Días de Santiago | Review

Drama shows the harsh reality and difficult transition of re-adapting with society.

Aside from heavily missed home-cooked meals, the most required need for young men who sign up for a holiday in the military and finally make their way back to familiar soil is an extended adjustment period. Filmmaker Josue Mendez’s directorial debuts examines the slow erosion of the human spirit and suffice to say that Agent Orange is not the root of all evil for some of these former killing machines. This is a rigorously hopeful drama, an economically shot oeuvre that depicts how one solider attempts to steer himself straight and clear from the lures and temptations of a culture and a country in reverse.

Featured in the bustle, but more of the hustle streets of the economically starved Peruvian capital of Lima, this describes the difficult process of returning into civilization,- for some young men the homecoming is a very unwelcoming experience. Capturing the face of angst, young actor Pietro Sibille plays a character filling himself up with other people’s chaos, which in the end, he makes them his own. Unemployment stings the young Santiago, but a car and a cab job become the tools for a possible new life.

With a low budget guise, this festival winner shows how dense and dark the populated jungle has become, but this is not a jungle full of green and stained with red. Mendez shifts from black and white to color lenses in an attempt to demonstrate his struggle and his sanity, an idea which is furthered in the sequences of Sibille’s narration – which features the character drilling himself with his own mantra of survivalist methods but where the accompanying visuals disagree and exposes the character’s vulnerabilities.

While Días de Santiago certainly feeds off of a Taxi Driver discourse, the chaos build up in the protagonist is poorly distributed and badly constructed – the flash-back sequences seem to ill represent the protagonist’s former tainted self and don’t provide the viewer with a nightmarish world in which escapism is the only method of survival. The sequences that feature pulsating moments of chaos only partially feed the film, but they don’t justify the character’s overabundance of pressures and the psychological dilemmas of his aim for purity over sin. With limited resources, and plenty of close-up shots of beads of sweat, Mendez depends too much on the actor’s frantic outbreaks in front of a camera rather than a suggested identity deconstruction, making his first work an admirable start that lacks a little depth.

Viewed in Original Spanish language with English Subtitles.

The 33rd edition of the Montreal Festival of Nouveau Cinema.

Rating 2 stars