In light of recent political events in the region—the rise of fascism in Brazil, the prospect of a US-backed coup in Venezuela, the nascent peace in Colombia and the continued descent into violent abyss of Central America—it is only natural that Latin American cinema is looking backwards. The region produced two of the most acclaimed films of 2018, Zama and Roma, both period pieces obsessed with memory, legacy and social progress and stagnation. Too Late to Die Young, from Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor is yet another celebrated—it won the award for direction at Locarno—Latin American film set in the past as a way for exploring the present.
Specifically, Too Late to Die Young displays Chile in 1990, on the eve of the political transition from the bloody, criminal Pinochet dictatorship to the stable democracy it has today. But the political situation is never discussed and plays little direct role in the film. The primary characters are teenagers and children enjoying the earliest days of their summer vacation in a commune in the dry Andean foothills above Santiago. They care little for politics, spending their time swimming, strumming guitars, smoking weed, dangling from their treehouse and flirting. If it sounds a lot like La Ciénaga, that’s because it is largely the same story structure.
The film is languid and the plot moves from nonexistent in the first hour to something minimal and not quite crucial in the second, floating through the various tangles of relationships in the commune rather than presenting a narrative. Viewers pass the time along with the characters. Everything culminates on New Year’s Eve with a party that gives way to drunken torpor that builds to a fire on the commune’s dry hillside, threatening to destroy everything.
There are details scattered in this broad sketch that liven up the film and bring more characters into the viewer’s attention. Many of these are crucial because they connect the seemingly insular commune to the rest of Chilean society. We see a dead horse poisoning the commune’s creek water, whispers of sabotage of their larger water grid, debates about connecting to the power grid, a break-in, a missing dog and car and motorbike trips to town for supplies.
Throughout, Too Late to Die Young presents little more than a series of overlapping metaphors for Chile and its history, another feature of Lucrecia Martel’s filmography that Sotomayor is inserting into her own work. This film is set at perhaps the most promising time in Chilean history, on the cusp of a renewed democratic regime that would end the crimes against humanity of the Pinochet era. Are Chileans mature enough to pull it off? Who are the hidden saboteurs who could poison the whole process? Are people too alienated to generate meaningful change even if the structures will allow it? Can all of society be trusted with these kinds of decisions? Even if they somehow pull it off, could it all simply burn down?
Too Late to Die Young is subtle in all of this, but to anyone with much knowledge of Chile, the allegory remains plain. There are additional complications: the commune residents are wealthier and whiter than their neighbors and exercise far greater social agency because of this privilege. Is Chilean democracy doomed to be similar: an out-of-touch plaything constructed by the privileged with little regard for everyone else? Maybe that explains the dead horse, the burglary and the fire.
All this adds up to a good film, but it seems too reminiscent of Martel’s superior oeuvre, to which it pales in comparison. This also marks the second Latin American film released in the US in the past six months that hinges on a forest fire on New Year’s Day and, again, it suffers from being in the shadow cast by the pile of Oscars that Cuarón’s film took home. Whether Too Late to Die Young could stand on its own is an open question, but given the titans it evokes, it will never have the chance.
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