Butler's Cinema Scene

“BIRDS OF PASSAGE” My rating: B

125 minutes | No MPAA rating

Crime story and folklore entwine in “Birds of Passage,” Colombia’s nominee for this year’s foreign language film Oscar.

Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerre’s decades-spanning saga, which follows the creation of that country’s drug trade in the late 1960s by indigenous peoples, blends stark realism with magic realism for an experience that plays less like “The Godfather” than “Days of Heaven.”

Initially the film resembles a documentary about the Wayúu tribe occupying a remote, desert-like stretch of northern Colombia. A celebration is in progress, a sort of bat mitzvah to welcome the beautiful Zaida (Natalia Reyes) to her status as a grown woman.  She’s now available for marriage and almost immediately she is claimed by Rapayet (Jose Acosta), a handsome young man from a neighboring family.

Zaire’s mother Ursula (Carmina Martinez), the clan’s matriarch, isn’t impressed with Rapayet’s credentials and sets an impossibly high dowry for her daughter’s hand. Rapayet doesn’t know how he’ll find the resources…until he runs into a couple of young Peace Corps volunteers looking to score weed.

Rapayet has some friends who grow the stuff up in the mountains, and with his colorful bud Moises (Jhon Narvaez) starts a distribution business that not only brings him Zaire’s hand but unanticipated riches.  Eager gringos scoop up Rapayet’s marijuana and fly it to the U.S.; before long Rapayet and Zaire are living in a very modern new mansion (which, weirdly enough, is situated on a vast, dried-up mud flat — I kept wondering about water and sewage issues).

But Rapayet’s business corrupts not only himself but an entire way of life. Steeped in tradition and devoted to ideas of honor and sacrifice, the Wayúu quickly succumb to the get-rich-quick, trigger-happy mentality that spreads like a cancer throughout the tribe.

Jose Acosta

With the exception of Acosta and Martinez the film has been cast with non-professionals, most of them members of the Wayúu community. While that roots the experience in authenticity, it also has a curiously distancing effect.

Mining subtext and establishing psychological complexity are a challenge even for trained actors; those goals are way beyond the means of first-time performers with limited range. So what we see here is pretty much all we get; much of “Birds…” plays out like a pageant filled with archetypical characters.  With few exceptions the players give performances that are authentic yet only skin deep.

Of course one may argue that Gallego and Guerre’s film (the screenplay is by Maria Cammila Arias and Jacques Toulemonde ) is less about individuals than the death of an entire culture.

Thus there’s a funereal pall hanging over “Birds of Passage.” The filmmakers go out of their way not to sensationalize the material. There’s no equivalent here to the notorious scene in “Scarface” in which Al Pacino passes out face-down in a tableful of cocaine.

For that matter, while the film is concerned with the corrupting effect of violence, virtually no violence is depicted on screen.  Gallegos and Guerre instead focus on the aftermath of mayhem…a dozen men and woman lying bloody on a rural road, or the smoking ruins of Rapayet’s once-grand compound.

Ultimately this is an elegy to an impoverished but noble existence.

| Robert W. Butler