Song Without a Name proved quite a difficult film to engage with during the opening few scenes. The opening shot in a film presented in black and white, comprises two ghostly figure in long shot trudging up a slope through the mist. Photos of newspaper headlines and street graffiti etc. reveal the political conflict of Peru in the 1980s. We are then introduced to the central character Georgina (Pamela Mendoza), part of a group of indigenous people coming together to sing, seemingly on a street corner. Perhaps because the film was presented in Academy ratio on a screen without masking in GFT3, the projectionist had difficulty in registering the image so that we could read all of the text of the subtitles. The film was re-started and from then on, I did begin to respond to the narrative. You can see in the trailer below that often there is no sharp edge to the image. Some commentators have remarked on the ‘shadowy photography’, others suggest a reference to film noir. The director and co-writer Melina Léon says she wanted black & white Academy to suggest both the monochrome newspapers and the TV image of the 1980s. The film’s story is based on real events from the early 1980s in which the director’s father had some involvement when he was setting up a newspaper. But the film is set specifically in 1988 towards the end of the first Presidency of Alan Garcia during which the Peruvian economy was in economic crisis mode and internal security was threatened by the Maoist guerrilla actions of the Shining Path and the smaller Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA).
Georgina is heavily pregnant and she and her husband Leo make a living selling potatoes in a local market. Georgina hears a radio announcement about a clinic offering free birthing procedures. When her time is due she makes her painful way by bus and on foot to the clinic in Lima where her daughter is delivered but quickly taken away from her. Later she is told to go home and return the next day to collect her baby. But by the next day the clinic has closed and moved away. In a sadly familiar sequence of encounters, Georgina and Leo (Lucio Rojas) are turned away by different government departments and sent on another pointless trip to an office where their lack of paperwork means nothing will happen. (As indigenous people they do not have IDs.) The police seem unprepared to investigate the theft of their baby. In despair, Georgina seeks to contact the press and Leo turns for support to one of the guerrilla groups.
When Georgina finally gets to see a journalist we realise we’ve seen him earlier in the film, nervously visiting a guerrilla group. Pedro (Tommy Párraga) recognises that this could be an important story and he begins to investigate with support from his boss on a major Lima paper. At this point the central narrative begins to splinter. Georgina finds other women who are supportive and she becomes more involved in music and street theatre. Pedro’s investigation begins to uncover a baby-smuggling network but also the role of the ruling class in covering up and blocking his investigation. He also has his own narrative one which makes him a potential victim as well as an investigator. This ‘unravelling’ of the central narrative and the lack of a clear resolution has been a criticism of the film from some reviewers. I can understand this but I don’t mind the ‘open ending’. Having said that, the latter stages of the narrative do take on an almost dreamlike (nightmarish?) quality. The black and white photography has also been seen as a practical decision to enable an easier representation of 1988 without too many VFX required to change contemporary Lima. Certainly the scenes of Georgina’s first home and then the shanty towns by the sea with sand dunes and footways across the landing stages offer a certain kind of marginal location. I think I may have been confused by these locations. The shacks tend to look the same. Perhaps some of the scenes towards the end of the narrative do refer to 1940s noir?
The music in the film is by Peruvian avant-garde musician Pauchi Sasaki and her website suggests:
Her music recreates intimate subjective landscapes through electro-acoustic sonorities mixed with field recordings and synthesis.
Along with the cinematography by Peruvian-Chilean Inti Briones, the music creates a distinctive ‘feel’. Briones and Sasaki, along with director Léon have experience of documentary shoots. Briones also shot Too Late to Die Young (Chile 2018). That film was not as successful on release in the UK as I expected. It shares some qualities with Song Without a Name which as yet hasn’t got a UK distributor. Together they represent a willingness by younger (under 40) directors to explore the social, political and cultural issues of Latin America in the 1980s and into the 1990s. I did find the coverage of the Shining Path and/or MRTA confusing in Song Without a Name. I’m not sure who the indigenous groups are that Georgina joins and I wasn’t sure what to make of bombings in Lima. Overall though, I found this an interesting film and a contrast to the few other Peruvian films I’ve seen. The performances by the leads are very good. After its Cannes showing, Song Without a Name has won prizes at several film festivals around the world. I hope it does get a UK release.
The Case for Global Film 