Marc Evans (2010)
The idea derives from Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977). On his travels in South America, Chatwin discovered a Welsh-speaking community in Patagonia (at the southernmost tip of the continent, partly in Argentina and partly in Chile). The film comprises two parallel narratives (the rhyming of these is pretty superficial): an elderly Welsh-Argentinian woman Cerys, with her nephew Alejandro, visits the land of her fathers to try to find the farm where her mother grew up before emigrating as a teenager (pregnant with Cerys); a thirtyish Welsh couple, Rhys and Gwen, their relationship increasingly strained by trying unsuccessfully for a baby, cross the Atlantic to Patagonia, where Rhys, a photographer, is going to take pictures of Welsh emigrant settlements and religious monuments. You get the impression that Marc Evans and Laurence Coriat, with whom he wrote the screenplay, felt that Chatwin’s find had such potential that that was enough – that there was hardly any need to dramatise things. Patagonia inches uninterestingly forward for what feels like a long time. It then has the nerve to start pushing for a melodramatic climax – to both parts of the movie.
The contrasts between the damp, green-grey Welsh landscape and the dry, brown-grey Patagonian terrain, and the resonances between the mountains in both places, are striking and often lovely (the cinematographer is Robbie Ryan). There’s an amazingly beautiful starry sky in Patagonia and the image of Cerys’s funeral barge – floribundant in the Latin American style, floating on Northern European waters – is extraordinary (especially the youthfulness of the old woman’s flower-framed face as she heads towards a cathartic cremation). In terms of drama, the events in South America are the less boring half of proceedings thanks to the sexual tension that develops when Rhys, convinced he’s infertile, becomes so hostile towards the couple’s local guide Mateo that his fears that Gwen will end up in the latter’s bed become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But both strands are low on content, let alone momentum. It’s fine for not much to happen in a story but you must be engaged by the characters and their situations. Patagonia is so undernourished that Evans and Coriat have to fall back on comedy details you’d expect in a much shallower film than this purports to be – Cerys deciding that a Welsh place name full of l’s must be a misprint, or – on the coach, with her eyes closed but sensing that Alejandro’s looking at her – saying ‘Don’t worry: I’m not dead’. (Once she’s said this, it’s a safe bet she will be before the picture is over.) When things turn more conventionally dramatic, they also turn obvious: it’s Gwen, not Rhys, who can’t make a baby; she and Rhys are finally reunited via a stop-the-bus-I-want-to-get-off number.
Patagonia is well enough acted. Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (Alejandro) is fluent and droll. Marta Lubos (Cerys) is a remarkable camera subject. Duffy, making her screen debut as Sissy, whom Alejandro spends his last night in Wales with, is appealing. Matthew Rhys (Mateo) is good at suggesting a man keeping a lid on what he’s feeling with growing difficulty. Nia Roberts (Gwen) hasn’t a lot of variety but she’s radiantly pretty. The only performer who really makes a strong impression, though, is tall, slim Matthew Gravelle as Rhys. (He may seem taller than he actually is because of an unusually long trunk and relatively short legs.) Gravelle doesn’t particularly draw you in but he gives off a strong scent of knotted-up self-dislike, and a tension that’s desperately needed in the prevailing mildness of the film. You may not warm to Rhys but the moment when he finds an old dog dead in the road and starts to cry, expressing the unhappiness that’s been building in him from the start, is affecting. He then encounters an Argentine vagrant, a Falklands War veteran, who’s lost his dog. The idea is no great shakes (and the actor playing the tramp overdoes things a bit) but because it’s emotionally powerful to Rhys this connection seems to matter more than anything else in Patagonia. The pleasant music is by Joseph LoDuca and Angelo Badalamenti.
9 March 2011
