Rating: C
Dir: Jorge Diaz de Bedoya
Star: Javier Enciso, Nathan Christopher Haase, Víctor Sosa, Beto Barsotti
a.k.a. Luna de cigarras
This is an odd little film, which I suspect might be better appreciated by the six million people who live in Paraguay. It feels like there’s a lot of local colour here, in the same way that early Guy Ritchie films were quintessential London. This has the aura of something like Snatch, not least because co-star Haase looks like a bargain basement version of Brad Pitt. From certain angles. In subdued lighting. If you squint a bit. He plays American marijuana grower, J.D. Flitner, who travels to South America to complete a deal on the purchase of a large parcel of land from El Brasiguayo (Barsotti), in anticipation of weed’s expected imminent legalization.
It’s quickly apparent that J.D. is utterly out of his depth, and unaware of how to negotiate the back alleys of the Paraguayan criminal underworld. He knows it, and has arranged for an intermediary, in the shape of Gatillo (Enciso). The gringo‘s naivety is ample demonstrated when he hears Gatillo’s name, and asks, “Like a little cat?” Having recently seen Gatillero, we were well aware it means “trigger”. And not in a Lone Ranger, or Only Fools and Horses way either. Something else J.D. doesn’t know: Gatillo has a plan to double-cross him. The scheme involves swapping out the American’s cash for fake money, giving it to El Brasiguayo, and when the recipient discovers the counterfeits, delivering up J.D. as a patsy for the con.
However, when the time comes to deliver the scapegoat, J.D. has vanished. He wandered off with a girl, got dumped, then rolled by a couple of whores with connections to a Russian organ trafficking ring. If Gatillo can’t find him before he’s dissected, it’s the local who will be on the hook to El Brasiguayo. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of moving parts here, and with the strongly local flavour, I spent most of the time not waving, but drowning. It begins with a shootout at a poker game, then spends the rest of the movie in flashback mode, assembling the various pieces which led to the carnage. As well as Ritchie, it feels like de Bedoya wants to be the Paraguayan Tarantino.
Parts of it are still amusing. El Brasiguayo disposes of his enemies by using a combine harvester (top), which is a first. J.D’s doped-up resistance to the pair of hookers, who are trying to use sex as an anaesthetic, is also amusing. However, there is a lot of stuff here which feels more likely to cause bemused confusion in a non-Paraguayan viewer. It’s definitely guilty of trying to over-stuff proceedings, both in terms of characters and plot. Outside of J.D. and Gatillo, nobody else makes much of an impression, and nothing of note is gained by the retrospective structure. It’s always nice to see genre pieces from unusual places. Yet there’s little here to make me interested in hunting down other products of Paraguay.
This is part of our World in Action feature, covering action movies around the globe.