Movie Review - El Norte (1983)

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johnkarls
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Movie Review - El Norte (1983)

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NY Times Movie Review
El Norte (1983)
'EL NORTE': ON SCREEN AND IN REALITY, A STORY OF STRUGGLE
By Annette InsdorfBy ANNETTE INSDORF
Published: January 8, 1984

Annette Insdorf, an associate professor at Columbia and Yale, is the author of ''Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust.''

''In order to get films made about
Latin America, you have to
have Americans in the center of
the story,'' lamented Gregory
Nava, the director of ''El Norte.'' ''I have nothing against 'Missing' or 'Under Fire,' but it bothers me that all the major characters are American and you don't get to know the people to whom things are really happening down there.''

Consequently, he and his producer- wife, Anna Thomas, worked outside the Hollywood structure in making their movie ''El Norte.'' In it, Americans are peripheral to the action, and the United States is a foreign and exotic locale - traditional land of promise rather than the center and the point of reference.

This drama - a kind of cross between ''The Grapes of Wrath'' and the rich textures of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's tales - focuses on two oppressed but hopeful Guatemalan Indians who flee to the United States.

Moving from tableaux of Mayan village life to the seedy hovels of Tijuana, to Southern California's exhilarating, confusing and often dehumanizing possibilities for illegal immigrants, ''El Norte'' is like three stories in one.

Opening Wednesday at the Baronet, it tells the story of Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutierrez) and her brother Enrique (David Villalpando); after losing their parents in military raids, they leave Guatemala for the freedom they think they will find ''up north.'' In Tijuana, they must pretend to be Mexicans in order to find a coyote (someone to take them across the border). And once in California, they ''adjust'' - to loss as well as success.

But making a film which had a feeling of authenticity about the locale and Guatemalan characters turned out to be an experience fraught with difficulties. The filmmakers encountered adventures almost as harrowing as those experienced by their characters but emerged unscathed and with a film that has already earned acclaim.

The origins of ''El Norte'' can be traced to the director's own childhood: ''I'm from San Diego, but I come from a border family,'' explained the 34-year-old filmmaker during a recent trip to New York. ''I have relatives in Tijuana. As a kid, I crossed the border several times a week, often wondering who lived in all those cardboard shacks on the Mexican side.''

As he got older, Mr. Nava realized that ''the border is unique - the only place in the world where an industrialized first-world nation shares the border with a third-world country. In California, it's just a fence: on one side are the Tijuana slums, on the other side - San Diego. It's so graphic! This was the germ of the story.''

While films about explosive situations in Latin America are often criticized for being dogmatically ideological, the filmmakers insisted that ''El Norte'' is not a political film but ''a human drama, a journey through cultural layerings,'' in Mr. Nava's words. Mr. Nava and Miss Thomas were attracted to the Mayan Indians of Guatemala because of their rootedness to the land, their striking and well-preserved traditions and their growing number of refugees.

Whereas the original protagonists were to have been Mexican, making Guatemalan Indians the focus of ''El Norte'' enabled Mr. Nava to correct a pervasive misunderstanding: ''So much attention is given to ancient pre-Columbian cultures - the ruins which suggest the end of a civilization - that people's understanding ends with archeology,'' he said. ''But there are millions of people who still dress that way and follow those customs. The Indians are still there, but they're now the victims of a tremendous onslaught in Guatemala and Mexico. And in Brazil, every time a new section of the Amazon is cleared out, some untouched tribe is wiped out.''

Another exploration of Guatemalan oppression opens Jan. 18 at the Film Forum: ''When the Mountains Tremble,'' directed by Pamela Yates and Thomas Sigel, is the story of a Guatemalan Indian woman who is forced to become a migratory peasant after her family is killed. Unlike ''El Norte,'' this film's story - much of it containing secretly shot footage - remains within Guatemala and focuses on the resistance of the Indians who join forces with the guerrillas.

The makers of ''El Norte'' learned about these matters from years of research, much of it conducted among exiles in California. According to Mr. Nava, ''There are hundreds of thousands of refugees from Central America in Los Angeles alone. Nobody knows the exact number, but a recent TV inquiry estimated 300,000-400,000. In our own research, we came across a community of Mayans from Guatemala - 5,000 from one village - now in Los Angeles. The original village, which is now dead, had 15,000. That happens to a lot of places: The village is rubbed out. I was very moved by these people who had been so tied to their land and I felt this is where the story should start.''

Miss Thomas interjected, ''Any issue would be better served by an involving and dramatic story than a lecture: Nobody goes to movies to hear a lecture. We didn't want 'El Norte' to look like a docu-drama, or have any stylistic elements that would remind people of journalism or 'rough-around-the-edges' documentary. The style we aimed for is the dream realism that comes from the Mayan culture.'' For Mr. Nava, ''The Mayans' dress, language, mythology and religion are very strong - a fertile field from which their magical culture comes.''

Miss Thomas and Mr. Nava began their career and their relationship in film school at U.C.L.A. and have been married eight years. ''We like to work together, but always in different ways,'' Miss Thomas said. On their two previous and critically-acclaimed independent features, responsibilites varied: For ''The Confessions of Aman,'' a medieval tale, Mr. Nava produced and directed while his wife co-wrote the screenplay; ''The Haunting of M,'' shot in Scotland, was produced, directed and written by Miss Thomas, with her husband as cinematographer.

They spent two years trying to raise money for ''El Norte'' but did not, in her words, ''pursue studios and TV networks actively - because we knew that much of what makes 'El Norte' right and wonderful would have to be changed if made in a studio situation.''

For example, Mr. Nava pointed out that language was an issue: ''This particular film cannot be all in English because the point is the lack of understanding when Rosa and Enrique come to the States. And what has been the accepted way for them to speak in films? Broken English with an accent that makes them seem stupid - when in fact they speak their own language fluently. I love the variations of the Spanish language - between how Guatemalans, Mexicans and Chicanos speak.''

Another point of contention in Hollywood was that the leading parts should be cast with American stars: ''It was suggested that 'El Norte' could be made with Brooke Shields and Robby Benson, or someone like that,'' Miss Thomas recalled with a hearty laugh, ''but I didn't find that appropriate.'' The director threw up his hands and said, ''the whole point of the film is to make people understand someone coming from another culture.

''The next line of thought,'' he continued, ''was to add an American part for a known name - like 'let's make the border guard more important.' But he's not the story! These ideas were unacceptable to me, so we put the script aside and started working on another project.'' In the interim, however, Lindsay Law of PBS's American Playhouse series had seen a copy of the ''El Norte'' screenplay. He said yes.

''After so many no's, it was a shock,'' Mr. Nava admitted. ''We had to guarantee the production of the film in order to keep control.'' he said, ''which means you either deliver a finished product or give back all the money. Once American Playhouse put up approximately half the funds, it was relatively easy to get the rest - like a presale to England's Channel 4.'' (American Playhouse - which was also responsible for the production of Lynne Littman's ''Testament,'' Robert Young's ''Ballad of Gregorio Cortez'' and Stan Lathan's upcoming ''Go Tell It on The Mountain'' from the James Baldwin novel - televises the film some time after its theatrical release.)

Most of the actors selected for ''El Norte'' were Mexican, including the two young leads, and many smaller parts were taken by Guatemalan nonactors. The choice of location and visual style was hardly typical for a low-budget film. According to Miss Thomas, ''Usually people choose between an exotic location and highly sophisticated technique, including lighting. We felt we had to have both the real location and a 35 millimeter crew in that location.

They could not film in Guatemala and therefore shot mostly in Chiapas - the southernmost state of Mexico which borders Guatemala - where the crew of ''El Norte'' came up against extraordinary obstacles. ''In its landscape, culture and social problems, Chiapas is like Guatemala - it's ready to blow,'' Mr. Nava observed. ''Our Mexican crew warned us against going there and they turned out to be right.''

The filmmakers encountered even greater dangers in central Mexico. Mr. Nava recounted that he made a deal whereby, in Chiapas, they would not show the military in any scenes, ''but we were told that things are stable in Morelos and we could shoot there with no problems. We found an incredible ruined hacienda that you see in the film and shot some scenes.

''On the day we got our machine guns for the sequence in which soldiers shoot down peasants,'' he continued, ''armed men came to the set, acting as if they were simply curious.'' Miss Thomas picked up the tale excitedly, remembering how they realized that the secret police were well-informed about their identities and whereabouts: ''Our cinematographer was scheduled to fly home that day to L. A. because his wife was having a baby. He had the film from the last few days of shooting, so they followed him. After a car chase, they ran him down, took the exposed negative at gunpoint, and tried to detain him. They had also kidnapped our production manager.

''When I learned that the negative was seized,'' Miss Thomas moaned, ''I thought it was all over.'' In Mr. Nava's opinion, ''The point of this whole exercise was to shut down the movie.'' They immediately checked out of their hotels and into other places under assumed names, waiting for the production manager's release - which took approximately 14 hours. ''They demanded a huge amount of cash for permission to leave the country unmolested, with the negative,'' Miss Thomas recalled.

''We negotiated a figure, and set up a rendezvous in a Mexico City parking lot. Two cars pulled up, with guys who had submachine guns and sunglasses, at night. It sounds almost comic but it was very scary. We paid around 1.3 million pesos (which had more value at the time than now!); they threw down a metal box, and drove away. Although we had another week of shooting left there, we had to get out of Mexico within 24 hours.''

Miss Thomas and Mr. Nava completed the filming in California, and tasted their first triumph later three days after the print left the laboratory: After the premiere of ''El Norte'' at the Telluride Film Festival during Labor Day weekend, the filmmakers were gratified not only by the standing ovations but by offers of distribution - ''from some of the very people,'' Miss Thomas said, ''who told us 'El Norte' would never get made.''

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