El Norte (The Criterion Collection)
by Gregory Nava
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DVD details
Actor: David Villalpando, Zaide Silvia GutierrezDirector: Gregory Nava
Brand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); English (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 140 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-01-20
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Criterion
DVD Reviews of El Norte (The Criterion Collection)
DVD Review: undocumented workers as human beings--a surprise to some people
Summary: 5 Stars
I once heard right-wing political commentator Pat Buchanan fulminate on PBS' "McLaughlin Group" that "Hispanics are out to destroy America." The response of his co-panelists to this declaration of bigotry was silence. In a curious way that has been the dynamic of the "dialogue" on the issue of the Hispanic presence in this country, a presence that has existed long before Anglos "bought" the Southwest from Mexico. Today, people may claim that the target of their bigotry is merely illegal immigrants, but this is merely a shield behind which to throw their brickbats from. To the hardcores, legal or illegal, they are all the "same." Adding to the effect, mass media and politicians disseminate the kind of racist propaganda and carefully selected "facts" that give people a sop in which to vent on and blame. The fact that the one-quarter of all illegal immigrants who come from non-Latin American countries are never mentioned by the media or politicians proves that this is not just an anti-immigrant issue, but an anti-Hispanic issue.
Who are these people but vermin and pests, as the Nazis viewed the Jews and Gypsies? One would expect, of course, that "progressive" mass media (that is, the media that is not Fox News or right-wing radio) would find a way to "humanize" Hispanic immigrants, or at least Hispanics who are U.S. citizens. But that has become harder and harder to come by. Only organizations that track the rising tide of hate in this country, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, even bothers to grant Hispanics their rights as human beings.
There was a very brief moment in history when television shows like "Zorro" and "The Cisco Kid," were popular hits that starred Hispanic heroes, but their success was more due more to their exoticness for viewers just getting their feet wet with the new television media. After those two shows went off the air, there was a long lapse until "Chico and the Man," whose initial popularity started to wane when the Man's racism was toned down after Hispanic advocates complained; Freddy Prinz's suicide along with the post 1970s rupturing of the television audience marked the end of television's attempt to fashion a hit from the Hispanic point-of-view. Cable series like "American Family" was nothing more than a "serious" Hispanic "Cosby Show" (but nowhere near as popular), its white feminist "sensibility" eviscerating what Hispanic cultural mores there were.
So much for television; up until the 1950s, film relegated Hispanics to the usual caricatures of spitfires, bandits and comic relief. Actors like Marlon Brando, would however, lend their weight to productions like "Viva Zapata!" during a period where serious political and social issues were being explored--strange how the supposedly "traditional" 1950s were more radical in this way than the supposedly "radical" 1960s. The 1980 film "Romero," concerned the assassinated liberation theology archbishop of El Salvador (interestingly, Pope John Paul II was so opposed by the idea of the rights of the poor espoused by liberation theologists that he moved to replace them with more conservative prelates--those backing the tyranny of right-wing regimes).
But such films were rare. Certain Reagan-era films like "Salvador" examined right-wing death squads and "Under Fire" which examined pre-Sandinista Nicaragua, but they had focused on the POV of white heroes, and Hispanics in these films were generally on the fringes or caricatures. Today, Hispanic women are seen far more often than men, usually cavorting with white men in the cause of gaining false status--although it has to be admitted that this is generally reflective of the current social mores inherent in the de facto caste system in this country. The stereotypes in which Hispanic man are disparaged for are the same ones that some find appealing in Hispanic women; me, I'd rather be a soldier than a strumpet. Only a strumpet would decide that the only subject worthy of examination in regard to the Hispanic "experience" is films like "Trade" which really has nothing to do with the Hispanic experience, but merely more feminist propaganda that reinforces popular prejudices to promote a political agenda.
Thus it is somewhat surprising that the 1981 film version of "Zoot Suit," based on a play written by a Hispanic and which dared to examine the Mexican-American experience from the POV of a Mexican-American actually made it on American screens. And then there is "El Norte." In his highly laudatory 1983 review of this film, Roger Ebert--who declared this film the "Grapes of Wrath" of our time--acknowledges that "It tells the story through the eyes of its heroes, and is one of those rare films that grant Latin Americans full humanity."
I hadn't seen "El Norte" in over two decades, until it (finally) arrived on DVD this year; this is obviously not the story xenophobes want told. It tells the same story that the oppressed and impoverished in Europe had experienced and wished to escape from, and until the 1920s could do so--without legal hindrance--for the price of ship fare. One would have to be a neo-Nazi or otherwise heartless and inhuman not to recognize the universality of the natural human instinct to live with some degree of dignity. The film's two young protagonists, Enrique (David Villapando) and Rosa (Zaide Silvia Guiterrez) are no different than those tens of millions of Europeans who immigrated to a country whose immigration motto was, until the early Twentieth century, "Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free." I find it (barely) amusing that some Americans (particularly those of Italian descent) never tire of proclaiming that their predecessors came to this country "legally," when in fact through most of this country's history you were "legal" merely by being white.
Of course, Enrique's and Rosa's problem is that the American Dream is legally closed to them, but before they find this out, they must endure a Guatemalan society that views indigenous Indians as virtual slaves to be killed if they step out of line (just as their father, and probably their mother, is). Guatemala had one of the most brutal right-wing regimes in Latin America, propped-up by the Reagan administration in its war against "communism"; naturally, we have the nerve to question why Enrique and Rosa, innocents being hunted by the regime's paid killers, would want to escape with their lives. Director Gregory Nava paints this segment of the film in colors and symbols suggesting a purity of spirit that contrast with brutal reality; this also reflects the pairs' naïve view of the land milk and honey--el norte--which also clashes with the reality they find.
The second section of the film deals with brother and sister's travails in Mexico in search of a coyote to take them across the border; their innocent naiveté clashes with the bemused cynicism of the Mexicans, who literally live in a world that exists developmentally somewhere between Guatemala and the United States. Gone are the lush forests and bright colors, replaced by barren desert and the Mexican version of Hoovervilles. But this, after all, is not Enrique's and Rosa's final destination, and they find a coyote who takes pity on them as a favor for a friend. The crossing, seemingly safe, turns out to harrowing and for one, in the end, terminal.
Once in America, life in the underbelly of society is a series of brief moments of happiness interspersed within uncertainty, fear, disillusionment and insecurity. The tiny motel room that Enrique and Rosa share is far from the pages of Good Housekeeping, and while they find work, the threat of immigration authorities and malicious co-workers is ever present. They want to be good Americans, so they learn English. But this is a story not about how to "make it" as an undocumented worker, but about people, and what it means to be human. When Rosa becomes mortally ill with murine typhus, Enrique must make a decision between the bonds he has with his sister, and his future; the decision he makes defines what being human is.
The story "El Norte" tells is so far beyond the racist propaganda being disseminated today that it is easy to see how those who view Hispanics immigrants as objects of disdain rather than human would be greatly annoyed by it--even calling it a "lie." That, of course, is the real lie, for political expediency. This film, although politics may be inferred in it, is not in any way political. It is simply about real people and real life.
Description of El Norte (The Criterion Collection)
Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa flee persecution at home in Guatemala and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a new life. It s a story that happens every day, but until Gregory Nava's groundbreaking El Norte (The North), the personal travails of immigrants crossing the border to America had never been shown in the movies with such urgent humanism. A work of social realism imbued with dreamlike imagery, El Norte is a lovingly rendered, heartbreaking story of hope and survival, which critic Roger Ebert called a Grapes of Wrath for our time.DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
New, restored high-definition digital transfer supervised and approved by director Gregory Nava
New audio commentary featuring Nava
In the Service of the Shadows: The Making of El Norte: a new video program featuring interviews with Nava, producer and cowriter Anna Thomas, actors Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez and David Villalpando, and set designer David Wasco
Wall of Silence, a new short documentary by Nava and Barbara Martinez Jitner, concerning the building of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border
The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva, the 1972 award-winning student film by Nava
Gallery of Chiapas location-scouting photographs
Theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by novelist Héctor Tobar and Roger Ebert's 1983 review of the film
The audience for El Norte splits into two factions. There are those who, ever since its 1983 Telluride Film Festival unveiling, have spoken reverently of it as a great film, "a Grapes of Wrath for our time." And then there are those who find it a decent movie deserving of respect as passionate social protest, but seriously compromised by a Filmmaking 101 approach. Hailed as "the first epic" of the independent American cinema, the film focuses on two young Mayan Indians--sister Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez) and brother Enrique (David Villalpando)--whose lives are shattered by the Guatemalan civil war. As one says to the other, "The past is gone forever ... you're my whole family now." They flee to Mexico with the ultimate goal of crossing into the United States--"El Norte"--where they hope for a new, secure life. The film aspired to put a face on the "invisible people," the shadow population of undocumented aliens that had become a key, though rarely acknowledged, element of the American economy--and if anything, the movie's relevance has grown more urgent over the ensuing quarter-century.
Directed by Gregory Nava, who wrote the screenplay with his wife Anna Thomas, El Norte portrays both the beauty and harshness of Rosa and Enrique's homeland; the low comedy and justifiable paranoia that mark their passage through Mexico, especially Tijuana, a "lost city" where everyone is "temporary"; and the culture shock of encountering America, where "even the poorest people have toilets." The filmmakers were after more than docudrama; their movie reaches for a mystical dimension, weaving imagistic and color motifs from native myth into the visual design, as well as incorporating periodic declarations about life on Earth being only a dream. The problem is that much of this comes off as earnest schematic rather than compelling cinema. The film is most alive in the presences of newcomers Gutiérrez and Villalpando; their actorly gifts are modest but sincere, and the mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation in their performances is genuine (they themselves were "without papers" as they shot their Los Angeles scenes).
This is one instance where the DVD extras markedly increase one's appreciation of the film, or more precisely, the fact that it exists at all. That's true less of director Nava's running commentary (which often sounds like a student displaying the note cards for his term paper) than of the accompanying featurette "In the Service of the Shadows: The Making of El Norte." Nava, Thomas, the two lead actors, and set designer David Wasco reminisce about the production, the effort of "a five-person crew in a VW van." Some of the stories are almost as harrowing as the film's most intense passages. These include a night in a remote Mexican village when the locals suddenly took umbrage at the film company's presence and formed into a mob--"anything could have happened, and no one would ever have known"--and a subsequent crisis when authorities seized reels of film and demanded a ransom beyond Nava's ability to pay. Apart from such melodrama-in-real-life, the documentary also impresses with revelations that, just as the Guatemalan sequences had to be shot in the Mexican states of Chiapas and Morelos (the civil war still being in progress), certain "Mexican" locations were convincingly replicated in Newhall, Calif.! "In the Service of the Shadows" is dedicated to El Norte's cinematographer, the late James Glennon (d. 2006), whose resourcefulness is gratefully remembered--shooting by candlelight in a town with no electric lighting--and whose artistry is abundantly apparent in the movie itself. --Richard T. Jameson
Stills from El Norte (Click for larger image)
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