Los Muertos is the second installment of a trilogy Lisandro Alonso began with La Libertad (2001) and completed with the under-feature-length Fantasma (2006), which also starred Argentino Vargas (this time playing a character named Argentino). While a film student in Buenos Aires, Alonso spent time alone on country land owned by his father and became interested in how differently the rural poor behave compared to city dwellers, placing as they do less trust in the spoken word. Traveling the length of Argentina, Alonso began to formulate ideas for what would be La Libertad and Los Muertos; it was during these travels that he found Argentino Vargas, a manual laborer who accepted the star role in a feature film as if it were day work. In a 2005 interview, Alonso recalled that his only direction to Vargas (beyond a basic explanation of the point of each scene) was to avoid looking into the camera or making any facial expressions. While all this enforced minimalism might easily have resulted in (at best) an arty preciousness and (at worst) a deadly dullness, Alonso has created instead a work of art that is, for all its slowness and refusal to telegraph or explain emotions and motivations, arrestingly vital and revealing.
To be sure, Los Muertos isn't for everyone. The film has a deliberate rhythm and a modus operandi all its own and its enigmatic longueurs may be off-putting to the easily bored. Vargas' past as a (possible) spree killer colors his interactions with everyone he meets along his journey (a prostitute, the inmate's daughter and her family and eventually even his own grandson and granddaughter), prompting some viewers (principally North Americans) to fear that he is killing everyone he meets. Alonso offers little to contradict this suspicion, forcing the ambiguity to an edgy extreme in his closing shot of a dropped toy, at which point audiences will be moved to assume the worst or reevaluate everything they have just seen. Vargas' brusque downplaying of his past ("I'm over it") is ominous and he proves himself disconcertingly deft with a machete, slitting the belly of a goat as if opening an envelope and pulling out its entrails as nonchalantly as if he were emptying a bag of groceries. No animatronic prop was employed here; this is actual animal death, captured in real time. While it is always disturbing, even for meat-eaters, to see an animal killed on film, the moment is not squeezed for mondo style exploitation but rather presented as a matter of fact... or more to the point, a matter of life and death.
Los Muertos received a limited release in the United States via the prestigious auspices of Facets Multimedia and has been pressed as a Region 1 DVD by that company's home video arm. (The feature played the Anthology Film Archives in New York City and was included in the 2006 LA Film Festival as one of their "Films That Got Away.") Appropriate for a feature of such lush austerity, there are no extras. The image is presented in its original widescreen aspect ratio of 1.85:1. English subtitles are burned into the image, which has a generally high bit rate, resulting in a clear and occasionally startlingly chromatic picture (albeit with green being the dominant color). Contrasts are strong and black levels are appreciably deep. The two-channel mono soundtrack is clear and subdued, being mostly in the service of ambient sounds (of which there are many) and a hypnotic closing track from Flor Maleva.
For more information about Los Muertos, visit Facets Multimedia. To order Los Muertos, go to TCM Shopping.
by Richard Harland Smith
