Fierce folk art speaks to Latin American unrest VISUAL ARTS

POLITICS AND THE PAST IN LATIN AMERICA

ARTS OF RESISTANCE: At the Museum of Anthropology at UBC until October 8

Horned devils and fire-breathing 2 serpents, extrajudicial executions and human sacrifice, armed insurgents and masked men wielding large hypodermic needles—there’s no shortage of frightening imagery in Arts of Resistance. There’s no dearth of beautiful and peaceable imagery, either: sumptuous flowers, winding rivers, idealized scenes of hearth, home, and agricultural abundance. Part of what is fascinating in this exhibition, subtitled Politics and the Past in Latin America, is the tension generated between the overtly critical and the quietly subversive.

Curated by Laura Osorio Sunnucks, a postdoctoral curatorial fellow at the Museum of Anthropology, the show examines the ways in which marginalized, largely Indigenous communities in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile use folkloric art traditions to express what Osorio Sunnucks describes as “contemporary political realities”. These realities, she notes while walking the Straight through the exhibition, range from state-sponsored violence to the forced imposition of genetically modified crops. While a few of the historic objects in the show are drawn from MOA’S permanent collection, many of the 100-plus works on view were recently commissioned for the museum. Two wall works—a graffiti mural by the Lapiztola collective from Oaxaca, Mexico, and a kené design mural, painted by members of the Shipibo-konibo diasporic community in Lima, Peru—were created for the exhibition directly on-site.

The show also explores the inspiration that contemporary Latin-american folk art draws from pre-hispanic cultures. A powerful example is Ayotzinapa Codex, a banner that alludes to both Spanish colonial and pre-hispanic forms and histories to protest a number of contemporary social, political, and environmental wrongs. Most notable among these is the 2014 kidnapping and disappearance of 43 education students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Guerrero, Mexico. Created by Juan Manuel Sandoval Palacios and Diego Sandoval Avila, the work uses handwriting and painted figures modelled on those found in historic Mesoamerican codices to draw our attention to both the particular (collusion between a drug cartel and state authorities in disappearing the Nahuatl-speaking students) and the general conditions of violent oppression and exploitation by those in power (violent oppression and exploitation of Indigenous people by those in power).

Also on view are paintings on roof beams, from the Sarhuino people of Peru. They exemplify a traditional folk-art form, now mostly discontinued, depicting scenes of family life, beliefs, and rituals. Collaboratively created for newlyweds, they functioned, Osorio Sunnucks says, as a way of passing on family and cultural histories. Evolved from that tradition are a series of similarly styled paintings on rectangular wooden panels, representing the violence committed against the people of Ayacucho by both government troops and Maoist “Shining Path” guerrillas during the 1980s. The panels were painted by Venuca Evanánda Vivanco, who reproduced them for MOA from originals by her father.

The extravagant and alternately frightening, humorous, and satirical festival masks and costumes displayed in the show suggest the ambiguous character of depictions of Satan in parts of Indigenous Mexico and South America. A carved and painted wooden mask from Guerrero, for instance, conjoins twisting horns, twined serpents, and multiple snarling and ferocious creatures, intended to scare children when performed and yet also a source of historical pride, related to a battle with the Spanish during the Mexican struggle for independence.

“Because the Spanish missionaries forced the association of pre-columbian deities with the Devil,” the exhibition text tells us, “it is possible the Indigenous people of Mesoamerica sympathized with the Devil.” At the same time, Osorio Sunnucks says, Indigenous peoples may have seen the Spaniards themselves—cruel and avaricious—as devils.

A few works in the show are extremely understated, including five small ink paintings on bark paper, depicting in intricate detail the daily lives of rural folk in the Balsas River region of Guerrero, Mexico. Created by members of an extended family from Xalitla, these works gradually and subtly shift from idealized representations of rural life to images of social change, including political corruption and desperate rates of emigration.

More understated still is the array of huipiles or blouses from Maya communities in Guatemala and southern Mexico, which Osorio Sunnucks has strategically placed in the show’s introductory installation. While the woven and embroidered patterns on these garments vary widely, from the floral to the geometric, the basic huipil form is consistent throughout: a folded cotton square with a circle cut out of its centre, its edge often highly decorated, indicating the neckline. This form reproduces the pre–classic Maya conception of the universe as a four-cornered structure with a hearth at its centre—and places the head of the Maya woman wearing the huipil at the centre of that universe.

In the context of the exhibition, the message encoded in these blouses is an assertion of cultural identity and solidarity, especially in Guatemala, where the Maya have been systematically oppressed and outright murdered. Osorio Sunnucks speaks about another, more paradoxical subtext into this display, that is, the appalling rate of femicide in Mexico, especially involving missing and murdered Indigenous women. Although the introductory text panel asserts the “irrepressible resolve of rural, Indigenous, and diasporic peoples in Latin America”, redress of their suffering seems very far away.

> ROBIN LAURENCE

Starring Saoirse Ronan. Rated 14A

Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle, 2

recently seen sparring in The Seagull, display serious screen presence in a lovingly crafted adaptation of Ian Mcewan’s novel of deep-dish repression in 1962 England.

Mcewan, whose Atonement gave Ronan her screen breakthrough when she was just 13, also did the screenplay for this feature debut for director Dominic Cooke, a BBC Shakespeare specialist who finds both tragedy and farce in a tale that fixes on a timid young couple’s wedding day. Initially, we wonder why we’re spending so much time at the stuffy country hotel located on the seaside respite of the title. But what should be the end of one romantic chapter is actually the launching point for what began it, and where these overly cautious youngsters came from.

Howle’s tousle-haired Edward Mayhew is of rough country stock, but his father is a hard-working schoolmaster, and Edward has just received a first-class degree in history from Oxford. Ronan’s Florence Ponting likewise received a first, in classical music, and has already formed a serious string quartet. But her snobby, well-to-do parents (Emily Watson and Samuel West, both terrific) don’t put much faith in her fiddling, or in the “country bumpkin” she brings home.

Their love is genuine, however. Edward introduces her to the pleasures of Chuck Berry—in the opening sequence, he explains the musical structure of your basic blues progression— and she brings out the best in his mum (Anne-marie Duff), a talented artist brain-damaged in a shockingly depicted accident. This is very much pre-beatles Britain, with neither Carnaby Street nor affordable therapy yet in sight. These kids are probably the last of their kind to be fastidiously polite with each other, or even to be virgins on the big night, as Florence struggles to overcome revulsion at what might not actually be her first, or worst, exposure to sex.

The exquisitely written movie is especially effective at connecting small details of the couple’s seaside tête-àtête with flashbacks that illuminate them. I wish there was more cohesion between Florence’s steely musical ambition and her day-to-day life. (She’s never seen practising her Beethoven, for instance.) And shy bookworm Edward seems at odds with his other side: a lippy college lad known for picking fights in the street. Of course, people are complicated, and that may be the film’s real subject. The bigger problem, though, is that the story winds down

Starring Shailene Woodley. Rated PG

On the surface, Adrift is a factbased 2 romantic adventure, starring Big Little Lies’ Shailene Woodley, who also helped produce, as Tami Oldham, who in 1983 met full-time sailor Richard Sharp in Tahiti, after bumming around on boats in the South Pacific. But it’s really about an unusual subject for movies: intelligence.

Woodley’s 23-year-old Californian is instantly smitten by the soft-spoken Brit played by The Hunger Games’ Sam Claflin, who has a Roger-daltrey-played-by-theyoung-hugh-grant vibe. (Woodley’s Divergent series costar Miles Teller was originally slated for this role, but that’s pretty hard to picture now.) He warns her of starvation, disorientation, and even hallucinations coming with life at sea, but she signs on anyway.

They’re only in his self-made 36foot sailboat a few months before another couple offers them a wad of cash to sail their 44-footer back to San Diego—tami’s hometown, which she’s not anxious to see again. That won’t be her biggest problem. Once under way, they run into a massive hurricane, and Richard is swept overboard, with the injured Tami left to fend for herself.

This happens right at the start of the 90-minute effort, although the whole story is broken up into bitesize flashbacks by outdoorsy Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, who previously delved into the life aquatic in films like The Sea and The Deep. (His breakthrough 101 Reykjavik was more about the Drink.) The screenplay is mostly by Hawaiian-born twin brothers Aaron and Jordan Kandell, and their dialogue is unusually bland—not unrealistic, but nothing very lyrical or amusing, either. (The orchestral score is also pretty dull.) Of course, language isn’t a crucial element of this survival story, which largely consists of Tami figuring out how to stay alive and get the banged-up yacht moving again, without the aid of a working engine or electronic equipment.

Once she finds the seriously battered Richard clinging to a dingy and patches him up, she gets occasional nuggets of nautical wisdom from him. But for the most part she has to improvise, based on an old sextant, some charts, and bits

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Starring Daniel Giménez Cacho. In Spanish, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel, 2

one of the most consistently interesting stylists working today, is also flying under the cinematic radar. It probably doesn’t help that her last release, The Headless Woman, was made almost a decade ago. Martel’s earlier films, The Holy Girl and La Ciénaga, were set in a recent past more dreamlike than real, but full of oddly recognizable atmospheres and oblique rituals that give our lives their most mysterious qualities.

The sharp-eyed writer-director’s new movie is her first leap into costume drama, first male-centric story, and only effort adapted from existing material. Based on a 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, tortured and exiled by Argentina’s military dictatorship, Zama centres on the haunting figure of Diego de Zama, played by Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, whose profile is so chiselled it should be on a Spanish doubloon.

It’s 1790, and this midlevel government functionary has been sent from Buenos Aires to a backwater in what would later become Paraguay. Zama, clean-shaven and bewigged, hasn’t seen his wife and children in years, and has long been asking to be transferred to a larger town. But he was born in the New World, is therefore considered less worthy by the crown, and keeps getting passed over for promotion. Colonials in this remote place have a curious relationship with the African slaves, the Indigenous people, and the many mixed-race children that have resulted. Perhaps his flirtations with a married Spanish-born noblewoman (Almodóvar regular Lola Dueñas) will bear bureaucratic fruit.

Zama prides himself on his lack of cruelty, but he also exhibits a proud absence of moral curiosity. His essential neutrality gets him in and out of various scrapes, depicted by Martel rather cryptically, with snippets of dialogue returning intermittently to reinforce events that are only hinted at. Portuguese cinematographer Rui Poças, who also shot Tabu and The Ornithologist, depicts wide-screen jungles and colonial villas with equal detachment, supported by anachronistically cheerful music from Los Indios Tabajaras, a Brazilian group that specialized in Hawaiian-flavoured kitsch.

Don’t assume that all these intriguing elements add up to a story that’s easy to follow. But the merging of raw nature and well-researched colonial history with magic realism tinged by Kafka, Camus, and Borges is fascinating throughout. In the multinational production’s last quarter, when Zama joins a group of soldiers (including Brazil’s popular Matheus Nachtergaele) in search of a mythical bandit long terrorizing the region, things really turn wild. By then, our stoical antihero has a long beard and tired eyes, and is still waiting for a transfer that will never come.

> KEN EISNER