Chaco

While the story of "Chaco" comes from a real event - a territory war between Bolivia and Paraguay in the early 1930's - it's hard to figure out if the scenario presented had in fact happened. It's slightly interesting the way the film is composed with its long take sequences and some solid acting but it's a hardly engaging experience and sometimes it's so lost that it's a mystery as to why this story needed to be told.

Diego Mondaca's slow burn film presents a group of Bolivian indigenous soldiers under the command of a German captain (Fabián Arenillas) who try to find the enemy (the Paraguyans) while crossing a wild environment of tropic forests and some deserts. Far away from the typical war movie, the war we see in the picture is within the platoon itself since they fight against themselves as each dire scenario happens with them either dealing with food rationing, lack of water or just hierarchy problems, and the enemy they were supposed to be fighting never appears.

Though the film is a quite simplistic experience, the viewer gets lost just as much as the soldiers as to why certain things happen with those men. Where's the actual place they are going? Why they never address such issue, they just keep moving forward on and on without a map and it feels like they're walking on circles because they never find anything, except some natives, some barracks. Why the German commander makes tricks to deceive a soldier and consider him a deserter just so he can face severe punishment? Is this German commander foreseeing that the war is lost - since he already comes from a lost war, the WWI - and he just keeps wasting everybody's time and forces just to make everybody mad and start killing each other? "Chaco" throws so many questions without resolutions or meaning, and that can be an exhausting thing to do with an audience.

And another thing: the movie never provides a context for the war and the military men never address the issue, neither have a stance if they are favorable to the conflict or they're angry to be there for no reason. In fact, the war happened because 1) Bolivia wanted to extend their territory to reach the ocean (and they already had lost a similar cause when fighting against Chile); and 2) it came a rumor that oil was found at Chaco, so there were riches to be found. But even knowing those facts after seeing the movie it doesn't add up much to a story thrown to the wind with almost no purpose.

It wasn't a total loss since there were some special moments and in the end I had the chance to see an unfamiliar cinema to me, the one made in Bolivia. I might need to find something else later on to find some greatness in their cinema. This movie here was quite weak and emotionless. 5/10.