a review by J. Robert Parks
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Director – Andrés Wood
Writer – Roberto Brodsky Mamoun Hassan and Mr. Wood (in Spanish, with English subtitles)
Director of photography – Miguel Joan Littin
Editor – Fernando Pardo
Music – Jose Miguel Miranda and Jose Miguel Tobar
Production designer – Maria Eugenia Hederra
Producers – Andres Wood, Gerardo Herrero and Mr.Hassan
Released by Menemsha Films.
120 minutes. This film is not rated.
STARRING: Matías Quer (Gonzalo Infante), Ariel Mateluna (Pedro Machuca), Manuela Martelli (Silvana) and Ernesto Malbrán (Father McEnroe).
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An even better political movie also opens this Friday, though unlike Syriana with its multi-million dollar marketing budget, you’ll have to look for this one at the Music Box theater. Machuca, directed by Andres Wood, is set in Santiago, Chile in the middle months of 1973. The Socialist president Salvador Allende has been in power going on three years, but the upper classes are more and more resisting his attempts to bring economic reform to the country. Both sides routinely parade through the streets, and the clash is coming to a head.
That doesn’t have much impact on Gonzalo (Matias Quer), at first. He’s a boy from a wealthy family on the cusp of adolescence. Gonzalo dotes on his mother and shines academically at his private Catholic school, though he resents his mother’s open affair with an even wealthier older man. One day, the school’s progressive priest, Father McEnroe, introduces several new boys to Gonzalo’s class. We can tell immediately by the way they’re dressed and even their slightly darker skin color that they’re from a much different background than Gonzalo and his friends. But he doesn’t care and even takes a liking to one of the boys named Machuca (Ariel Mateluna). And when Machuca invites Gonzalo to come with him after school, Gonzalo jumps at the chance to escape his unsettled home. Soon this naive teenager is helping sell flags to marching demonstrators and then visiting the shantytown where Machuca lives. Gonzalo also meets the beautifully fierce and older Silvana (Manuela Martelli), who initially snubs him for “being a snob” but then strikes up a relationship in exchange for condensed milk.
The puppy-dog love triangle that develops has a much different tone, though, than most coming-of-age films. Here, the class divisions are sharp and pointy. Uncomfortable situations and questions routinely undermine the romance. And as the political situation deteriorates, which side Gonzalo is on becomes of paramount importance. The film rises to a potent climax in three scenes of conflict. The first involves a meeting at the school where the richer parents berate the priest for mixing apples and pears (their children and the poorer boys), the second takes place in an anti-Allende march which features the almost comical sight of women in high fashion banging on pots and pans, and the third occurs between Gonzalo and Silvana and Machuca. There, Silvana, in a fit of pique, takes Gonzalo’s bike, which provokes him to lash out.
Because Machuca does a much better job of integrating the political and the personal, it has a more satisfying narrative than Syriana. And its careful attention to how class affects even the smallest details of a friendship helps it to overcome some rather clunky moments (Wood’s use of slow-motion and period pop songs does the movie no favors). Also contributing enormously are the three leads, who have spectacular chemistry. Furthermore, Wood’s clear connection to the material–the movie is dedicated to his progressive school priest in the years leading up to 1973–packs a punch. I could do without the homage to Au Revoir les Enfants, but the almost Biblical betrayal at the film’s conclusion is undeniably powerful.
After the movie, a number of us stood around and discussed why the movie was named after Machuca when Gonzalo is clearly the main character. Later, I remembered an incredible scene when Machuca’s drunken father starkly reminds Machuca of how his and Gonzalo’s lives are destined to part: “Twenty years from now, he won’t even remember your name.” I suspect Machuca is Wood’s own way of remembering the lives that were divided in 1973 and the repercussions that reverberate even to this day.