teaThe overwhelming tension and angry thriller of Colombian filmmaker Alejandro Landes is one of the most seen in Berlin this year. Apocalypse Now, between the monarchs of Paris and the grace of snakes. It depicts a dysfunctional society and a guilty family in miniatures, the cult's changing power dynamics, the incidence of child soldiers' crash, the grudges raised in the army without supervisory commanders, and the danger of eating shrooms cut with real cow dung.
The Mono are a unit of the top ten guerrilla bands operating in countries very similar to Colombia or Bolivia, and seem to be named after Mono Grande, a mythical giant monkey that has existed somewhere in South America for centuries. They initially have little to do themselves, but wait for orders on the radio, take care of the cows for the cows (good for the bones and teeth of the boy) for the milk, and they are displayed in high-altitude mountain resorts with little to see. American hostage, a captive engineer apart from a small child. They are allowed and even encouraged to develop sexual relations between them, developing strange rituals and traditions. When one of them celebrates their birthday, there is a version of the crash, except that they are sexually crushed with a belt. Everyone can participate and hostages can also go sports.
But their favorite is to launch a semi-automatic, simply excitement that is impossible to resist, which inevitably leads to disaster. (PJ O & # 39; Rourke reminded me of what I wrote about hearing semi-automatic fires for the first time in the near quarter. “Chemical shocks” are triggered in the pits of the stomach. You have to go down into the jungle from an eerie singularity, and when the hostage shows signs of escaping, the leader will spawn anger of the anger and theoretically throw away the radio that connects them.The larger command structure and the whole group effectively suffer rogues. More bad than the first.
It is not clear whether they are breaking the rules or submitting to collective collective destruction in order to pursue clear goals. There is no Kurtz, and the unstable bond of civilized restraint is not gradually solved. It's just an intensification of the confusion that was there.
Mono just doesn't show that the static situation gets worse. Intense things happen. And they are noisier with the vivid and confusing sheet music of Mica Levi, who regularly rolls timpani like an exclamation point of thunder.
Jasper Wolf's cinematography floats the transcendental beauty of the landscape, the dense and hostile lushness of the bushes, floating through the banks of the cloud, and as if monitoring the character's habitat as if it were removed like a dream.
The interesting thing about Monos is about the group. Is that nobody is more important than the other members of the group as a whole. Individuals appear, but it is not clear who is developing as the most important person. Landes' film rejects the final girl trophy or indeed the final boy trophy. Of course it's not just about children's soldiers, it's about soldiers in general, but you can imagine that their paradigm lesser offers a faint pun for Mr Kurtz in Conrad. KurzOr short.
In some ways, Monos is the title of Jim Jones rituals in jungle cleanup, or alternatives to dreams, hallucinations, rituals for disasters like what we have about them, or what they are about themselves. Altitude sickness or hunger or post traumatic stress disorder. And Landes withdraws from us in any sense what will happen, now or in the eschatological future of the future or in the past, just as his children are the plates of mythical Japanese soldiers in the jungle who do not know the end of the war.
Perhaps it is as a fable for the homeland of Colombia, as if waking up from the dream of endless violence, but with anxious suspicion that there is always a new seedling of violence. Immersion of unforgettable horror.
•Mono will be released in the UK on October 25
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