We Shall Not Be Moved - Sedentary Cinema At The Oscars
Don't expect the usual demeaning caricatures sidelining female elders in this deplorable Mexican international Oscar entry this year, when not monsters on the menu of horror fare. In fact far worse, at least when it comes to that other usual 'out of context cinema' bypassing history in progress all around it.
For starters, the misleading title, whether intentional or not - an insult to the historic US Civil Rights Movement anthem. In other words, in a case of detrimental double meaning, dismissing both popular struggle and the honoring of those who sacrificed enabling those causes as a kind of psychological impairment - embracing collective sedentary amnesia as the path forward instead.
Symbolizing and central to this drama's cynical historical hypothesis, is Socorro (Luisa Huertas), a seemingly senile alcoholic, chain smoking Mexican lawyer. The bitter, bedraggled Socorro is portrayed as psychotically obsessed with finding and murdering the unindicted officer who tortured to death her brother nearly six decades ago during the 1968 student uprising culminating in the Tlatelolco Massacre. And though her family is dismissive of what is portrayed as a toxic mix of geriatric fantasy and dementia, Socorro proceeds on her determined mission. This while soliciting the assistance of local hitmen, when not staging a homicidal dress rehearsal murdering a neighbor's cat. And the rest is history - or rather, not.
Much more a reflection of perhaps pessimistic and derisive younger generations today, the film sets itself squarely, when it comes to the real world all around them, a flinching Mexico bowing beneath the bullying, increasingly imposing threats of the US that began with renaming the Gulf Of Mexico. And which has progressed to internal signaling of that potential invasion of the country, under the pretext of wiping out their neighbor's domestic criminal activity - along with the simultaneous encroaching US occupation of the entire Caribbean with their massive military fleet, and engaged in assassinating alleged fishing boat suspects in the surrounding waters.
Thus signaling a not unrelated allegory of a film promoting historical passivity and amnesia as the cure, culminating in a cynically rehabilitated Socorro ultimately breaking with the past in creating a funeral pyre out of a symbolic photo of both criminal perpetrators and victims. And likely palatable simultaneously to US movie audiences - that is, the Oscars...
Prairie Miller
