On her deathbed, Juan Preciado's mother orders him to travel to the village of Comala to seek his father, Pedro Paramo. "You must make him pay for having neglected us," the dying woman says. So we are told in voice-over to an image showing Preciado baffled in the midst of a vast stony desert where two faint cartways seem to intersect. In a heat haze, a muleteer named Abundiz Martinez approaches. He tells the young man that people who die in Comala and are sent right to Hell have to come back to town to "get their coats" -- Hell is apparently cool compared to this pueblo. The town appears in the crotch of a mountain like a petrified garden or the bones of an extinct beast. No one is around and the walled streets an alleys are shattered and empty. The houses are abandoned. On the advice of the muleteer (who says he is also Pedro Paramo's son), Juan Preciado goes to a villa owned by an old woman Dona Eduviges. The house is crammed with dusty, moldering junk -- when people leave town, they put their furniture and knickknacks in storage in Dona Eduviges manor, but no one ever returns for these items. The old woman makes Juan sleep in an attic room with a pierced roof; he must lay on the floor in the room where a man was hanged. The ghost calls out at night. In the street, a mad beggar woman named Dorotea warns Juan that Camalo is a literal ghost town -- everyone he meets is already dead. (The women all know that Juan's mother has died; she has apparently visited them recently as a ghost.) In the morning, light penetrates the wrecked roof of the villa. A dreamy young man sits in an outhouse where he is reprimanded by his mother -- this is Pedro Paramo as a young man, probably forty years before the events shown in the opening scene with Juan Preciado. Paramo is in love with a girl named Susana -- she is the daughter of a silver miner. Pedro flies a kite with her and, then, she leaves town with her father. Paramo grieves the loss of his childhood sweetheart. (At various points in the movie, we see her swimming with him in a deep, radiantly blue pothole under a tree; this is an image of the lost idyll of Paramo's childhood, his own "paradise lost" that motivates, apparently, most of the depredations that he commits in his later life.) We learn in flashbacks -- although the concept isn't really applicable to a movie that insists on the simultaneity of all events -- that Pedro's father was murdered and that his family was threatened with poverty by debts owed to various feudal landowners in the vicinity. Pedro claws his way out of this poverty by marrying Dolores Preciado (Juan's mother) for her wealth and land, bullying neighbors, and, ultimately, having his adversaries murdered by his thuggish lieutenant, Fulgor. (It's Fulgor and his henchmen who hang the man in the upper room where Juan Preciado tries to sleep when he arrives in town.) Dolores Preciado's honeymoon night is complicated by the fact that she has her period. So she persuades Dona Eduviges to take her place in Pedro's bed. (Most of the women in town admire the handsome, rakish caballero Pedro Paramo -- and the women who resist him, he rapes.) Most of the children in the village are Paramo's sons and daughters. Time flows forward and backward -- in a series of scenes, we see Pedro Paramo's single acknowledged and legitimate son, himself a seducer and rapist, riding to and from assignations. He rides into a bank of fog, smashes into a fence and dies with a broken neck. The local priest, a withered and venomous little man, extorts donations out of the wealthy Paramo for the funeral Mass. The priest, Tio Rentaria, hates Paramo because the boss murdered his brother and raped his niece. Preciado keeps encountering Damiana Cisneros, the only female servant at Paramo's huge estate called Media Luna, not seduced or raped by Pedro. He asks her if she is alive -- she just stares at him enigmatically. Preciado seems to be sick. He has chills and a fever. In a ruined house, he shivers on the floor next to a bed where a naked man and woman make love -- they are brother and sister. The man departs at dawn and the naked woman invites Preciado into bed with her where she suddenly decomposes into stinking, excremental mud. The mud floods out into the empty street, a corridor lined by crumbling walls. Preciado staggers to the church where he looks up and sees a great vortex of naked souls whirling around in a shaft of greenish-blue light above the Church. Then, he passes out.
This describes the first half of Rodrigo Prieto's 2024 Netflix movie based on the novel by Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo. Rulfo is undoubtedly the greatest writer to ever have worked as an executive and salesman for the Mexican division of the Goodyear Tire Company. Pedro Paramo (1955) is generally acclaimed as Mexico's greatest novel and it is an integral part of the identity of modern Mexican intellectuals -- the book, in essence, defines what it means to be Mexican and is regarded as broadly, and acutely, diagnostic of the pathologies that afflict that nation. The novel is an austerely complex and difficult modernist work, a cubist array of vignettes that are presented in a narrative order that is associative and surrealist, but not chronological. The initial premise, Juan Preciado's search for his infamous father, is abandoned after a dozen or so pages and the reader must navigate an increasingly disorienting labyrinth populated by dozens of monstrous or damaged characters, each displaying stigmata of his or her encounter with the vicious patron, Pedro Paramo. At the halfway point in the book, Preciado dies although this doesn't keep him from narrating parts of the second part of the short novel from his grave where his mouth is "stuffed with dirt" and where he rests in a spooning embrace with town's disheveled and mad beggar woman, Dorotea.
After Juan Preciado's death, the film shows us Paramo's ruthless rise to power in the village and environs. When his second wife dies (he has sent away Dolores Preciado and her son to Colima), Paramo courts his lost love Susana. She's insane. Her father once lowered her into a silver mine full of cadavers in search of coins and the experience has driven her mad. (There's also a suggestion of incest with her father, an old prospector whom Paramo has had killed in order to force himself upon his daughter.) The revolution interrupts the morbid occurrences in the village. Fulgor gets gunned down by the rebels, dying in a showy scene in an irrigation furrow in a field where he is working. Paramo buys off the rebels who seem both venal and politically confused. Susana won't sleep with Paramo forcing him to rape one of his servants out of sexual frustration. Susana torments Paramo by masturbating histrionically in front of him. Then, she also dies. The serpentine priest, Father Rentaria, threatens her with gruesome damnation but she defies him. At her funeral, Father Rentaria rings the church bells incessantly, apparently insane himself at this point, and the town swarms with mourners who turn into merry-makers -- the funeral has become the occasion for a great carnival complete with fireworks. Paramo regards this as insulting and says he will destroy the town by folding his arms across his chest. He sits in front of his manor at Media Luna for ten more years and the town withers and dies. At last, Abundiz Martinez appears, half-crazed to demand that Paramo pay for his wife's burial. Martinez, the muleteer from the first scene, stabs Paramo's loyal maid, Damiana, to death and, then, repeatedly stabs Paramo, gutting him. No one can really die in Comala. Damiana gets up from the pool of blood where she lies and tells Paramo that his lunch is ready for him to eat and she assists him in limping into the manor house for his meal.
The movie is far easier to follow that Rulfo's elliptical and lyrically poetic novel. This is because subtitles identify, from time to time, who is speaking, reminding you of the identities of the numerous named characters in the story. Prieto's direction is very lucid and, from moment to moment, the viewer can readily follow the intricate interwoven narratives that comprise the film and the novel. Prieto is a famous Mexican cameraman who has worked with Alphonso Cuaron (Roma) and Alejandro Inarittu and the movie is impeccably shot -- it looks exactly how one might imagine the scenes in novel to be. The picture is impeccably cast and acted. It is extremely grim, positing that modern Mexico is an apparition rising from the ghosts of ten-thousand doomed little villages, places over which vicious feudal lords ruled by a combination of terror, greedy exploitation, and sexual predation. Machismo drives the men to be rapists and creates a culture of intimidated and subservient obedience in the long-suffering women. No one acts on principle. Everything is for sale. The feudal landlords are not an aristocracy based on merit, but rather a kleptocracy founded on terror and murder. In Mexico, everyone is a son of the rapacious and emotionally disfigured Pedro Paramo. The novel seems to be based, at least in part, on predecessor works by Faulkner -- but Rulfo's approach is more poetic and occluded than even difficult Faulkner novels such as Absalom, Absalom and The Sound and the Fury. (Probably another source of the book is Rulfo's response to Faulkner's Snopes novels including The Hamlet -- but Rulfo, of course, is Catholic or responding to the Catholic sensibility and his novel relies heavily on supernatural events: in Faulkner, the past is imagined; in Rulfo, the past is present as a ghostly manifestation or "echo coming out of the cracked earth.") The book's prismatic approach to its protagonist also seems related to Welles' Citizen Kane and the concept of the great man who is both cruel and vicious, but also a victim of childhood trauma (in Paramo's case the death of his father and the loss of his childhood sweetheart) that motivates the crimes committed by the hero. The book is admired to the point of veneration by Latin American writers -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez claimed that he had memorized the entirety of the rather short novel (it's about 200 pages long). Prieto's adaptation is extremely faithful to the novel. As I watched the film, various passages from the novel sprang to mind -- and, indeed, those episodes were depicted in the film. An example of how the film processes Rulfo's novel is near the end of the picture: we see Susana's funeral with a hearse pulled by horses retreating from Media Luna's manor house; a close shot shows Pedro Paramo as an old man, still handsome but in ruins, sitting on his chair in front of the mansion -- this is the pose in which he has vowed to destroy the village. Then, the film cuts to a shot of Susana fifty years earlier as a young girl, looking morosely back from a cart on which her father is driving away from the town. In a single sequence of a half-dozen shots, the movie will slip between events separated by decades -- and, yet, Prieto's film making is so lucid and transparent that the viewer, once acclimated to the movie's approach to its material (which is parallel to Rulfo's novel in the ordering of events) will have no trouble understanding what is happening. Remarkably, the part of Paramo is played by a Mexican actor named Manuel Garcia Rulfo, Juan Rulfo's grandson.
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