For more than twenty years, the Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto has earned a reputation as one of the most reliable professionals in his field. After reaching international recognition thanks to Prieto’s work in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Amores Perros” and “21 Grams’, Prieto has also directed Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain, Ben Affleck for Argo, Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon, Greta Gerwig for Barbie and many more music videos and glamorous ads. So it is no surprise that the cinematographer’s first film director’s feature turn is an exciting ghost story full of visual-looking devices and surrealist visuals, giving him enough breadth to demonstrate his skills while still sorting out the narrative structure.
The film, like the book, is entitled ‘Pedro Páramo’ and it centers around Juan Preciado, a man who is said to have idolized and held close his mother, whose death he suffers to the point that he searches for his long lost father in a distant village, Comala.
Juan loses a large part of himself when he visits his mother’s hometown of Comala because it has nothing in common with its earlier self, which boasts of being a vibrant community. What he has instead, is a village riddled with sordid legends about his father, Pedro Páramo, who, with overwhelming authority, terminated the region as a wealthy cattle rancher. Due to his mother’s accounts, it is evident why Juan will never bear the chance to meet the man, as the residents of the town dwell over numerous tragedies depicted by the locals over the years.
The first looks of the movie “Pedro Páramo” aspire to possess exceptional visuals as it is Prieto’s debut as a feature director and cinematographer for the film alongside Nico Aguilar. Instead of depicting Comala directly, Prieto pauses on mentioning other parts of the world, “A bloated sense of purpose taught an economically stable Basa art’s value and thrust the viewer deep into this city’s stark absence.” He treats Comala with unwavering attention, laying out surreal and dark fantasies intertwined with moments like a ghostly longing above an endless wasteland of a village that precedes a collage of lifeless black and white fantasies on a beach’s shore.
However, even outside of the envisioned sphere, remnants of those violent epochs appear equally mesmerizing in terms of compositional skills, for example when a lens tends to wander over the surface of a stream of water, and then provides an angle where the water surrounds a dead body, dip into a crowded party and listen in on different characters positioned around a ranch, or when it lingers over a lengthy table before dolly shooting her way into one of the main characters at a time where one of the possible group of enemies are seated around him.
Prieto’s camera work can get quite thrilling and some portions of weak script stand swept under the carpet of such form. Mateo Gil has rat cut Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo in such a manner that it goes from one enigma to the other while brisk walking through the film’s tale like an aunt who has some relative that she presumed to carve stories in your head starts mentioning one after the other. It was like watching one whole season of a TV series in a single afternoon with a host of new characters and various plot threads at varying times and locations.
Characters who seem to be ghosts constantly appear and disappear from the frame, and it was a challenge to be prepared for the subsequent character switch and a new plot. With others, like Juan, however, he becomes a storyteller of the past, briskly guiding the camera toward a new plot.
Despite being rather vivid, Huerta is almost the last of the visions. Still, the vision that he embodies is in some sense an earned one as he compromises in the quest of his mother, he gives us a vision of the past where we can glimpse Pedro and the different lives he waded into. There is, first, Juan’s unfortunate mother, Dolores (Ishbel Bautista), who is unceremoniously tossed aside after being used up, and her close associate Eduviges (Dolores Heredia), the first in the forsaken village to pay a visit to Juan. There is the maids’ work damiana (Mayra Batalla) and a baby, Dorotea (Giovanna Zacarías) whose complete tale is just one of many tragedies tucked up under Another. Then comes the enslaved priest of family and religion, padre Renteria (Roberto Sosa) who begins to obey and glorify his soul mate Fulgo, foreman (Hector Kotsifakis) And, Susana, (Ilse Salas), who has not been in love with Pedro, who remains of sadness during a life full of such characters.
Even though the multitudes and the time-bending story that moves at breakneck speed does take Prieto out from time to time, the mysterious universe of ‘Pedro Páramo’ is spellbinding.
Ana Terrazas and Carlos Y Jacques alongside Eugenio Caballero, keep detailed and vivid period decor by ensuring that each of the characters is fitted with a unique personality and helping the audience settle into that period. It does seem like there is a lot of potential and vision hidden within Prieto but while it does seem to turn out to be a bit fuzzy in the beginning we do get a sense of where it should be headed, there seems to be a lot of potential for more creativity to spout out if Pedro Páramo is any kind of reasoning.
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