Director: Felipe Gálvez Haberle (Chile, Argentina, UK, Taiwan, Germany, Sweden, France, Denmark). Year of Release: 2023
1901, Tierra del Fuego on the Southern tip of Chile. From a distance, we watch a team of farmers erecting a fence. As a red jacketed man arrives on horseback, we hear a scream off camera. One of the farmers has had an accident and lost his arm. This means that he will no longer be profitable as a labourer. As the man protests that it’s not a deep injury, and he’ll be all right soon, the horseman lifts his pistol and shoots him in the head.
Alexander MacLennan speaks in a Scottish accent, but everyone assumes he’s an Englishman. His boss, sheep baron José Menéndez, offers him a new job. Menéndez’s sheep need to be taken to the port where they will be shipped off and sold. MacLennan’s job is to find a route to the port that can be used to transport the sheep. And if he can use the journey to exterminate indigenous people who don’t understand property rights and keep eating Menéndez’s sheep, all the better.
Menéndez asks MacLennan how many people he needs to accompany him on his journey. Just the one, answers the Scot. To help him choose, he organises a shooting competition for the farm labourers. Segundo, who is half-Chilean, half-native, proves himself to be a capable shot. As security, Menéndez tells MacLennan that he must also take Bill, a US-American racist, who can “smell an Indian for miles”, and is full of tales of his recent history fighting natives in Mexico.
Bill mistrusts mixed race people like Segundo: “You never know who they’re going to shoot.” This helps build a hierarchy of power – Menéndez dictating what happens from afar, MacLennan, who gives the immediate orders, with Bill below him and Segundo who’s aware that any of them can kill him at any time, and nobody would complain. This power structure is most visible when the men capture and rape a woman, and let Segundo know that he must join in or lose his life.
This is all sounding promising, isn’t it? Not a barrel of laughs for sure, but a searing indictment of the evils of colonialism. As one character says, “wool stained with blood loses its value”. Whereas other films tell a story almost exclusively from the point of view of the colonisers, Colonos is largely shown from the POV of Segundo. It makes no excuses for any of the attacks made, either on Chilean natives or on indigenous people. It refuses to sugar coat the evil of empire.
This makes it particularly sad to say that, as a film, Colonos just didn’t work for me. I am in a minority on this – it got rave reviews from both critics and cinemagoers, many of whom enjoyed it despite its political message. By contrast, although I am fully on board with what the film is trying to say, it didn’t speak to me as a piece of drama. Where other people saw important sociological observations, I just saw a bunch of (largely) men talking endlessly while they ride into the distance.
Maybe it’s in part a genre thing. Colonos is, essentially, a Western. It is a lot more progressive than most Westerns, and is unusual in that it has a social conscience, but it is still a story of stern jawed pioneers riding into the blue yonder. Like most Westerns, Colonos feels way too interested in the fate of its individual heroes rather than in deeper social change. The landscapes are beautiful for sure, but this is no substitute for actual conversation.
I know it seems counter-intuitive to saw Colonos avoids social change. We see great barbarism being meted out to Chile’s indigenous population, and how the creation of new borders did for the old Chile what the clearances did for rural Scotland. And the violence in the film is often seen to be important for how it affects the protagonists. Some of the greatest brutality is not even shown directly, but through the grimace on Segundo’s face, as he is forced to endure watching it happen.
While Colonos does not shy away from talking about the violence of colonialism, and there are some scenes of shocking brutality, we do not directly view much of the violent dispossessions of native Chileans. This is particularly true of the final section, set 7 years after the main action, when witnesses relate the brutality of the “Red Pig”, as MacLennan went down in Chilean history. Increasingly, the barbaric violence becomes mediated through its effect on someone else.
This larger scale violence is mirrored in individual indignities, such as when McLennan and his party come across a troop of British mercenaries, with whom they are encouraged to compete in shooting, arm wrestling and boxing. I’m sure this is trying to make a significant dramatic point about the way in which carrying out such atrocities brutalises the men responsible, but the sheer relentlessness made watching the film more an exercise in endurance than of entertainment.
I celebrate Colonos’s content, and welcome the fact that cinemas are prepared to show the long ignored genocide of the Selk’nam people. At the same time, I found myself being slightly bored by the way in which the story is told. The cinematography is beautiful, but is this really a history which needs to be beautified? Yes I know, light and shade, contrast, and all that, but you feel conflicted when the pictures of ethnic cleansing looked just so pretty.
Colonos has been compared to Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, by which I guess the people making the comparison don’t mean that there a long unnecessary bits which could have been removed without seriously affecting the plot. I see it as a noble failure – an attempt to come to terms with an important but under-reported part of history. It didn’t work for me, but if its message hits other people watching, then it has done its job.
CinePhil 