Cannes review: “La Jauria” by Andres Ramirez Pulido

In the jungle, no one can feel you drag your body. Remember, nobody pays much attention to what you do in the city. The first feature film by Colombian director Andrés Ramírez Pulido, the judgeThe screening of Critics’ Week in Cannes begins with familiar images of contemporary Latin American cinema: a teenage couple in the darkness of a neon-lit city, some subtle smells and a nose wash, a bicycle screaming “stolen”. “When they are traveling, they soon lose an unknown and much more distant area. You can be sure of one thing: wherever you are, these guys are in trouble.

Where I am, as this opening sequence shows a scene that instantly knocks us to the ground, is a mystery. Elieu (Joan Steven Jiménez), previously seen at the lampposts with a bottle in hand, is one of the gang working in a broken hacienda who cleans the pool in the sun before entering the clearing to do their exercises. Álvaro, (Miguel Vieira), heartbroken but stern, telling them to exhale, close their eyes and return the negative energy to the earth. The soundtrack is dominated by ritual drum rhythms. Then they sleep in a bare room, chained and bitten by mosquitoes. You misbehave and sit for hours in a stressful situation or force a group to starve for days while Álvaro convinces everyone that they like a gang. Fast and furiousThey are all families.

ლია Is there a place? It’s a kind of open prison, but it functions like a sect and, as we’ll see later, under the auspices of a remote chief who uses these minor inmates as cheap labor to turn the Hacienda into a spa hotel. Eliú refuses to talk to El Mono (Michael Andrés Jiménez) about his old street crime partner when he gets into a cattle truck with the next group of boys. The always cheeky Monkey wants to know why not. “Things are different here,” Eliu complains. She mainly looks at the ground when she is not working. Everyone does. “Swallow your words,” warns another inmate.

They are also required to take a number of unspecified drugs (modern prison guards), although this is not new to any of them. A conversation we overheard among the kids, a break from deforestation in the backyard of the Hacienda, is a live swap of the best drug combinations they’ve ever had. The best thing in life, the only good thing, is wasting time.

When Elius’ younger brother (Carlos Stephen Blanco) comes to visit, he is clearly shaping the same terrible future. “School: I’m not involved,” he said. “I swim with Cricket and his gang; We sat in a village house. “I learned something after they locked you up.”

The film suggests that there is something disgusting about these kids who are born into street crime, explode into violence and addiction, and provoke the usual lies. This cruelty, whether you want to take refuge in poverty, drug addiction, domestic violence or any demon, is ingrained in your whole life, or so you force them to believe in themselves, which is the same. “Let’s not waste time with this rascal,” the prosecutor said as he led Elius and El Mono through the chains into the woods at night to find the body of the man they had killed together. Godoy, an Avazak guard rarely seen without a huge shotgun hanging from his chest, gazes into the shadows. The relatives of the murdered, juvenile delinquent perpetrator, Eliu, presumably confused with his own father, accompany him while they interrogate the children. They appear to be in the field, but in the middle of the jungle at dawn.

This is the judge: A well-balanced mix of recognizable socialism and dystopian weirdness. Like the kids who take us to prison blindfolded, we never know exactly where we are. The stylized compositions showing the characters in the center of the screen for a moment add to the awkward feeling of being in a crazy world where some of us are prisoners and some of us are guards, but other than that, there are no rules. .

Exciting use of this and of the extraordinary natural landscape of Colombia, the judge 2019 feature film by Alejandro Landes monkeys, on the cult of teenage warriors trained by a group of maniacs in the mountains of Colombia. At first, one wonders if these two films, together, aren’t some kind of Colombian cinematic world, a strange franchise starring drug addict survivors. However, when it’s in its own hole, it looks more like a field of books. Children in war; Children in prison. Many children are as tall as kites. the judge Terrible, but it’s a very special movie.