The newest feature from Alejandro Landes (Porfirio, Cocalero) offers a brutal, hypnotic hybrid of genres — part modern war film, part coming of age story — tackling the horrors of child soldiery alongside teenage growing pains.
Monos (Spanish for monkeys) is the name of the ragtag troupe of eight teen militants living in the midst of an unspecified South American war. They go by short, army aliases — Wolf (Julian Giraldo), the squad leader; Lady (Karen Quintero), his partner; the Messenger (Wilson Salazar) — a tightly wound, startlingly buff soldier with dwarfism who appears from time to time to check up on them. And there's Shakira, their newly acquired milk cow, who appears as a tiny white blip on the dark, earthy horizon.
Left alone on the Columbian mountaintop, the teens engage in activities serene and frenetic, taking the same pleasure from whistling soft bird calls among the flowers as they do from drawing out machine guns and blasting the air after a particularly raucous night of partying.
During the day, they perform regimens that look less like workouts than rituals — rhythmic, quasi-ceremonial exercises marked by guttural chanting and aggressive hugging (calling to mind the dance-like military drills in Claire Denis' 1999 film Beau Travail) that are less demonstrations of physical strength than of army discipline.
Monos's main task is to keep captive a prisoner of war — Doctora (Julianne Nicholson), an American woman with a fearful, pointed face, trapped in a roomy pit beneath the earth. Being kids, they joke around with her, and do kind things like braid her hair and give her cigarettes. It's only under duress that the essence of their relationship — captor and captive — reveals its serrated edge.
Cinematographer Jasper Wolf takes great advantage of the lush, loamy scenery of the Columbian Andes, where the first half of this film is shot. Polished in rich, saturated blues and greens, the world of Monos feels ethereal. The squad, estranged from all civilised society, could just as easily be living on an entirely different planet, with their rules and punishments ill-defined and subject to childish whim.
This is indeed a strange, mystical place: magic mushrooms vegetate in Shakira's dung, and giant stone monoliths sprout from the mountainside, with an eerie artificiality reminiscent of their 2001: A Space Odyssey ancestor.
The sound design — which picks up the thundering movement of clouds, or a stream rippling just out of frame — thickens the immersive atmosphere. Combining this with Wolf's colossal, panoramic landscapes, Landes charges the film with real big screen energy.
Monos, however, departs from this location in its second half, as an ambush forces the group into a dewy, hazardous rainforest where they spend the rest of the film, tensions rising as they try hard to keep Doctora from escaping.
Mica Levi's intuitive, ever-changing score, swinging from delicate glimmers to brash industrial churning, captures the wild unpredictability of adolescent impulses and guerrilla action alike. Levi's music underscores the sense of mysticism: a synthesised purr suggests an otherworldliness; the rush of a rising timpani roll signals the peril to come.
Each member of Monos becomes easily recognisable by the second half of the film, as the stress of war teases out their distinct characterisations and separate base instincts. We learn how Bigfoot (Moises Arias), with long dreads of hair and a tough, searing gaze, thirsts recklessly for power and independence, while Smurf (Deiby Rueda), a small, slight boy, can do no harm.
However, one element of their identity is kept secret — what they're fighting for is never explained. They're simply part of an enigmatic 'Organisation'; a rebel group without a cause.
At its worst, this deliberate sidestepping of ideology feels cowardly. By removing the motivations of these young militants, Landes also strips their actions of deeper complexity, rendering moot efforts of nobility or sacrifice that have been the grist of recent war movies A Hidden Life and 1917 — films where the line between hero and monster becomes compellingly hard to define.
But on other levels this ambiguity works — it allows the film to zero in on the repulsiveness of war — which corrupts the souls of all involved, no matter what age you are or what side you're on.
After all, child soldiers are pawns in a game they don't entirely understand — an analogy that echoes the opening scene, where the blindfolded Monos kick around a metal ball in near silence.
For these militant teens, violence is a fluid currency: it's a tool of playful celebration, but also one of destruction and rage. Rituals that seem at first punitive evolve into ecstatic. The volatility of Monos echoes the wild Lord-Of-The-Flies-esque carnality of human nature (complete with a pig-head cameo) — of youth left to their own devices, as both soldiers of war and angsty teens.
As tensions come to a boil, and things gradually grow more anarchic, their allegiance to each other and to the Organisation gets tested. But there is no distinct culmination in which the violence rises to an unbearable peak; no particular morality or message is served.
And while it's uncertain what lies at the heart of Monos — be it fear, survival, or plain darkness — whatever it is, you can't look away.
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Monos is in cinemas from June 22.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMibWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTA2LTIyL21vbm9zLXJldmlldy1jaGlsZC1zb2xkaWVycy1maWxtLWFwb2NhbHlwc2Utbm93LWxvcmQtb2YtZmxpZXMvMTIzNjg5NzLSASdodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTIzNjg5NzI?oc=5
2020-06-21 20:44:28Z
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