TIFF 50: "Noviembre" makes for a formidable debut

by Cláudio Alves

Dedicated to the memory of the victims, their families, and those still looking for the missing, Tomás Corredor's directorial debut reflects on the Palace of Justice siege in Bogotá, Colombia, without ever leaving a bathroom where M-19 guerrilleros took refuge and held hostages over two fateful days in November 1985. It starts at the close, with archival recordings over grainy blackness from which the vision of a destroyed room emerges, sunlight pouring in through a hole in the wall. One might wonder what happened here that turned a commonplace public toilet into an apocalyptic tableau such as this. Noviembre then goes back, to the beginning of the end, when the militants first took their hostages into the windowless room and signed their fates…

Little context is provided beyond a couple of late-coming informative title cards, predicting the film on a storytelling strategy that privileges visceral understanding over pedagogical principles. Whatever Noviembre may be, it's not didactic. This could spell the project's doom if not for the exquisite craft on display and the unshakable meanings these audiovisual achievements produce. In fact, Corredor is quick to prepare the audience for the kind of experience ahead, deploying the double take device to revisit the same shot with different sound mixes and suggest an eerie wrongness that's not tied to the markers of more genre-oriented cinema.

The film only ever glimpses the outside world through news footage from 1985, showing the army's ruthless actions with a clinical objectivity that does nothing to conceal the brutality with which authorities delivered punishment. The insertion of realities occurring far from the dramatized sections should make the fiction feel less credible. Instead, the journalistic clips lend credibility to the other side of the film. Moreover, they underscore the idea of contemporary artists reckoning with the past, visualizing the dialogue between history and the present as a cutting between chronologically displaced images.

And what staggering images they are. Thought it'd be easy to lose oneself praising the sound design and editing work, Corredor's staging and the cinematography by Carlos Rossini and Nur Rubio are just as meritorious. Still, at first, mediums and close-ups with short focal lengths may suggest a dispiriting capitulation to televisual styles. Gradually, these strategies change. Consider the elemental verve that comes as smoke from unseen fires pours into the room, floating above, near the ceiling. On the floor, water floods, mixed with dirt, sweat, tears, and blood. In the middle, desperate bodies congregate and the reflected light paints shimmering spiderwebs over them. It's like the film plunges into a catatonic trance, a bad dream you can't wake up from.

Later, blackouts provide some of the riskiest images yet. These days, when digital photography often correlates to undecipherable dark frames, Corredor proves he knows more about the plasticity of the cinematic image than directors with filmographies ten or twenty times more extensive than his. The sinking into shadow is mesmerizing to observe. All the camera perceives are flushed cheeks and bulging eyes, faintly reflecting the warm emergency light that, kept out of frame, feels almost mystical in its provenance. These are sketches of humanity, delineated in ochre over inky black, as if someone smeared charcoal over a Caravaggio or a de La Tour.

If you can believe it, there are even more overwhelming sights to follow. For instance, the final attack by the military is a nightmare I struggle to adequately describe. In terms of form, it's all done through that glorious sound design and desolate frames, so full of desperate people they threaten to become an abstraction of mouths open in pleading screams. Cut to the aftermath, the silence, the shoes covered in rubble, a butterfly resting by a broken wall, air thick with dust. It's as if the light has turned the insubstantial into something material, thick, unbreathable, and both a manifestation of some divine sorrow and man-made cruelty. Is this justice? It doesn't look like it.

Textually, there's some Dog Day Afternoon here. At least, in theory. In practice, Noviembre may more closely resemble something like September 5 with all its limitations, its lack of direct engagement with the politics that underpin the action. And yet, returning to an earlier point, asserting Corredor's work is apolitical beyond a liberal weep at the tragedy of lives lost would be a lie. The actions of the military are inherently criticized just by the refusal to acknowledge their POV, grant them any characteristic that goes deeper than their indiscriminate, inhuman violence that targets everyone on sight – soldiers, militants, the accused terrorists and their victims alike.

Sure, this doesn't differ from the film's portrayal of the people inside. There's barely any character work or characters to begin with, the ensemble always working better as a group than as individual personalities whose allegiances and subjectivities inform the whole picture. Natalia Reyes still shines as the de facto protagonist, blessed with a Pieta-like moment in the dark and a bit involving a bottle of bright nail polish. It's in fragments like those that this whisper of a film finds its grace, its ultimate humanity and purpose. While limited in scope and a tad too short at 78 minutes, Noviembre still makes for a formidable directorial debut whose power lingers long after the credits roll.

At TIFF, Noviembre will screen again tomorrow, Sunday, September 7, as part of the festival's Discovery section.

Comments

[Pedro Penna]

Esse eu quero muito ver! Ótima análise, Cláudio!

[Cláudio Alves]

Pedro Penna -- Muito obrigado!