Monos, a Savage Tale

White clouds drift idly underneath the blue sky as a group of blindfolded teenagers play football over the grounds filled with red vegetation...

The Colombian film Monos (2019) looks surreal at the outset. The film tells the story of a group of teenage guerrillas guarding an American hostage (Doctora) and a milk cow on the top of an impossibly high mountain. The film’s atmosphere switches between astonishing beauty and extreme horror, and the audience witnesses how a small, isolated community transforms from utopia to heterotopia and eventually to dystopia.

Be it in terms of style, genre or narrative, the film is difficult to classify and confusing. But if we trace back from the text, we can get relevant hints.

On the first level, it explores human nature. The film is based on the novel Lord of the Flies by British writer William Golding (1911-1993); it is an attempt to examine the evils of human nature by analyzing children surviving on a deserted island. A pig's head impaled on a pole appears in the film in homage to the novel.

On the second level, it is a war movie. As the director Colombian-Ecuadorian Alejandro Landes said, this is a war that can happen anywhere. When he and co-screenwriter Alexis Dos Santos wrote the script, they looked to the Soviet film Come And See (1985) for how the war was written from the traumatic perspective of children. In addition, the film also inherits the dramatic context and moral legacy of films such as Beau Travail (France, 1999) and Apocalypse Now (1979).

On a third level, the Colombian civil war serves as another source of inspiration for the film. The guerrillas in the film are based on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Founded in the 1960s, this armed organisation is well-equipped, large in number, and well-trained, and includes many children and female guerrillas. This conflict of "all against all" has lasted for over half a century and caused tens of thousands of casualties.

What’s amazing is that the film combines non-professional actors, perseverance in surviving the wilderness, and savage minds to create a highly original ‘savage movie’. One reviewer exclaimed, “This film is a f***ing masterpiece.”[1]

Savage Faces

At the beginning of the film, everything is ambiguous. What organisation the teenagers belong to, what war they are fighting, why did they kidnap the American engineer, and why they’ve to care for the milk cow are all distant and abstract concepts in the film. What we are gradually becoming familiar with are the eight unforgettable teenage faces in the close-up shots. They are a group of guerrillas code-named “Monos”, and they each have very cartoonish names: Lobo (‘Wolf’ in English), Leidi (Lady), Rambo, Patagrande (Bigfoot), Swedica (Swede), Blutufo (Smurf), Perro (Dog) and Boom Boom.

On this remote mountain, these faces are wild and enchanting. Their race and history are unknown, their identity and ideology are difficult to distinguish, and even the gender and sexual orientation of several teenagers are quite ambiguous. The film uses this ambiguity to get rid of the predetermined “causes and effects” in audiences’ minds, causing the audience to gradually lose their bearings and immerse themselves in the film stripped bare of all expectations and prejudices. During military training led by the dwarf commander, the film uses a lot of close-ups of the actors looking directly into the camera. Their faces become the windows to the characters’ souls, and their eyes freely reveal the suppressed vitality. Picturesque scenery and real, grimy faces, youth and machine guns, beauty and terror – all collide in an explosion of poetic beauty.

The film's casting was very successful. Rambo's androgyny and sentimentality, Patagrande's ruthlessness and decisiveness, Swedica's innocence and mental breakdown, Leidi's vulnerability and hunger for love, etc. – every character is portrayed vividly and realistically. In fact, except for the well-known actor Moisés Arias who plays Patagrande and Julianne Nicholson who plays the American engineer, everyone else are non-professional actors selected from a pool of 800 children auditionees. Wilson Salazar, who plays the Messenger, was a real guerrilla from age 11 to 24. His short stature and huge authority is also a form of metaphor.

The film’s landscape is also a significant part of the narrative, symbolising the characters’ loneliness and helplessness. The first half of the film was shot on the Chingaza plateau in Cundinamarca, Colombia, where the altitude is over 4,000 metres, and this extreme natural environment pushes everyone to their limits. On the first day of filming, someone had to be transported to the hospital in an ambulance. The second half of the film with a jungle and canyon was filmed in the Samaná Norte River in the Antioquia Department. Due to the treacherous terrain and extreme weather conditions, filming in these locations was unprecedented. The actors entered this perilous environment, where such an existence of places and faces, geography and physiognomy directly reflect the characters' primal instincts.

In the first stage, The Monos seems to be a utopia that complies with the "laws of nature". Weddings and birthdays, bonfire parties and bathing in streams all show that they have a friendly relationship, including the hostage. As a result, this portion of the film is filled with an atmosphere of sensual ecstasy: capoeira, sexual experimentation, getting high on shrooms, and drunken shootings. The film uses a scene of three people kissing together to imply this primitive, tribal-like openness to love and desire. But this peaceful harmony was soon broken by the death of the cow and the suicide of troop leader Lobo.

If a person's sense of security and existence comes from his stable connection with the world around him, then the relationship between the members of the Monos shows its fragility and transient nature, before the isolated society gradually broke apart. The "whistleblower" incident instigated by the Messenger almost destroyed the trust among the members. After Patagrande killed the Messenger, their contact with the organization was also disrupted. At this time, the atmosphere of terror reached its peak and the conflict turned inward. They begin to kill each other, and the paradise-like landscape deepens the film’s sense of claustrophobic terror.

It’s a fine line between heaven and hell, and it is one decision away from becoming a fallen angel. There's a scene where the hostage is swimming in the beautiful azure waters, but she's chained to the bottom of a cliff. In the next scene, that innocent lady becomes a murderer. (This part of the plot is based on the biographies of a large number of hostages kidnapped in Colombia.)

Apparently, the children did not develop a deep connection with nature either. This reminds me of another Colombian movie El Abrazo de la Serpiente (2015). Despite losing all contact with human society, the protagonist relies on his spiritual connection with nature to establish a spiritual ark of salvation.

Savage Minds

Savage poetry permeates the film. Causal relationships are removed from the plot, with everchanging emotions driving the plot instead. Dreamy scenes appear intermittently in the film – drunken revelry, going on psychedelic trips from eating poisoned mushrooms, delirium caused by fear, etc. – making this film feel dreamlike and fantastical.

Therefore, this is a pioneering work with "savage thinking". As Hungarian scholar Yvette Biro said in the book Profane Mythology: The Savage Mind of the Cinema, movies simulate people’s inner world and consciousness. This is a kind of primitive mythical thinking that skims over the superficialities of everyday life and captures the deep spiritual ghosts of human beings in the form of dreams, memories, imaginations, hints, rituals and symbols.

This dreamy atmosphere is enhanced by cinematographer Jasper Wolf's supersaturated images that transform pastoral landscapes into green infernos. The disciplined bodies in the frame and the close-ups of actors looking directly into the camera all exude a grotesque charm. Both infrared and underwater cinematography have a mysterious magic that makes people feel an out-of-body experience.

Composer Mica Levi's electronic music is harsh and foreboding, at times sounding like an erupting volcano, others, like a rolling thunder clashing against the screen. The music and sound are in the style of the Russian symphonic fairy tale Peter & the Wolf, where all the main characters have their own characteristic sounds. In the last section, the teenagers no longer even speak, instead communicating through whistles and imitating birdcalls, which signals loneliness and decline. The sound of gunshots, on the other hand, is another language representing revelry, despair and killing.

The film is a group portrait of what the members are like, and no one is truly innocent. Yet in the second half, the audience will come to identify with the beautiful Rambo who tries to escape. She repeatedly used infrared vision glasses to observe people in the war. In the negative black-and-white images, she saw the naked souls of humans and the absurdity of reality. This is the beginning of her awakening; however, under peer pressure, her tears and compassion are considered weaknesses, and only cruelty is normal. In war, it is not just relationships that are torn apart by hatred and fear, but also one’s mind. The black camouflage dye covering the children's bodies thus hints at the evil lurking in their hearts. Finally, Rambo escaped by jumping into the river, the rapids carrying her downstream like a broken twig, and the film closes with her terrified and tearful gaze, haunted by the uncertainty about her survival.

Monos is not only an allegory of Colombia's conflict, but also a post-apocalyptic version of a brief history of mankind. It forms a metaphor for humanity as a whole: the intellectual level of humanity is still in its infancy, while the rapidly advancing technology is like a machine gun that’s in the hands of children. So, how do we avoid our annihilation?

[1]https://www.cinephiled.com/interview-director-alejandro-landes-colombias-powerful-oscar-submission-monos/