El tenedor plástico (2001)

User Rating:

8.1/10   

Director:

Miguel Coyula

Writer:

Miguel Coyula (writer)

Genre:

Musical | Animation | Comedy | Fantasy | Sci-Fi

Tagline:

The theory of chaos takes the form of a farce

Plot:

After his girlfriend is brutally murdered a young man swears revenge with a plastic fork. |

Plot Keywords:

Plastic | Cuba

Cast

Adam Plotch	...	Adam / The Avenger
Chai Horowitz	...	Avenger's best friend
Nikita Lazarus	...	The girl of his dreams
Eric M. Wolfson	...	The Killer
Volonte Williams	...	Wrong Avenger
Alison Kemp	...	Girl inspired by the Avenger
Diana Kemp	...	The Inspiration's victim
Kate Currie	...	The telepathic accountant
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Ivan Botello	...	Cab driver (voice)
Dina Plotch	...	Adam's sister

Also Known As:

The Plastic Fork (International: English title)

Runtime:

53 min

Country:

Cuba | USA

Language:

English | French

Color:

Color | Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Pirámide

Trivia:

The film was written and shot over a two-week period, with different video formats and took six months to edit.

Quotes:

Adam: YOU are fast food.
The girl of his dreams: What's that supposed to mean?
Adam: I means you are tasty... It means that after I eat you... I have to hurry and find a way to get you out me... Because if I don't, it's gonna hurt my stomach and I'm going to explode.

Coyula's best work yet. A sincere testimony of the dos and don'ts of independent film-making.

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

A synopsis for this movie would roughly sound like this. Adam, a geek-looking character, dreams of a beautiful girlfriend like he'll never have in reality. One night, in one of those dreams, his best friend warns them that there's a murderer coming after them. They run away, but the mysterious killer catches up with the girl and injures her mortally. In her agony, she makes Adam swear to avenge her with an "ancient" plastic fork that she gives him. Once he awakes, he grows obsessed with finding the killer, although he knows that everything that happened was just a dream. Meanwhile, two gangsters who are dating the same girl confront each other after Adam threatens one of them over the other's phone. The girl they are fighting over turns out to be Adam's sister. At the same time, in Miami, a child girl grows more jealous of her younger sister every day, and plots a murderous scheme to get rid of her once and for all. All of this happens while an unnamed character that's also accumulating frustration on her own counts backwards until the end, in which the plastic fork connects each one of these stories. Even though all of them destroy themselves somehow, the possibility is open for the story to continue.

Coyula plays with different scenarios and possibilities. He leaves the audience to figure out which ones are really taking place. It's never clear if the characters, especially in the plot line that concerns Adam, are really there or if they are only the product of each other's imagination. One moment he's talking to his best friend in a full baseball stadium, and the next there isn't anyone else but the two of them. This character also disappears and reappears giving us the impression that Adam is only talking to himself among the loud baseball fans. In another scene, one moment Adam is arguing with a girl in a restaurant and the next he's waiting in a subway station. There, he recognizes his best friend, who acts like a he had never seen him before. In both of these scenarios, he looks like he just came from his high school graduation; an event that was supposed to have taken place years ago. It's almost like Adam is in several different places, confronting those who've wronged him all at the same time. Considering that the rest of the plot lines have the same gruesome ending as the one he's in, it could also be that Adam is imagining he's different people. On the other hand, he and everybody else in the story may live only in the imagination of a girl in San Francisco, who appears to be the only one who knows what's going on since she's counting backwards and finishes when all their fates come to a dead end, even hers.

Coyula, an atheist, tries to find an explanation for the workings of the universe in terms of a strange dependency among its conscious beings. In his belief system, objects and thoughts link creatures rather than place or time. The filmmaker is also the true God among entities who have the power of manipulating their reality at whim, like gods themselves, whether they are aware of it or not. There's a particular sequence in which a doll, an object typically made in resemblance to its creators and not able to act by itself, comes to life and impales itself in the fork. The only certain thing is that the main characters in each story line confront their greatest fears and give way to their frustrations by destroying them and themselves with the same object, unthinkable as a weapon. The banality of the means they use for this purpose reinforces the belief that fears are only as strong as we let them be. The plastic fork symbolizes such banality, or otherwise what their opponents see as the main characters' weaknesses. The fact that they destroy themselves when they kill their enemies shows how their deep-rooted fears had become part of their very own essence. It also symbolizes, once somebody finds the fork broken along the seashore, the only common thing in landscapes all over the world: Trash, which is said to define individuals, and evokes contamination, and therefore, evilness. Adam also represents those unable to compete according to the standards of physical strength and beauty in a consumerist society, which by definition tends to destroy itself. The fork as a symbol of this and Plotch's hysterical performance set the tone for the entire movie, which leans more towards the farcical and the absurd.

This film has the free spirit that characterizes films which remain a source of inspiration to new filmmakers and classics among film viewers, despite their commercial failure, and being widely misunderstood in their day. It brings to memory such titles as "Fando & Lis," by Alejandro Jodorowsky, a seemingly disjointed piece, shoot almost just for fun, which the most conservative factions of Mexican society tried to keep from being shown and was thought lost for a long time. A better-known example would be Luis Buñuel's "An Andalusian Dog," which defied rules in the same fashion and made no concessions in its intention to communicate an artistic vision in all its integrity. Hopefully, there will be a way for Coyula to overcome these objections and have the wider audience this particular work deserves. It is a challenging piece that calls for the active participation of the viewer, and teaches the aspiring filmmaker that, when there are not enough resources, the only way to say something meaningful through cinema may be to take as many chances as his/her intentions call for.