Bogota. A derelict, abandoned residential building, "Casa Uribe", is inhabited by over twenty squatters who live there. However, the authorities show up one day and demand that everyone inside must be evicted because its landlord, Dr. Holguin, wants it cleared. Romero, who has not graduated as a lawyer, manages to postpone the eviction citing the law that they have a bed-ridden sick man inside, Lazaro. Another tenant, anarchist Jacinto, devises a plan: they will dismantle the entire building from inside, piece by piece—leaving only the four walls outside—and move it to a meadow on a hill, where they will rebuild it. They manage to postpone the eviction again and again, and even send trasnvestite Gabriel to crossdress as a woman and seduce Dr. Holguin's lawyer, Victor, to have him arrive late for the eviction. As the police arrive, the tenants blow up the empty for walls from inside, which collapse, revealing an empty space.
Voted in one poll as one of the best movies of Colombian cinema, "The Strategy of the Snail" shows what a blessing resourcefulness and humor are when applied to a depressing social issue—in this case, when authorities want to evict over twenty homeless people from an abandoned residential building, these tenants simply decide to secretly dismantle and "evacuate" the building from inside and live on a hill. The concept is genius, though the writing and execution are on a lesser level. The overlong running time drags at certain moments, indicating that the movie could have been cut by 20 minutes, and the dialogue is rather bland and routine. Nontheless, the director Sergio Cabrera shows craftsmanship through several aethetic shots (a hill overseeing the Bogota metropolis), clever ideas (lawyer Romero pays a kid to go to an office and say to the evasive official Don Mauro that "some blond broad is waiting for him at Roma Cafe", and when Mauro arrives there, Romero tells him: "I'm the blonde"; in order to postpone the eviction again, Romero changes the address plaque number on the building, causing confusion among the police which have to wait until someone double-checks the veracity of the address) and directorial intervention (at the cafe, Romero asks Mauro about the new schedule for the eviction: "When will that be?", and then there is a match cut to Romero in the house, saying: "Tomorrow morning they'll come for the house"). The scenes of the tenants dismantling the building from inside, piece by piece, are the most fascinating, showing, for instance, how they tie a bathtub to a pulley, raise it up through the ceiling, and then move it horizontally via a rope outside to another place; or how they dismantle windows, tiles and even a whole block of a wall, which they then slide across the ground. The movie needed more of these scenes, and more humor. The ending literally brings down the house and is impressive for its sheer scale and ambition, though the lack of budget reveals its limitations, whereas the final scene feels kind of incomplete, lacking a resolution, yet one feels that spirit of pumped up energy as the small are trying to outrank the big authorities through their sheer cleverness, also inadvertently revealing the corruption and incompetence of this government.
Grade:+++
No comments:
Post a Comment