Last Updated on 09/09/2024 by Arun jain
TORONTO, Canada—Two horsemen mount a hill on a wide plain, five chases at their heels. A gunshot is heard, and a man falls from his horse. No one else is more fortunate; His stallion is yanked, dragged behind his assailant for what seems like an eternity.
The camera moves back behind him, capturing this in a widescreen panorama that’s all the more terrifying for being so gracefully composed. In a voiceover, a narrator speaks of the need to “smash the earth” to create “a better world” where everyone has a right to happiness and dignity—a destiny that, it is clear, is not reserved for these unfortunate individuals.
The identities of the murdered men have never been released without bloodAnd that’s considering its wholesale obscurity. Writer/director adaptation of Alessandro Barrico’s novel of the same name Angelina JolieAt this period piece—premiering Toronto International Film Festival-In its lack of uniqueness is the dog.
While it aims to provide a timeless parable about the lasting impact of violence on both victim and victimizer, wounded and unscathed, it results in initial confusion and, later, hopeless thinness. Choosing to remain abstract, he offers only general and empty truths.
Following its opening scene, without blood An old gentleman named Manuel (Alfredo Herrera) rests on his porch, his elbows on the railing and his mind lost in thought. Jolly doesn’t specify what year it is or what country we’re in, but it appears to be mid-20th century Mexico.
His revelry is interrupted by the distant sound of a car, and he answers it by running inside and instructing his son (Alessandro D’Antuno) to retrieve his guns. The boy dutifully undertakes the task as Manuel hides his naive daughter Nina (Carole Fernandez) under the floorboards of the house. Terrible trouble, it seems, has arrived, and it comes in the form of three visitors led by Salinas (Juan Minujin), a man dressed in white linen, with an enormous mustache on his upper lip and whose hands are adorned with shiny gold rings. is .
A shootout ensues, and ends when the youngest of the three attackers, 17-year-old Tito (Ariel Pérez Lima), jumps the father, who turns out to be a doctor. Shot in the shoulder, he is confronted by Salinas, who accuses him of crimes committed during the recent war. In particular, Salinas is furious about the doctor’s murderous treatment of his patients at the local hospital, one of whom is Salinas’ beloved brother (Andres Delgado).
When he reveals how he found his brother and, because of his condition, was forced to end his life, the doctor denies any wrongdoing and argues that the war is now over. Salinas, however, disagrees; For that, the struggle continues. The Doctor can’t get out of this confrontation, and neither can his son. Although she is discovered in her shelter, the girl survives, and the killers set fire to her house.
Decades later, well-dressed adult Nina (Salma Hayek Pinault) arrives at a news stand and asks to buy a lottery ticket from Tito (Damien Bichir). The man obliges, at which point Nina asks him to join her for a drink. He is disappointed, and she repeats the question twice more, each time with a stern look that suggests she won’t take no for an answer. They sit in a fancy restaurant and start talking, and Tito admits that he doesn’t know who she is for long, since he was the teenage gunman who let her live during the massacre of her loved ones.
“Some stories have morals. That is why they exist. to say something profound,” Nina thinks, and her own story is a shocking litany of suffering. After her father and brother die, Nina is taken in by a nun who entrusts her to a pharmacist (Pedro Hernandez), who sleeps on her lap. Telling her scary stories, and his hand sliding down her body to indicate that he was being fair to her.
The pharmacist then loses Nina in a card game to the Count (Luis Alberti), who marries her at age 14, leading to further pedophilic abuse. She bore her partner three children, from whom she was later separated when, after the Count’s death, she was deemed insane and sent to an asylum.
without blood It checks a lot of boxes when it comes to sexual injustice, yet the ambiguity of every element of the film makes it paper-thin. Nina does not describe her entire ordeal; She allows Tito to fill in the blanks from her perspective. What he reveals is that he spent years trying to find and kill Nina for fear that she remembered his face and might turn on him (or worse).
Once he heard that his compatriots had died under mysterious circumstances, he knew her recovery was inevitable. Little did he realize, however, that their conversation would be drawn so awkwardly, the pair would constantly pause their accounts to stare at each other in oh-so-momentary silence.
Hayek Pinault’s pleasant demeanor is belied by his evil eyes, but his relationship with Bichir doesn’t approach the same, optimal dynamic. Death and the Maiden. In fact, their back-and-forth is often passive, suggesting that there isn’t enough material to pad out the 91-minute feature. Coming face-to-face with the woman he hurt, Bichir’s Tito seems mostly just indifferent, and the director’s flashbacks are aptly woven into the action. For all the echoes she creates between the present and the past, Jolie only manages to convey that formative trauma lingers long after any superficial scars have healed.
Devoid of historical context and detail, without blood fails to reckon with the atrocities of yesterday or today; His heroes and tragedies are mere intellectual concepts, divorced from everything that could give them meaning. Thus, its unresolved conclusion comes across less as a question to be pondered after the house lights come on, and more in line with the film’s other affected gestures.
Post Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut is a big miss at TIFF appeared first The Daily Beast.