El Violin
plays a song that hurts to hear.
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The Screener has recently returned from a monthlong trip to Mexico, where he went to Monte Alb�n, a series of pre-Colombian, Zapotec temples perched on a leveled mountaintop that soars up from the Valley of Oaxaca. It was here that he witnessed an old, indigenous man who cast his hand over the valley and spoke.
�The Spaniards have all the water and all the good land,� he said.
As the man demonstrated, it is impossible to escape history in Mexico. It is a land of memory bound by a language complexly structured to speak about the past.
It is, therefore, unsurprising how seamlessly writer/director Francisco Vargas� filmic language in
El Violin
melds a 1970s tale of peasant rebellion with intimations toward the country�s entire history of oppression, struggle and survival.
El Violin
�s opening scenes are very violent: a savage rape, torture and murder. Those who cannot handle watching such things should not attend. But, by ***image1***the film�s end, the brutality is left like a scar on the audience�s conscious�and its dull pain pales against the heartbreak of history, which seems, in Vargas� unsparing view, to be a repository for suffering. Moreover, Vargas� parable of past and present requires such a beginning; this is a country born of a rape.
The rest of
El Violin
, which is without further violence, centers on Don Plutarco (�ngel Tavira), an aged peasant farmer and a violinist. Plutarco aides the guerilla rebels who populate the hills where he lives and, as the film progresses, he comes upon a scheme to transport ammunition under the hostile gaze of a military occupation. The apprehension of betrayal or discovery hangs over
El Violin
like a guillotine blade.
Vargas makes use of subtle, widely significant symbolism caught on high-contrast black-and-white film, which is sensitive to texture. In one remarkable scene Plutarco, seated by a meager campfire, explains to his grandson, through a myth it seems he might be extemporaneously composing, how the ancient gods set the world up as a confrontation between the ambitions people and the good people. As the guttural, rasping music of his words float up along the fire�s smoke, the camera moves slowly from the pair�s feet, across the rich soil, up the perforated bark of a tree, finally finding the moon, alone in a black sky.
That Vargas and, by proxy Plutarco, uses myth to explain why the exploited must forever fight, suffer and die is not surprising. Myth has long been the vehicle for that which is impossible to fathom. So has history.
