Somehow, I happened to watch two long and slow-paced literary adaptations of works about people with stalled lives. It's been a very long time (since the start of the "boom" for Latin American magical realism) since I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novella El Coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel, published in Spanish in 1961) and I remember little about it, but am told that the screen adaptation (by Arturo Ripstein, 1999) is quite faithful, though surely it feels slower.

The titular colonel (Fernando Lujan) is one of the last surviving veterans of the Mexican Revolution some time during the 1950s. He has been waiting 27 years to start receiving his pension, but the weekly mail to the village never includes anything for him.

The movie throws us into the funeral preparations for the colonel's son, killed in a knife fight (the viewer does not see by whom for 110 minutes). The impoverished but proud colonel ("I was never taught how to beg"), waiting for the pension that never comes, inherits a gamecock from his son and nurtures it in hopes of winning some money when the cockfighting season comes (I didn't know cockfighting had a season). "Blondie," the rooster, does not look very aggressive to me and lives a far more comfortable life than the colonel and his wife do. "Blondie" also commands more respectful attention from others than they do.

The colonel's asthmatic, Spanish-born wife (Marisa Paredes) resents the rooster and the neighborhood boys who dote on it. Though her husband fought an anticlerical war (putting down the Cristero revolt during the 1920s), she is a pal of the dubious priest. Both of them watch a movie on the Index of works forbidden to good Catholics. His friends are even more dubious characters.

The DVD makes it appear that this is a Salma Hayek movie. As Julia, the streetwalker who was an intimate of the dead son, she makes an impression in her three scenes conversing with a nasty shopkeeper, the colonel, and the colonel's wife, but she is onscreen less than ten minutes.

The movie is about the old couple who are devoted to each other, desperate for money, but unwilling to do anything to get any (a continuity with "Oblomov"). It does not sentimentalize them as "Cocoon." "On Golden Pond," "Ikuro," and many other movies (even "The Shop on Main Street" and "Umberto D." to some extent) do, putting it in the company of Bryan Forbes's harrowing "The Whisperers" and Robert Anderson's "I Never Sang for My Father."

The grinding down of the old couple is not pleasant viewing, and I thought I was going to rate the movie 2.5-stars until the final 7 minutes. The last two scenes, however, raise it to 3.5 stars. First, there is a confrontation with the son's killer that clarifies much and then the final exchange in which the wife asks the colonel what they will eat, he pauses, and then spits out "Mierda" (if I translated it, the word filter would object).

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Though I went over 500 words with mention of some canonical old age movies, this is still far leaner than the lean-n-mean ceiling, and another contribution to CaptainD's good movie writeoff.


© 2007, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age