The fascination of El Gran Movimiento doesn’t reside so much in its story, which is simple enough, but in the many beguiling and transporting detours the film takes along the way to tracing its main character’s arc. There’s even some ambiguity about who or what that main character might be. Is it the story of an unemployed former miner succumbing to illness during a stay in the highland metropolis of La Paz, Bolivia, or is it the story of that city itself? During long stretches, the human characters recede into the background, but the city never stops playing to the camera. Coupled with the immersive score and sound design, it feels as much like a symphony as a film, which may explain the title.
Some films teach the viewer how to watch, and writer/director Kiro Russo proves adept at focusing the eye and the ear through layers of visual and aural cacophony. Again and again, the camera pushes in from afar, steadily centering on an urban landscape, or a wall of torn and overlapping posters, or a thronging crowd in a marketplace accompanied by the buzz and burr of traffic and birdsong and voices. At times, a character stands motionless in the dead center of the frame as the image pushes in from seemingly miles away–an effective technique for suggesting the galaxy of stories that could potentially be told here in a mosaic-like city. Russo smash-cuts from these epic establishing shots to ground-level moments of chatter in sunless rooms where characters smoke and drink and talk shit. It’s Koyaanisqatsi at the cantina.
The vibe is documentarian as the camera observes seemingly unscripted interactions in the city where our protagonist, Elder (Julio César Ticona) is looking for work. Having traveled to La Paz from his previous gig toiling in the mines, Elder is wracked with coughs and fever, and has trouble carrying out the menial tasks he gets hired to do. His fretful godmother, Mama Pancha (Francisca Arce de Aro), takes it upon herself to find a cure for what ails him, which she believes must be related to the devil. She enlists the help of an eccentric herbalist, Max (Max Bautista Uchasara) who spends a lot of time roaming around in the hills beyond the raggedy outskirts of the city, mashing roots and leaves into poultices. When Max wanders through the crowded streets, he repels everyone with his stink and bad habits. There’s an enchanting scene where various women in the market take turns haranguing Max about his smoking and his filthy clothes even as they laugh and flirt with him, until they’re all chattering in unison like a nutty chorus. It’s a moment of jovial naturalism, and it registers as a celebration of the up-side of urban living where the city is humanity’s natural habitat.
On the down-side of that, Elder’s story represents a hopeless plunge into anonymity and neglect in an environment where industrialization and capitalism have reduced human beings to the roles of insects in a hive. His cough is not getting better, and no one is really able to help. There’s a hint that he might be suffering from COVID-19 (a fragment of radio news mentions case numbers and deaths in La Paz and surrounding areas) but it’s never specified. The more feverish he gets, the more impressionistic the images become, until the narrative itself begins to feel like the city–slapdash, fragmented, menacing and visionary. There are startling moments of visual free association where the glint of light on someone’s tooth becomes the surging headlamps of miners in a watery tunnel, or where blurry motion in the dark resolves into the pale fur of a stalking wolf. Signs and symbols trip past in a cascade of rapid edits that either represents Elder’s dissolving consciousness or the city’s essential character, and maybe that’s the same thing.
The ambiguity is by design in Russo’s freeform script where the narrative arc doesn’t bend towards any resolution but rather shoots off into the clouds where thunder rumbles over the city. In the midst of everything, as a kind of palate cleanser at the film’s halfway mark, there’s a hard detour in tone when a dance number breaks out in the marketplace. As an ’80s synth-pop beat surges, workers in their aprons and smocks break into a shaggy choreography as if they were suddenly all conscripted as extras in a Paula Abdul video. It’s surreal and ridiculous and charming, and seems to say something about the absurdity of life in this metropolis that’s too big and too much to be contained in a single story. Like Elder, we’re just passing through, but the Great Movement keeps on going.
Photo courtesy of KimStim
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