Alejandro Landes (2019)
The ten pictures selected to compete for the Best Film award at this year’s London Film Festival included six directed by women. It wasn’t surprising that Festival publicity made a lot of this though I remember wondering whether that was wise. If the award went to a female director, it might seem this was predetermined; if to a male, it could be argued that, when push came to shove for the jury, traditional prejudices kicked in. In the event, the winning director was Alejandro Landes for his film Monos. It wasn’t among the offerings I saw at the Festival; because nothing I did see there was outstanding, I decided to try Monos when it opened in British cinemas a couple of weeks later.
The Spanish title translates as ‘monkeys’. The title characters are a group of teenage soldiers, camped out on mountains above the Amazon jungle. Alejandro Landes, born in Brazil, holds dual Colombian-Ecuadorian nationality. Given that range of South American connections, perhaps it’s appropriate that Monos isn’t set in a specified country, though it’s tempting to connect the warfare it depicts with the long-running, still continuing conflict in Colombia[1]. Landes, who co-wrote the screenplay with Alexis Dos Santos, dispenses entirely with scene-setting. We’re plunged straight into watching the monos at work and play. The work includes rigorous drill, supervised by an adult known as the Messenger (Wilson Salazar). The play includes blindfold football and, when the Messenger has left the camp (though he returns subsequently), taking magic mushrooms. For a couple of the kids, it also means having sex.
The eight-strong group, who serve an agency known only as ‘the Organization’, consists of boys and girls (Moisés Arias, Sofia Buenaventura, Laura Castrillón, Esneider Castro, Paul Cubides, Julián Giraldo, Karen Quintero, Deiby Rueda). None of them has any backstory. Each is known by her/his nom de guerre. The striking mixture of names comprises Wolf, Dog, Lady, Bigfoot, Boom Boom, Rambo, Swede and Smurf. It’s amusing that Rambo (Buenaventura) is shyly androgynous. As embodied by Wilson Salazar, who is a dwarf (and an ex-member of FARC), the Messenger is of interestingly ambiguous age. Because he’s so short, he has the look of an even younger boy soldier. His musculature suggests years of military training and service. There’s another important character, a middle-aged woman (Julianne Nicholson) being kept prisoner by the group and who keeps trying to escape. Her captors refer to her as ‘Doctora’. As a radio news report, heard late in the film, makes clear, she’s an engineer called Sara Watson.
Landes and his cinematographer Jasper Wolf create fine images of (truly) awesome landscapes. Monos also features any number of how-did-they-do-that shots, especially underwater and in darkness, and an unsettling soundtrack, to which Mica Levi’s latest inventive score makes a major contribution. The London Film Festival prize is one of many this movie has already won. Its gone-native scenario has led to comparisons with Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now and Lord of the Flies. Landes acknowledges the latter almost explicitly in a close-up of the head of a pig killed by the monos.
The lack of context ensures the film is impactful and disorienting for a while but Landes’s approach pays diminishing returns – and points to a big difference from Conrad/Coppola and William Golding. The superficially ordered but de-civilised behaviour of the young guerrillas means relatively little because no idea is given of who they used to be. If they (somehow) were always feral – and one or two of them look to have been cast as if to suggest that – they’re far from kin to Kurtz or Goulding’s English schoolboys. Julianne Nicholson is the strongest presence in Monos and not just because she was, for this viewer, the one familiar face. Nicholson is skinny enough to convince as a prisoner of war. She’s also able, unlike any of the younger actors, to suggest she once belonged to a different reality. I became invested in Sara Watson’s resourceful escape attempts to the exclusion of what I assumed Landes considered more important elements.
While Sara gets out of the film alive, not all the monos do. In the last sequence, Rambo, who has survived, is picked up by a military helicopter. The film’s final image, a prolonged shot of Rambo’s anxious, vulnerable face, is incongruous with what’s gone before. It’s an expression of what-are-we-doing-to-our-young-people concern at the end of what’s been a bravura exercise in style – one that’s technically impressive but which I found less hypnotic than punishing to watch. Although not nearly as punishing as Monos must have been to make.
7 November 2019
[1] Wikipedia summarises this as ‘a low-intensity asymmetric war between the government of Colombia, paramilitary groups, crime syndicates and communist guerrillas such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the National Liberation Army (ELN), fighting each other to increase their influence in Colombian territory’.
