Matamoros
Director Edgardo Aragon
Countries Mexico
Duration 22 min
Synopsis
A former Mexican drug trafficker relates in detail how the transport of goods and the crossing of the American border functions. With the images, we accompany him on his trip through a heavenly landscape. In a voiceover, Pedro Vasquez Reyes explains in detail the actions and the meetings, repeats conversations, mimics the voices of his interlocutors, the cheeky humor with each intonation, in the manner of the smooth talkers of silent cinema. This choice of the young filmmaker Edgardo Aragon “to replay” the told stories is decisive. It creates an almost comic distance between the horror of situations, their real stakes, and our reception. By his refusal of a suspicious pathos that makes us complicit despite ourselves, the film articulates a space all its own: flagrant theatre, Brechtian operation all the more striking because the narrator is none other than the filmmaker’s father, and this story an autobiographical fragment. This strange nocturnal passage, very artificial and barely comprehensible, is better understood when the scene where someone is beat up is “replayed,” and where we all we see is just a piece of a helmet. For Aragon, the rule he practices is the following: it is a question neither of observing from faraway as a judge, nor on the other hand to take too seriously an incarnation, but to invent a minimal frame for representation. To finally inhabit a landscape where the voice explains that it is forbidden to him.
A former Mexican drug trafficker relates in detail how the transport of goods and the crossing of the American border functions. With the images, we accompany him on his trip through a heavenly landscape. In a voiceover, Pedro Vasquez Reyes explains in detail the actions and the meetings, repeats conversations, mimics the voices of his interlocutors, the cheeky humor with each intonation, in the manner of the smooth talkers of silent cinema. This choice of the young filmmaker Edgardo Aragon “to replay” the told stories is decisive. It creates an almost comic distance between the horror of situations, their real stakes, and our reception. By his refusal of a suspicious pathos that makes us complicit despite ourselves, the film articulates a space all its own: flagrant theatre, Brechtian operation all the more striking because the narrator is none other than the filmmaker’s father, and this story an autobiographical fragment. This strange nocturnal passage, very artificial and barely comprehensible, is better understood when the scene where someone is beat up is “replayed,” and where we all we see is just a piece of a helmet. For Aragon, the rule he practices is the following: it is a question neither of observing from faraway as a judge, nor on the other hand to take too seriously an incarnation, but to invent a minimal frame for representation. To finally inhabit a landscape where the voice explains that it is forbidden to him.