Wednesday afternoon,
I was scrolling down the Facebook page after the evening classes at the
university, idly sitting on the river bank with a pack of almonds and dry
fruits. A few minutes later my momentary slackness was interrupted by the idea
to visit Fabio Fest to watch the peculiar masterpiece by Amat Escalante, a
Spanish-born film director. I briefly took a look at the plot summary posted on
IMDb telling that this was some “love story between a young girl and a police
man”. Not really caring about that non-inviting intro, I called my friend to
join me and we headed for CineStar. Later on, after the film ended, I didn’t
really get the connection between this fabricated description on IMDb and what
I saw on the screen.
First, the film was
immediately touching yet silently violent, although there were hardly any sickeningly violent
scenes the feeling of them was hidden between the shots. Second, it is
conceived freshly and acutely.
Not cruel, but “reality capturing”. Not loathsome, but captivating. You are, in
the middle of everywhere, you cannot even think to leave the cinema hall to go
to the toilet: not because it is so uncivilized but because THE FILM made you
watch ceaselessly. You watch the kids being raised within that subconscious
harshness derived from the deeds of natural savageness around them. You are
aware of something bad to be forbidden but they are born without that morality.
You can judge it and be affected yet you can’t move while you stare at how the
young boys are suffering in front of their non-responding peers; while the
genitalia of the former is sadistically set on fire by the older ones, while
the girl with lacklustre eyes is drawing the map to some place since she can’t
even talk after the sexual violence she experienced. The
film never tells you directly how it was and what it was but the effect you get
watching it is even more potent, indeed.
Uneasily, you accept it. It is
natural as someone is brought up watching severity, whose organically trained innards are able
to stand and reconcile it. Some people in here, near you, right now, suffer. It
is ok. It is how it is. Eat your dinner. Some of them suffer on purpose, some
do so with no reason mentioned. Cruelty is born not to comment itself but to
spread itself among those who do not consider it abnormal. Who is born to take
your sister’s virginity and separate families. "Natural born” brutalized
men happen, born not against nature but to make that baby squirm. Eat your
dinner. No shame. You can do nothing. One dies, one lives, one kills. Everybody
is bound to its congenital messiah. Eat your dinner.
Margo
Kirlan
