I just finished watching my Criterion Blu-ray of
Canoa: A Shameful Memory.
Canoa: A Shameful Memory, which is based on a true story, is one of the most disturbing movies that I've seen in recent memory.
In 1968, while student protests were erupting across Mexico, a group of five university employees traveled from Puebla to San Miguel Canoa in hopes of hiking to the top of La Malinche, the sixth-highest mountain in Mexico. When they found themselves stranded in San Miguel Canoa overnight due to a rainstorm, however, they were falsely accused of being communists and then attacked by a mob of roughly 2,000 townspeople, who were instigated by a local priest. Three of the five students were killed by the mob, along with a villager who was housing them for the night.
Canoa: A Shameful Memory opens with a newscast report of the massacre, and then presents us with a documentary-style travelogue of sorts, where a cynical and shifty villager explains the volatile atmosphere of San Miguel Canoa, telling us about the corrupt priest, who takes mercilessly takes money from the townspeople and who riles the townspeople up by way of predictions that their animals and their farms will soon be taken by communists, who will descend upon the town bearing red-and-black flags. The priest, who is portrayed with horrifying effectiveness by Enrique Lucero, is shown delivering an anti-communist sermon to the town just two weeks before the arrival of the university employees.
The film then segues into a dramatic recreation of the story of the five university workers, who are introduced as good-natured and fun-loving friends who want nothing more than to hike up La Malinche, eat well, and perhaps befriend some local women. Since we are well aware of the impending fates of these friends, the casual and comedic depiction of their preparations for the trip is unsettling in its own right.
These five young men arrive in Canoa, where they ask for shelter at the town hall and at the church, only to be refused. Finally, they are taken in by Lucas, a villager who is somewhat of a rebel against the priest's stronghold on the town, and who, as a result, already falls under the wary suspicion of the majority of the uneducated townspeople. As they relax with Lucas and listen to his stories, the men hear strange firecracker/gunshot noises and repeated announcements over the town loudspeakers that "the outlaws have arrived." They are starting to become spooked out by the noises of the riled-up town from outside their hut, and, finally, they look out the door to see hundreds of villagers coming their way with torches, machetes, and sticks.
After a vain attempt to reason with the mob, Lucas is struck in the neck by a machete, beaten to the ground, and shot. The crowd then corners the university employees, whose assertions that they are innocent fall upon deaf ears.
What follows is the most terrifying depiction of mob violence that I have seen in a movie. If, like me, you are not a fan of being in big crowds of people, then this movie will definitely not cure you of that phobia. We see the students being dragged through the town as they are hacked by machetes, repeatedly beaten, and mutilated as the angry mob calls them "communists" and calls for their deaths.
Canoa: A Shameful Memory is not the most graphically bloody film that I've seen, but the matter-of-fact way in which the atrocities are shown makes for one of the most jarring sequences that I've ever watched. The final half hour plays out almost like one of the 1970s exploitation horror films that I'm fond of watching, but the documentary-style exposition that sets the stage for the brutal conclusion reverberates into the recreation in a way that convinces the viewer that everything is real. The sense of realism is further enhanced by several scenes where actors break the fourth wall by speaking directly into the camera at the audience.
This film is sadly relevant today simply because of the way that it outlines that tangible dangers possible when a demagogue takes hold of a town or a country. It's a shame that, instead of instilling sense into the masses, contemporary social media often seems to encourage and exacerbate mob mentality. This is not an easy film to watch, but it is a masterful cinematic experience, thanks to the way that director Felipe Cazals toys with chronology and the way that he presents us with the final outcome during the first scene, and then backtracks in a deliberate march to that outcome.
On the Criterion Blu-ray of
Canoa: A Shameful Memory, director Guillermo del Toro (
Pan's Labyrinth,
Hellboy) provides a brief supplement where he discusses how the film shocked him and influenced his own movies. An hour-long discussion between director Felipe Cazals and director Alfonso Cuaron (
Children of Men,
Gravity) further details this viscerally unnerving film's impact on subsequent generations of Mexican filmmakers.
From a technical standpoint, the video presentation and the audio presentation on the disc are both superb.
A lot of my above write-up probably comes across as a blatant rerun of what
billy pilgrim posted a few days ago in his own review, and that is no accident, since his review is what prompted my purchase of this film.
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