portrait of a community where virtually no one is innocent, the police are corrupt, and criminals have to worry about being preyed on by other crooks. In other words, this is not a movie the Venezuelan tourism board wants you to see.
The two films have taken different routes into American theaters. Crónicas premiered at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, and spent the next year on the festival circuit, including stops in Toronto and Sundance before Palm Pictures released it into art houses this summer. In contrast, Miramax picked up Secuestro Express, which Robert Rodriguez's wife and producing partner Elizabeth Avellan executive produced. It recently opened in five cities – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Miami - with more to follow, with screenings evenly split between the multiplex and the art house.
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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An underrated actor
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Stylistically, the films couldn't be more dissimilar. Cordero is more concerned with character and our seemingly unquenchable thirst for the latest media sensation than action. He gets inside the heads of his reporter and the reporter's prey, and holds his camera steady on the impoverished neighborhoods of Babahoyo that make up the bulk of Crónicas’ locations. In contrast, Secuestro Express is a visceral, deeply color-saturated, gritty DV thrill ride, full of quick cuts and a constantly roving camera that captures the deepening sense of dislocation and frenzied panic that grips kidnap victims Carla (Alias' Mia Maestro) and Martin (Jean Paul Leroux) as their ordeal wears on.
As distinct from one another as both films are, they have one thing very much in common. They are the latest entries into the U.S. market of what has in recent years become a vibrant Latin American cinema. Walter Salles' Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, Alfonso Cuaron's Y Tu Mama Tambien, Fernando Mereilles and Katia Lund's City of God, Fabian Belinsky's Nine Queens, and Carlos Carrera's The Crime of Father Amaro are just a handful of the acclaimed titles to emerge from the region.
Leguizamo bluntly assesses the difference he perceives between the Latin American films and their American counterparts. "[The Latin American films] are just smarter," he says. "Like when you talk about someone like Sebastian, it's a much more intellectual package than you're going to get in the United States. There's a huge body of super intellectuals in Latin America and they are the ones driving the cinema, so you're going to get smarter stories, you're going to get stuff that's much more attacking, much more satirical."
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Cronicas writer-director Cordero
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Cordero is more modest in his assessment, but is equally passionate about what the films in the region have to offer. "I think what's great about Latin American cinema right now is that there's a mixture of entertainment value – the new films are gripping, they do grab the spectator – but they're not compromising in terms of content,” he observes. “They really do have a lot of socio-political elements to them."
That element in much of the films is, perhaps, a natural when so many countries in Latin America have lived with unstable governments, sometimes-violent resistance movements, and an almost unbridgeable gap between the rich and the poor. In Secuestro Express, the kidnapping – a popular form of crime in the region with Mexico recently given the dubious distinction as the world's capital in reported kidnappings, according to the Citizen Council for Public Safety – has political dimensions, as the kidnappers berate Carla both for her posh lifestyle and for flaunting her status by driving her SUV in the midst of extreme poverty.
In Crónicas, the political content is not so overt, but insists Leguizamo, "It's there. Sebastian's shooting in the poorest neighborhood in Ecuador. People barely have water and he's throwing in all these Latin people that have money, that are outside of that thing."
"There's always something political in Latin films, because they have to be,” he continues. “That's the conditions people are living in. Ten percent are rich and the rest are all struggling."
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Salles at the Golden Globes
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According to Cordero, Crónicas' political content is not just limited to displays of poverty. It is also there in constant references to Colombia as Leguizamo's reporter plays hooky from covering a hostage situation in that country in order to follow the serial killer in Ecuador. That is partially, because the killer's character was inspired by “the Monster of the Andes,” a Colombian who moved to Ecuador to commit his crimes, in no small part because he believed he could get away with more in his homeland's less troubled neighbor.
Not only that, explains Cordero, "There's been a lot of Colombian migration to Ecuador because of all the problems [there]. Everything there has forced a lot of people [to move], either people who are fleeing the problems in their country or the violence or people who are fleeing the law."
In terms of world cinema, Latin America is increasingly important, not just for the films that are produced there but also for the directing talent that the international community increasingly taps to make movies far afield of the region. Mereilles followed up City of God with the engrossing new thriller The Constant Gardener, an African-set, UK-USA co-production based on a John Le Carré novel; Salles works all over the world, mostly recently in the U.S. for Dark Water, and France for a segment of the upcoming anthology Paris, je t'aime; and Francis Ford Coppola just announced it will be Salles and his Motorcycle Diaries screenwriter Jose Rivera who will bring Jack Kerouac's classic Beat generation novel On the Road to the screen.
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Palm Pictures
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Palm's Crónicas
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Cuaron, who served as one of Crónicas' producers, also contributed a segment to Paris, je t'aime and proved himself adept at tent pole movies with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. And after working in his native country on Secuestro Express, Jakubowicz next travels to England to make Paranoia, a thriller inspired by the French film With a Friend like Harry.
Cordero's situation is more complicated. Raised in Ecuador and France (where he first fell in love with the movies), he studied film and screenwriting at USC. He briefly considered staying in the United States, but when a project he'd written with a school friend fell through, he decided to return to Ecuador, a nation where filmmaking is practically a myth. The IMDB lists only 36 movies for that country and of those, one is Crónicas and the other is Cordero's first feature, 1999's Ratas, Ratones, Rateros.
Crónicas is an Ecuador-Mexico co-production, and according to Cordero, partnering with another country was the only way to get his film made. "Financing a film in Ecuador is almost impossible, particularly a film like this, which is over $2 million in budget, which in Ecuador would just be unthinkable," he explains.
The Quito native says that he is not adverse to following in Cuaron's or another Crónicas producer, Guillermo del Toro's footsteps and making films outside of Ecuador, but he's also mindful of why he decided to make a stand in a country with a moribund film industry in the first place. "I became very conscious that the stories that attracted me the most and the stories I felt more strongly about were the ones set in Ecuador," he reflects. "I think it was very good for me to be able to make films which were closer to me and to the world I know in Ecuador. I think it would have been just as difficult to start a career somewhere else and there wasn't anything that I felt so strongly about."
Secuestro Express and Crónicas have one more thing in common and it is an odd coincidence. When it came to ensuring verisimilitude, Jakubowicz and Cordero both had uncommon experts on their sets. Jakubowicz, in fact, could rely on his own memories, since he was once carjacked in Caracas and held briefly in order to drain his bank account. In addition, the three actors who play the kidnappers had their own specialized knowledge: Pedro Perez and Carlos Madera grew up in Venezuela's harsh Cotiza ghetto, while Carlos J. Molina was a kidnap victim himself a few years ago in Mexico City.
In Crónicas, the scenes that take place in the town jail are among the strongest. Cordero was able to shoot in an actual disused jail in Guayaquil, the scene of a devastating prison riot some 35 years ago in which nearly 200 prisoners were killed. But the authenticity of those scenes, he credits to one of his assistant directors.
| "He was in jail for a year and he took it as a personal crusade to make sure the jail was as realistic as possible," he explains, adding, " He was in a subversive movement in the '80s. It was a Robin Hood-type of group. He got arrested for stealing a truck full of chickens and distributing them in a poor neighborhood."
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That Latin American film continues to flower with Secuestro Express and Crónicas being but the latest wave is no mystery to Cordero. "For the first time, the boundaries are being blurred between the different countries and it's great. We have a common language, a common market, a common interest for making films, and that's also transcending into the United States where there's suddenly all this huge interest in the Latin American movement."
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