Carne de tu carne (1983)

User Rating:

6.7/10   

Director:

Carlos Mayolo

Writers:

Carlos Mayolo (writer)
Jorge Nieto (writer)

Release Date:

25 December 1983 (Colombia)

Genre:

Drama | Horror

Awards:

2 wins & 1 nomination

Cast

Adriana Herrán
David Guerrero
Santiago García
Vicky Hernández
Carlos Mayolo
Sebastián Ospina
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Josué Ángel
Silvio Arango
Paulina de Duque
Alberto Dow
Karen Lamassonne
César Mejía
Sonia Montero
Luis Ospina
Lina Uribe

Runtime:

94 min

Country:

Colombia

Language:

Spanish

Trivia:

This film was dedicated to Roger Corman and Roman Polanski.

Tropical Gothic...baroque

An extremely interesting film about La Violencia in Colombia which captures the strange social and political heterogeneity of this dark set of events. Mayolo developed his own aesthetic - partly in collaboration with filmmaker Luis Ospina and the late Andrés Caicedo - 'el gótico tropical' in order to convey this strangeness. The film combines local Colombian myths - caspi, la madremonte, el hojarasquin del monte - with themes of vampirism and incest to convey the place of La Violencia within a repetitive and cyclical history characterised by interpartisan conflicts that benefit the empowerment of the Colombian aristocracy. Opening with a series of cross-cuts showing, alternately, a dying grandmother, and a group of graverobbbers in the countryside of the Cauca region, the film (as suggested by these images) delves deep into the 'other scene' of political life and into the dark quasi- supernatural forces driving it. Whether Mayolo's 'tropical Gothic' works is another matter, and whether it is Gothic or indeed baroque is a question that the spectator might wish to ask him/herself. Some of the performances are strong (particularly Mayolo's own cameo as the family chauffeur-cum 'pájaro'), others, however, are fairly weak - in particular that of Andrés Alfonso and Enrique, the Communist uncle, whose performances waver between the wooden and the melodramatic. The whirring, moaning soundtrack nicely conveys the sense of historical repetition.