Three films of note

Two of the three films under consideration here were made in Mexico and deal with the super-exploitation of farm laborers and immigration, in other words just the kind of fare that deserves the widest viewing. The other is a documentary on American soldiers serving in Afghanistan, a well-traveled genre after a decade of imperialist war.

(Note the trailers for the Mexican films lack subtitles but they will be available obviously at screenings in NY.)

Opening today at the Anthology Film Archives, Eugenio Polgovsky’s “The Inheritors” (Los Herederos) is a cinéma vérité set in rural Mexico that gives a flesh-and-blood dimension to the economic processes that allow people in the United States to buy tomatoes, cucumbers, jalapeño peppers and string beans at low prices in local supermarkets in all seasons. If I had ever made good on my goal (long since abandoned) of teaching economics in college (obviously only at a place like U. of Utah or Massachusetts), I would have had my classes investigate the roots of the exploitation behind various grocery store staples. Despite the lack of any narration or text, “The Inheritors” makes it all crystal clear.

You will see a typical peasant village that rests on a mountainside where the land is rocky and where mechanization is non-existent. As ox-drawn tillers carve a groove in the unpromising soil, barefoot women toss in seeds presumably derived from the previous year’s harvest. Living in thatched-roof huts, the same women cook dinner on open hearth fires. Water is drawn from questionable-looking streams a mile or so from the village by young children in empty soda bottles nearly as tall as them.

Like most rural Mexicans who need hard cash to buy essential commodities, they have to work part of the year harvesting crops on the fields owned by agribusiness in the valleys beneath the mountainside where they live. The entire village participates, including the same young children who carried water to the village. Babies are left on the side of the field, precariously close to the monstrous machinery that only commercial farmers can afford. The work itself can be described as stoop labor and subject to cheating by those who pay their wages. Without a union to protect them and with no other work available, there are few opportunities to get a leg up economically. It is obvious that the title of the movie refers to the cycle of poverty that will condemn the children to the same bleak existence. They “inherit” the backbreaking labor that the Indian villages are condemned to repeat until a liberation movement greater than anything led by Zapata is victorious.

Next Friday, also at the Anthology Film Archives, is the opening date for “Northless” (Norteado), a fictional film that is part of their Genmex: Recent Films from Mexico series. (http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/37891) As an immigration “problem” film that can be grouped with “El Norte” or “Sin Nombre” (http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/2009-movies-wrap-up-part-two/), this debut work by Rigoberto Pérezcano eschews melodramatic formulas and concentrates on the small-scale trials and tribulations of the aspiring emigrant: loneliness, anxiety and a sense of vulnerability.

The film opens with Andrés (Harold Torres), a young man from Oaxaca, walking through the desert headed toward the American border. Just before he gets there, he is picked up by the cops and returned to a Tijuana hostel filled with other unsuccessful border crossers. The next morning, he runs into Ela (Alicia Laguna), a fortyish woman who is carrying garbage bags from her store and offers to help her. In no time at all, she offers him a job that he all too happy to accept, even if he is bent on crossing the border the first chance he gets.

Not long after starting the job, Andrés is invited to go out drinking with his boss. They go to a local cantina where they get tipsy on tequila and dance. She is anxious to have some physical release and he is in no position to refuse. As Andrés is vulnerable to the vicissitudes of both the workplace and the borderline, he tends to accommodate to anybody in a position of power, including his wanton employer. We soon learn that both of them are married. He has left a wife and kid back in Oaxaca and her husband has crossed the border, leaving her behind.

There are no “big” scenes in “Northless” but you will be impressed by the honesty of the film and its intimacy. As is also the case with “The Inheritors”, it will give you some genuine insights into the social reality of Mexico that is worth far more than the schlock at your local Cineplex.

Like “Northless”, the documentary “Where Soldiers Come From” that opens today at Village Cinema East avoids the sensationalism that you might expect from anything involving soldiers in Afghanistan. Unlike “Restrepo”, a very good film in its own right, the focus is more on the connection that the subjects have to their small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan than to any kind of adrenaline-soaked battlefield confrontations. That being said, there are a number of IED attacks that are unlike anything I have seen in a documentary, one leaving a major figure in the film a victim of physical and psychological aftermaths.

Director Heather Courtney comes from Hancock, Michigan, the same small town as Dominic Fredianelli, Cole Smith, and Matt Beaudoin—the three soldiers featured in her film that joined the Michigan National Guard right out of high school. This is a town of 4300 souls that has sunk economically since the local copper mining industry came to an end. Like countless other towns in 2007, this was a place long past its prime and fertile territory for military recruitment that would take advantage of young men and women with bleak prospects ahead of them.

By 2007 all of the fervor that led Pat Tillman to enlist had disappeared. The three young men who the movie tracks enlisted mostly because they hoped to take advantage of tuition assistance and because joining up seemed like an extension of hanging out.

Hancock, Michigan is nestled in a beautiful but slightly desolate woodland near Lake Superior whose fall colors are more spectacular than anything I have seen in upstate New York. The gorgeous scenery combined with the camaraderie of the three young men who decide to enlist at the same time reminded me of Michael Cimino’s 1978 “The Deer Hunter”, especially since one of the men—Matt Beaudoin—is an avid hunter. Apparently I was not the only one reminded of the similarity, since one of their mothers says not long after they join up: “Don’t this just remind you of ‘The Deer Hunter’”.

As is the case with Cimino’s film, they come home shattered and disillusioned—not that they had any grand illusions to start with. Despite Cimino’s reputation for having made an antiwar film, I found the Russian roulette scene offensive enough to make me walk out of the theater on the spot. As most people up to speed on the Vietnam war will tell you, the only incidents of Russian roulette were forced on the Vietnamese by their American captors and not the other way around.

As is generally the case with documentaries on men and women soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan, the director assures us that she is “more interested in focusing on the emotional and human aspects of the story” rather than making a “political statement”. One supposes that this effort to appear non-political goes along with getting  the military’s assistance in filming on location in Afghanistan. A unambiguously antiwar film would have not gotten to first base.

In one scene, we see the three friends in their barracks watching the movie “Zeitgeist”, a conspiracist movie that I declined to review when it premiered a while back for reasons that might be obvious to my regular readers. However, the three soldiers agreed strongly with one of the film’s themes, namely that three wars of the United States during the twentieth century were waged purely for economic gain by what the film refers to as “international bankers”.

In 2008 we see their parents glued to the TV screen watching the election returns and cheering for Obama’s victory. They, like many voters, expected peace but have been rewarded with more war and deeper economic misery.

In order to understand why young men and women continue to enlist in the killing machine that the imperialist bourgeoisie will continue to rely on as economic misery grows around the world, there is no better place to start than the appropriately titled “Where Soldiers Come From”.