Alice Braga, Gael Garcia Bernal…fighting land grabbers in “Ardor”
“ARDOR” My rating: C+* (Opens July 17 at the Tivoli)
101 minutes | MPAA rating: R
A fermented mashup of spaghetti Western imagery and art house pretensions, “Ardor” gives us Mexican star Gael Garcia Bernal as…well, as Charles Bronson.
We first seen Bernal rising from a jungle river deep in the Argentine interior…he looks like some sort of primordial spirit. Actually, he’s a farmer named Kai who has survived the burning of his homestead and the murder of his family by gun-toting goons.
Kai stumbles barefoot and shirtless to the farm of Jao (Chico Diaz) an old man scratching out a living with his daughter Vania (Alice Braga). But trouble follows in the form of three murderous brothers who force Jao to sign over his property and then kill him. They take Vania as their prisoner.
Her new duties include cooking for and washing the clothing of her owners — and that’s just during daylight hours.
Happily Kai comes to the rescue, leading to a bout of jungle love (doesn’t look very comfortable) and a vendetta against the three killers and other mercenaries who have been making life miserable for the poor, hard-working farmers.
Writer/director Pablo Fendrik takes many a page from the Sergio Leone playbook — long looming closeups of beard-stubbled faces, explosive violence, an appreciation of scenic splendor.
Bernal, who has almost no dialogue, is this film’s version of the Man With No Name…although he also wears a worse-for-wear hat exactly like the one Charles Bronson donned in “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
Fendrik also indulges in mystical mumbo jumbo, suggesting that Kai has a direct pipeline into the forest’s spiritual forces (at one point a leopard nestles down beside him to stand guard while he sleeps).
Presumably the thugs are in the employ of big business interests — they appear to be not at all interested in the hard work of farming. But the film never bothers to explain who wants all this land or why.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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