(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Sicario
Directed by Dennis Villeneuve
photo: Roger Deakins
At the beginning of Canadian Denis Villeneuves Sicario we see an FBI team carrying out a violent raid by a drug dealer. After a dramatic round of arrest, they discover that the walls are filled with corpses. But there is more that is hidden, because under a hatch in the ground in a shed outside, there is an explosive charge on the nap that is detonated as the agents open the hatch / amazement package. Kate Macer – brilliantly played by Emily Blunt – stands on the edge of the blast, coming from the drama of her life in the making.
Shortly thereafter, she is contacted by a CIA team who wants her to take the men behind the hidden explosive charge and kill her colleagues. They want to "create turmoil" in drug traffic, as they say, on the US-Mexico border, thus misleading the mafia boss himself, Fausto Alarcon, from his hiding place. The CIA gang is led by a striking Josh Brolin in the role of Matt Graver, and an insidious and secretive Benicio del Toro in the role of Alejandro. They achieve their goals, in a sense, even though the "goal" is redefined along the way and roles are shuffled towards the end of the film. Hidden agendas are uncovered and dark motifs appear. The film's climax takes place underground – between the US and Mexico.
Sicario is probably the least enigmatic of Villeneuve's recent films and a light version of the problems he addresses in the previous masterpieces ENEMY og Prisoners. But with its relatively well-organized crime story and the film's fantastic photo, it will probably appeal to many more.
The back of reason. As with Prisoners og ENEMY (both 2013) this movie is also drawn in the direction of something mythical or allegorical. Sicario is quite right about drug cartels in the south of the United States and in border towns in Mexico, but in reality goes far deeper than that. It goes in the direction of some fundamental evil, a satanic maliciousness that goes beyond the crime itself. When the CIA team travels into the border town of Juárez to retrieve Fausto Alarcon's brother from prison – with solid backing from Mexican police – it's like a trip down into the underworld or hell. Things are out of control. We hear howls and shouts. We hear screams, blasts and gunshots from both near and far.
The dead bodies hanging from the bridges in Juárez further demonstrate the state of chaos: This is not just a city with a lot of crime, but a mythical place. The serving of the dead – headless and naked, with severed limbs – is Villeneuve's homage to Francisco Goyas The horrors of war, a series of erasures that also open the doors to a brutality that goes beyond our senses. The barbaric is not something that can be explained, but something that challenges the boundaries of how we organize reality.
Lookalikes. The introductory quote to Villeneuves ENEMY can, in this sense, stand as a motto for his production: "Chaos is order that has not yet been deciphered." The statement, taken from José Saramago's novel The Double which the film is based on, suggests that the enigmatic can be explained if we look closely enough. ENEMY – especially with its terrifying and marvelous ending – invites to such decoding, but I think we can just as easily turn the statement upside down for Villeneuve. For the question is not only whether what is chaotic can be understood, but that what is understood carries a chaos. It is this chaos, or this disorder, that Villeneuve reintroduces in symbolic form in his films.
Although the motives for the violence can be presented and illuminated rationally, the floodgates of chaos have been opened. And it is this landscape – where we balance between the symbolic and the mythical on the one hand, and recognizable everyday reality on the other – that Villeneuve is so concerned with. That is also what makes him so good.
We hear howls and shouts. We hear screams, explosions and shots from both far and near.
His films are all about the boundaries of identity in one form or another, but it is special ENEMY who penetrate into this issue. The film explores what happens when we meet someone who is identical with ourselves – down to the smallest detail, such as scars on the body, laughter and tone of voice. The answer given in the film is ambiguous and enigmatic, but at the same time it is obvious that such a doubling of yourself leads to a disintegration of reality. Your own exact doubling is something that is not can exist without both you and the world around you having to be radically redefined. Villeneuve's exploration of what happens when we pursue our own reflection is extremely interesting. Here he is close to his compatriot David Cronenberg's films – besides, of course, David Lynch.
The boundaries of morality. Prisoners also revolve around identity, but move away from the enigmatic doubling and towards the boundaries of morality. It asks how far we are willing to go, what we are capable of, when the lives of our loved ones are in danger. If your child is kidnapped, how far can the elastic be stretched to get it back? Villeneuve extends it very far in Prisoners, but I think most of us are willing to follow him in the thought experiment.
Although it is less enigmatic than ENEMYis Prisoners notched more disturbingly than both ENEMY og Sicario, because it penetrates deep into the turbidity we would rather not take in. For if the lives of others must be sacrificed in order for you to save your own child – are you then willing to do so? And can you take the law into your own hands, as Keller Dover – played by a frantic and desperate Hugh Jackman – does?
I Prisoners there is a symbol of a labyrinth that plays a central role in the solution to the drama that the film revolves around. The symbol, which has different roles in the film, is in fact also a picture of the Cretan labyrinth, without this being explicitly mentioned in the film. According to mythology, this was a maze containing the monster Minotauros – half human and half ox – and to which the people of Crete sacrificed humans to keep calm. As is well known, Icarus and his father managed to escape from the labyrinth, before the former fell into the Mediterranean and drowned. Theseus became the one who managed to crack the monster by putting a thread behind him as he entered the labyrinth (Ariadne's thread). Villeneuve uses the image we have of this labyrinth hardly for no reason, because the labyrinthine plays a central role in his films.
At Villeneuve, it all boils down to questions such as "What is it that makes us free, and what is it that locks us in?" We may be trapped in an outer labyrinth, but it is inner the maze that is the hardest to find the way out of, he suggests. Getting others out of the maze, as in Prisoners and Sicario, can also cause you to lock yourself inside it.
Røed is a regular critic in Ny Tid. kjetilroed@gmail.com
