Review: Purgatorio

The film, although it positions itself in dialogue with contemporary debates about the border, eschews a clearly delineated historical narrative.

Purgatorio
Photo: Maston Films

Purgatorio takes us on a trip to a border-crossing: the politically and emotionally charged U.S.-Mexico frontier. Mexican director Rodrigo Reyes’s essayistic documentary features shots of a drug addict injecting heroin and a survey of the fresh corpse of a murder victim, but amid those brutalities and others it contains a singularly arresting image that managed to elicit an even greater shock from the audience. Their gasps and winces were audible. In the shot, we watch in close-up as an animal control worker euthanizes a tiny dog inside a cage, and the camera holds on the animal as it slowly dies.

Even knowing that image is featured in the film is probably enough to drive a number of prospective viewers away. I once heard from a screenwriting expert that you can’t kill children and you can’t kill dogs. Well, you can, but whatever your movie’s about, it suddenly becomes about that instead. Reyes’s film is about “A Journey into the Heart of the Border,” and the inclusion of that dying dog is a thematic gambit trading on the hope that its symbolic resonance evokes some of the pain and despair at that heart. However, in that moment the visceral shock seems to outweigh everything else.

While that instance is the most extreme, Reyes structures his documentary around those kinds of sliding semantic shifts, of transitions in which dead bodies give way to industrial detritus and the fishermen of polluted canals segue to a funeral dirge for casualties in the war on drugs. Though it positions itself in dialogue with contemporary debates about the border, the film eschews a clearly delineated historical narrative; we flit through time and space in dislocated, tangential ways. There are interview subjects, but they gel with Reyes’s narrative less as individuals and more as emblems—striking as they might be, such as a man who cleans up litter along the border to remove any possible migratory trail markers. He stumbles into saying, “Some people hunt deer or elk, but hunting an individual…is an even greater thrill.”

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The imagery that the film deploys is striking, especially in the way that it constructs la frontera as a postlapsarian space, where idyllic apolitical nature has been obliterated and replaced by a pulsing psychic wound. The borderlands are depicted as wastes in which both oppressive government authority and anarchic violence suffuse the landscape, and that perhaps the fears and anxieties that so energized the narratives of the western haven’t disappeared, but simply crystallized and mutated along a dividing line.

The most striking display of this comes in scenes which take place along a section of border fence. It’s far from impermeable, and as a physical barrier it doesn’t seem that difficult to climb over; in fact, we see someone do exactly that. But through Reyes’s lens, the fence imposes more strongly than its height would indicate: in the way that the prison-like bars stretch upward while giving a glimpse of the other side, and in the way they serve as the backdrop for a testimonial of forlorn hope. That image, perhaps, hints at the trauma underlining that scene of animal euthanasia. It’s not just the death on display, but it also airs out in the theater that we were perhaps already primed to think of dogs in cages.

Score: 
 Director: Rodrigo Reyes  Screenwriter: Hugo Perez, Rodrigo Reyes  Distributor: Maston Films  Running Time: 80 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2013

Oscar Moralde

Oscar Moralde's writing can be found in Well Played Journal, Latin American Perspectives, Media Fields Journal, and the Criterion Collection.

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