Review: Rodrigo Reyes’s 499 Is a Fascinating Refutation of Colonial Dreams

The film raises pertinent questions about Mexico’s mixed cultural heritage and the contested representation of reality.

499
Photo: Cinema Guild

Rodrigo Reyes’s 499 uses interviews and observational camerawork to put a unique spin on what’s essentially a ghost story. This docufiction film concerns an unnamed conquistador (Eduardo San Juan) who’s lost in time and washes up on the beach at Veracruz five centuries after the Spanish conquest. He retraces Hernán Cortés’s march to Tenochtitlan—modern-day Mexico City—narrating his version of the conquest even as he comes face to face with its aftershocks. While the documentary core of the film ends up overshadowing its fictional exoskeleton, the questions that 499 raises—about the hybridity of docufiction as a reflection not only of Mexico’s mixed cultural heritage, but the contested representation of reality—could not be more pertinent today.

No one looks surprised to see the conquistador in his helmet and breastplate, who stalks through Mexico like an intimation of death. Despite his concrete presence in the reality being documented, he retains the intangibility of a ghost. In an early scene, he seizes a coconut from a fruit stand on the beach and drinks greedily while the seller and her children look at him with contempt. In another, a man concealing his identity behind a skull mask picks the conquistador up in a luxury sedan to confess his sins as a soldier in the drug war.

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During the film’s interview segments, people from various walks of life respond to prompts presumably posed by the filmmakers as the conquistador often looks on as a witness. And in between these interviews, his journey is marked by poetic images that invite contemplation, from shots of a junkyard full of police vehicles, to an airplane passing over a shantytown at dusk, to a performance of the Danza de los Voladores—all charged with surreal anachronism by the conquistador’s presence. His voiceover, meanwhile, never comments on the images directly, though in a roundabout sense it provides them with historical explanation.

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In one mesmerizing sequence, migrants traveling north take turns jumping aboard a moving train. The camera pans back and forth in a steady rhythm, tracking each person as they sprint to match the train’s speed and leap aboard, at risk of falling underneath and losing an arm or a leg. Now and then the camera pans up to show people in ones or twos already riding on the roofs of the boxcars. Not all of them make it before the last car passes them by. Shot in slow-motion, the sequence induces a contradictory sense of effortlessness and futility.

The presence of the conquistador, this unshakable specter of Mexico’s colonial history, makes past atrocities not only present but impossible to overlook, and with an emotional immediacy unavailable to a straightforward documentary. The conquistador may also stand in for neocolonial intrusions by the United States, in the name of fighting communism or the drug war, not only in Mexico but all across Latin America, interference which has forced millions to abandon their homes for the relative wealth and stability of the U.S. itself, only accumulated at the expense of its neighbors, as well as its enslaved and indigenous populations.

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Near the close of 499, the conquistador undergoes a change of heart after listening to a harrowing account of a rape in Mexico City. His tears undercut the power of the interview in question by turning it into an excuse for character growth. Slightly more convincing is the decision to shed his armor in a landfill, but the man’s subsequent search for penance, which the film’s final scene implies will be ongoing, if not perpetual, feels like too easy of an out for the ghost and, by extension, the audience. Moreover, it can’t compensate for the film’s failure to address the colonized instead of the colonizer, even assuming that address is purely rhetorical. Still, taking the interviews into account, 499 cannot be accused of lacking counternarratives, as the violence and corruption of contemporary Mexico that they depict, along with the images themselves, are nothing if not a refutation of colonial dreams.

Score: 
 Cast: Eduardo San Juan  Director: Rodrigo Reyes  Screenwriter: Lorena Padilla, Rodrigo Reyes  Distributor: Cinema Guild  Running Time: 87 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020

William Repass

William Repass’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. For links to his published writing, click here.

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