Heli (Amat Escalante, 2013)
Posted: Sun Mar 22, 2015 12:52 pm
Major spoilers:
I have real issues with the story of this film, although the various subtexts also regularly felt a bit too forced: the guy who causes the whole situation cannot just be getting his girlfriend and her family into trouble, he has to be a 17 year old army cadet feeling up a 12 year old schoolgirl; we can't just watch someone being hung from a hook and tortured by being hit with a bat, we have to see the mother cooking in the kitchen in the distant background and the thugs getting a young boy to participate in the beating, with the video game the boy was playing showing an armoured hero on the television in the background waving his weapon in an aggressive way, almost the same way that the young boy wields the bat (I get it: video games are evil and dehumanising, and even vicious drug dealers have mothers); we cannot just see our hero feeling troubled by threatening police vehicles, we actually have to see one drive straight up to the house, and then drive off again, in a rather pointless scene; and so on.
And what the point of the scene in which Heli calls the police inspector to make a statement, only for her to pull her breasts out of her top and ask him to suckle from them, was, I'm at a loss to imagine!
That leads me to a main criticism of the film - that I'm not entirely sure about the meaning behind any of the 'messages' that the film puts across, or even if there is one intended beyond just showing a lot of unjust 'stuff' happening, as there does not seem to be a coherent thesis tying the subtexts all together. Is there an anti-militarism message with the scenes of cadets being rigorously trained and bullied by their squadmates? (Or even a slight comment on American imperialism in the short scene in which a white American officer is shown teaching the Mexican officers how to put the cadets through their paces, which involves ordering the cadets to do combat rolls through a pile of their own vomit) If so, the army stuff drops out of the picture once Beto is disposed of.
What about Heli and his father working alternating shifts at an enormous pristine car factory? Is that a comment on dehumanising jobs (with similar military-style mandatory exercise regimes) in which robots are more useful than human beings? That a state of the art factory co-exists with crumbling shacks in which the workers live, and families end up never seeing each other more than for minutes at a time, or in passing on the road to and from the factory? If so, that stuff drops out of the film once the family is assaulted for the stashed drugs.
Is the point about police corruption? If so why do the inspectors make good, if rather brusque and uncaring, points about the father having shot first? It is as if the breast-baring scene had to be included to tip us away from understanding the police position.
In the end all of the 'wider issues' are undermined by the core story in which various characters act problematically. I'm not really talking about the 12 year old Estela here, who stupidly but understandably stashes packages of cocaine in the family home on her boyfriend's request. I'm not even talking about the boyfriend Beto, who stupidly breaks into a criminal/police stash of appropriated cocaine in the hope of using it to escape to the city with Estela.
I'm really talking about my problems with the reaction of the main character Heli to all of this. That he just doesn't talk to the other characters in such a way that would involve them and perhaps be helpful in sorting everything out sooner. The big lesson to learn from Heli's silly actions, which really I sort of knew already, is that if you find that a family member has a couple of bundles of cocaine stashed away at home, you don't immediately take the bundles, cut them open and throw them away! You are throwing away the bargaining chip there! You instead tell the family member to get rid of them to whatever gang is going to be looking for them as soon as possible and never do it again!
Then, when your father comes home from work that evening you don't just tell him that you've locked your 12 year old sister in her room because of 'boyfriend issues', but instead immediately tell him that you found a couple of kilos of cocaine in the house and that your father should probably prepare himself for people to storm the house sooner rather than later. Then the father might not get himself killed! This annoyance with Heli just not doing the sensible things sort of affected my attitude to the torture scene, in which Heli is let go with just a beating, when he perhaps deserved more punishment than he gets!
This all gets even more troublesome in the last section of the film. Heli should really have spilt the beans about the cocaine packages, throwing them away and only the now abducted sister being uncomprehendingly involved in the same to the police inspectors straight away. In fact, due to the elisions in the scene, I had been assuming that this is the one thing that he would have done straight away! So no wonder by not doing this Heli and his family get put under completely unnecessary suspicion of being drug dealers!
So of course he calls the inspector back weeks later to tell them about the packages, only to find that the case was closed and has to be re-opened (all the female inspector can respond with is to have her breasts pointlessly fall out of her top). So in a way Heli is responsible for his sister being taken off and assaulted by the gang for a longer period!
This all seems to be trying to be tied together in the very final section in which Heli, after the perhaps 'neutering' of his masculinity by the destruction of his family and personal torture, starts assaulting his wife sexually and once Estella returns (without any input from Heli) traumatised and leads Heli to the gang's hideout, he commits another murder on a completely minor character (and perhaps an uninvolved one? Given that in the meantime most of the torturers have themselves been shown on television as having been beheaded by yet another gang, presumably the ones looking for the cocaine). Then we get the final scene of Heli vigorously humping his wife again, (asserting his dominance again, after being witheringly rebuffed at the mid-point of the film) as if his masculinity has been restored by his actions. Did Heli just need to kill someone, anyone, to feel better about himself?
It is a deeply troubling film that has a pretty weird view of male victims of assault only being able to respond through violence themselves, something that I cannot subscribe to at all. Though this does mean that the film has a little bit of a Bruno Dumont feel about it. (Presumably that is what the heavy handed, otherwise pointless, moment of the shirtless facing down of the masculine, big as the shack, truck is for? Is that scene meant to play as realistic or an expression of Heli's troubled mind? Did the female inspector really bare her breasts, or did he just imagine it? That is perhaps too charitable an approach to take to these scenes though, as they play out pretty concretely as happening in the film itself)
So I'm mixed to negative on this. I love the beautiful photography of this film and the way that it hangs on moments, especially the final scene of the curtains waving in the breeze as a couple of characters lie on a sofa together (although that image is overlaid by the sex sounds from the bedroom as the traumatised, gang raped sister cuddles the couple's young son).
The very best element is the way that these tiny dramas are playing out in grubby locations, yet these locations themselves are surrounded by breathtaking natural beauty. The moment when the characters leave the frame and we are left with just a landscape shot, or when the camera pans up into a shot of twinkling stars, are the best aspects of the film by far, and in some ways provided their own damning commentary on the cosmic pointlessness of the human drama going on, although these shots themselves have a Carlos Reygadas-feel (or indeed Dumont) to them, so I can't exactly call them original. But it does add to the sense that there is a wider, stunning world out there beyond our character's distressingly limited horizons.
I have real issues with the story of this film, although the various subtexts also regularly felt a bit too forced: the guy who causes the whole situation cannot just be getting his girlfriend and her family into trouble, he has to be a 17 year old army cadet feeling up a 12 year old schoolgirl; we can't just watch someone being hung from a hook and tortured by being hit with a bat, we have to see the mother cooking in the kitchen in the distant background and the thugs getting a young boy to participate in the beating, with the video game the boy was playing showing an armoured hero on the television in the background waving his weapon in an aggressive way, almost the same way that the young boy wields the bat (I get it: video games are evil and dehumanising, and even vicious drug dealers have mothers); we cannot just see our hero feeling troubled by threatening police vehicles, we actually have to see one drive straight up to the house, and then drive off again, in a rather pointless scene; and so on.
And what the point of the scene in which Heli calls the police inspector to make a statement, only for her to pull her breasts out of her top and ask him to suckle from them, was, I'm at a loss to imagine!
That leads me to a main criticism of the film - that I'm not entirely sure about the meaning behind any of the 'messages' that the film puts across, or even if there is one intended beyond just showing a lot of unjust 'stuff' happening, as there does not seem to be a coherent thesis tying the subtexts all together. Is there an anti-militarism message with the scenes of cadets being rigorously trained and bullied by their squadmates? (Or even a slight comment on American imperialism in the short scene in which a white American officer is shown teaching the Mexican officers how to put the cadets through their paces, which involves ordering the cadets to do combat rolls through a pile of their own vomit) If so, the army stuff drops out of the picture once Beto is disposed of.
What about Heli and his father working alternating shifts at an enormous pristine car factory? Is that a comment on dehumanising jobs (with similar military-style mandatory exercise regimes) in which robots are more useful than human beings? That a state of the art factory co-exists with crumbling shacks in which the workers live, and families end up never seeing each other more than for minutes at a time, or in passing on the road to and from the factory? If so, that stuff drops out of the film once the family is assaulted for the stashed drugs.
Is the point about police corruption? If so why do the inspectors make good, if rather brusque and uncaring, points about the father having shot first? It is as if the breast-baring scene had to be included to tip us away from understanding the police position.
In the end all of the 'wider issues' are undermined by the core story in which various characters act problematically. I'm not really talking about the 12 year old Estela here, who stupidly but understandably stashes packages of cocaine in the family home on her boyfriend's request. I'm not even talking about the boyfriend Beto, who stupidly breaks into a criminal/police stash of appropriated cocaine in the hope of using it to escape to the city with Estela.
I'm really talking about my problems with the reaction of the main character Heli to all of this. That he just doesn't talk to the other characters in such a way that would involve them and perhaps be helpful in sorting everything out sooner. The big lesson to learn from Heli's silly actions, which really I sort of knew already, is that if you find that a family member has a couple of bundles of cocaine stashed away at home, you don't immediately take the bundles, cut them open and throw them away! You are throwing away the bargaining chip there! You instead tell the family member to get rid of them to whatever gang is going to be looking for them as soon as possible and never do it again!
Then, when your father comes home from work that evening you don't just tell him that you've locked your 12 year old sister in her room because of 'boyfriend issues', but instead immediately tell him that you found a couple of kilos of cocaine in the house and that your father should probably prepare himself for people to storm the house sooner rather than later. Then the father might not get himself killed! This annoyance with Heli just not doing the sensible things sort of affected my attitude to the torture scene, in which Heli is let go with just a beating, when he perhaps deserved more punishment than he gets!
This all gets even more troublesome in the last section of the film. Heli should really have spilt the beans about the cocaine packages, throwing them away and only the now abducted sister being uncomprehendingly involved in the same to the police inspectors straight away. In fact, due to the elisions in the scene, I had been assuming that this is the one thing that he would have done straight away! So no wonder by not doing this Heli and his family get put under completely unnecessary suspicion of being drug dealers!
So of course he calls the inspector back weeks later to tell them about the packages, only to find that the case was closed and has to be re-opened (all the female inspector can respond with is to have her breasts pointlessly fall out of her top). So in a way Heli is responsible for his sister being taken off and assaulted by the gang for a longer period!
This all seems to be trying to be tied together in the very final section in which Heli, after the perhaps 'neutering' of his masculinity by the destruction of his family and personal torture, starts assaulting his wife sexually and once Estella returns (without any input from Heli) traumatised and leads Heli to the gang's hideout, he commits another murder on a completely minor character (and perhaps an uninvolved one? Given that in the meantime most of the torturers have themselves been shown on television as having been beheaded by yet another gang, presumably the ones looking for the cocaine). Then we get the final scene of Heli vigorously humping his wife again, (asserting his dominance again, after being witheringly rebuffed at the mid-point of the film) as if his masculinity has been restored by his actions. Did Heli just need to kill someone, anyone, to feel better about himself?
It is a deeply troubling film that has a pretty weird view of male victims of assault only being able to respond through violence themselves, something that I cannot subscribe to at all. Though this does mean that the film has a little bit of a Bruno Dumont feel about it. (Presumably that is what the heavy handed, otherwise pointless, moment of the shirtless facing down of the masculine, big as the shack, truck is for? Is that scene meant to play as realistic or an expression of Heli's troubled mind? Did the female inspector really bare her breasts, or did he just imagine it? That is perhaps too charitable an approach to take to these scenes though, as they play out pretty concretely as happening in the film itself)
So I'm mixed to negative on this. I love the beautiful photography of this film and the way that it hangs on moments, especially the final scene of the curtains waving in the breeze as a couple of characters lie on a sofa together (although that image is overlaid by the sex sounds from the bedroom as the traumatised, gang raped sister cuddles the couple's young son).
The very best element is the way that these tiny dramas are playing out in grubby locations, yet these locations themselves are surrounded by breathtaking natural beauty. The moment when the characters leave the frame and we are left with just a landscape shot, or when the camera pans up into a shot of twinkling stars, are the best aspects of the film by far, and in some ways provided their own damning commentary on the cosmic pointlessness of the human drama going on, although these shots themselves have a Carlos Reygadas-feel (or indeed Dumont) to them, so I can't exactly call them original. But it does add to the sense that there is a wider, stunning world out there beyond our character's distressingly limited horizons.