Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
If one didn’t have liner notes to what EL VELADOR was all
about, the nonfiction feature would be pretty much mystifying. In confronting
the potentially searing topic of drug violence and fatalities in modern-day
Mexico, filmmaker Natalia Almada tries a minimalist approach to a maximalist
problem, presenting, with no preamble, no interviews, no explanatory narration,
the day-to-day routine of a town cemetery kept "busy" by the carnage,
even though most of what we see is quiet and deceptively siesta-peaceful.
Gravediggers and groundskeepers, mostly silent, do their
work with portable radios on. The night watchman arrives. Attractive young
women in black sweep dust off mausoleums and memorials – and only with the
press release material accompanying can one figure out that these shapely
senoritas are, in fact, the bereaved widows, whose children play among the
headstones.
Every so often a mariachi-band procession comes along,
onlookers look on, and yet another young male slain, almost certainly in
connection with cartel wars, gets interred. And then the cemetery sits in the
sun and waits impassively for the night watchman to arrive and the cycle to
begin again, the graveyard awaiting its next permanent residents. An
English-language TV broadcast near the end spells out the meaning, that the United
States pours billions into a distant
conflict in Afghanistan
and hardly anything into this ongoing terror on its very doorstep.
Okay, point taken. But as less may be more, sometimes
less is just…less, and many viewers not invested in the subject of
Latin-American drug pandemics and slaughter may just find this an opaque
time-passer in which the payoff arrives "manana." I guess Almada
deserves credit for not just putting together another compilation of bloody
news footage and sound bytes and impotent outrage. Perhaps she was trying to do
something along the lines of how NIGHT AND FOG conveyed the Holocaust by
presenting the empty, silent death camps, no onscreen atrocities at all. She
does find some pretty camera angles, but this literally bloodless take on the
intolerable situation just didn’t stir many emotions outside of ennui, and the
victims of narcotics rackets deserve more. (1 ½ out of 4 stars)
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