Ahoy, squirts. Quint here with a review of Alfonos Arau's newest directorial effort, ZAPATA! Arau is known to many as the director of flicks like A WALK IN THE CLOUDS and LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE. I must confess to being fairly ignorant of Arau's directorial work, but who could forget his turn as El Guapo in THREE AMIGOS! "It's a sweater!" Ahem... Anyway, here's The Fly's take on the flick!
Hi Harry,
Just call me The Fly. I'm a big fan of your site and read it every single day and have always wanted to contribute something but didn't really know what until now. I don't know if this will get posted, but I'll try my best to write something that doesn't sound like a bunch of bullshit. I went to Juarez, Mexico and caught Alfonso Arau's new film "Zapata" at a local theater. This is a long-awaited movie especially for fans of Arau's "Like Water For Chocolate" and "A Walk In The Clouds."
So how does Arau do with his epic about the legendary Mexican revolutionary? It's not total shit but it's not exactly the best foreign film of the year either. The photography is of course by Vitorrio "Apocalypse Now" Storraro and he does a magnificent job, the painter of light has not lost his touch and there are scenes of absolute visual beauty that have a great, epic air to them. The main flaw of this film resides in two things: the script and actors. The movie has received a lot of press in Latin America particularly because it's the first movie starring Mexican singing sensation Alejandro Fernandez, but while he's an excellent singer (he sings once or twice in the movie as a matter of fact), he's still new to this thing called acting and it shows. He's never given any large amounts of dialogue and as a result the conversations in the film feel rushed or too short, making it seem as if Emilio Zapata was a guy with not much to say about anything and Fernandez delivers it in a deadpan, simple tone that makes it all seem more like words he was memorizing instead of performing. He never feels inspiring or driven by a cause.
Another popular Mexican singer, Lucero, appears as Zapata's rich Spanish mistress, but she's also given shitty one-liners and even her sex scene with Fernandez feels short and amateurish. This is also her first major movie and she comes across as a singer trying to act more than a singer actually acting. Arau is an awesome director, he's worked with the best (as we all know, he was only in some little western called...THE WILD BUNCH!), but he deserves better talent for a work of this scale.
The other major flaw is the screenplay which Arau wrote. It never really lets us get to know Zapata as a person, he's more like a typical icon through-out the whole thing. Arau canonizes him to the point where we NEVER see Zapata shoot anyone or really bleed. The screenplay gives simplistic reasons for his revolution, or at least for his involvement in the indian cause. All we get is that he was born with a birth mark that the indians translate as a mark from the gods and so therefore Zapata is meant to be their savior. That's another thing, Arau throws in a bunch of weird mysticism that feels either weird or ridiculous to the point where scenes which are supposed to feel serious instead make you laugh your ass off. There are too many scenes where this annoying indian lady appears to Zapata as a spirit, tells him he's the chosen one and then does a dance that looks like the macarena and disappears with a cheap CGI effect that looks like something you can put together with Imovie or Windows Movie Maker. It's as if Arau is trying to give us a myth more than a portrait of a fascinating revolutionary. There are weird dream sequences that look like they belong more in a Buñuel movie and we learn very little about the local indian culture, their cause (which is a very important one) and we never get a good view into the Mexican government and their attempts to stop Zapata.
Without giving away the
ending, I'll just say it feels like some kind of weird fairy tale
closing. I loved Arau's sense of fantasy in his previous movies, but
it doesn't belong in a movie about a tough revolutionary fighting a
rough government in a rough time. When it comes to technical credits
"Zapata" is superbly crafted and there are indeed a few moments that
shine, but they feel like fragments looking for a whole. It's a good
idea looking for a better movie. Keep up the good work on this
kick-ass site!
