Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Alvaro Olmos Torrico
Starring: Marisol Vallejos Montaño, María Magdalena Sanizo, Nely Huayta
The world is so vast it could drive you mad if you thought about the enormity too closely. And it sounds like such an obvious claim to make, but when you're faced with it, really immersed within the unforgiving magnitude of what we quaintly refer to as nature, the destabilising reality is a phenomenon to be both acknowledged and respected. Coming home from a lovely seaside break, we turned right at Machynlleth to re-join the A470 at Dolgellau: a winding journey through the rolling miles of the Dyfi Hills, an infinite range of mountains that were completely bare due to the inexorable heat of the summer. Gigantic dunes of nothing (I know one is supposed to find such sights beautiful, but to me the space was just terrifying; a belt Gehenna). For long stretches we didn't see another car, let alone a house. Deb Grant on Radio 6 cut out. That far from civilisation I start to get antsy. Not even my inflated ego can withstand such spectacular reminders of our tiny insignificance. It's an anxiety which is leveraged by Alvaro Olmos Torrico's striking drama The Condor Daughter, which, set in the wild and brutal Bolivian Andes, juxtaposes its devastating locations against the small, tenacious lives of the people who exist within their vast shades.
Cinematographer Nicolás Wong creates painterly shots of the mountains and the scrub wherein Clara (Marisol Vallejos Montaño) serves her circumscribed community as an apprentice midwife under her adoptive mother Ana (María Magdalena Sanizo). It is as rudimentary as you would imagine, with the women trusting in the old ways of singing, binding with scarves and prayer to deliver children; an ingrained mistrust of the modern world, with its medicines and education, galvanising their practice and isolated collective. Gifted a radio which spills out excitable, trebly Spanish pop by a patient, Clara is electrified by the bubble-gum promises of the world beyond the mountains, and, with her own vocal prowess identified by a tourist from the city, begins to dream of flight.
Torrico presents the community at a threshold. Crops are dying, the world is hard, and many members of the village are keen to leave. The film suggests that modernity, its expanding Wi-Fi and influence, is inescapable (when we do get to the town below, we see a man in a Hogwarts t-shirt who is far too old to be into that nonsense). And, for the most part, the film does not romanticise the rural life, either. Ana doesn't want Clara to leave partially because of her natural suspicion of the city, but mainly, you suspect, because staying in the community is the way things should be. I have always presumed that this is the driving force behind reactionary ideals, this fear of change and the dread of how open the world truly is. We see a village elder punish a woman for the crime of talking to men who were not her husband: he cuts off her long hair in the village hall as she squirms and cries beneath him. It is implied that the community is a patriarchy, and, furthermore, that this display is not enacted out of a misguided desire for justice, but out of boredom: the whole of the village attends to watch, and no one intervenes (I think it's the same principle for people who post awful things online: they've got nothing else going on. Plus ça change).
We see the city in glimpses that are vivid in their arresting use of artificial colour. The screen pulses with nights of lilac, pink and lime, as if shot by Nicolas Winding Refn, when Clara makes her escape to become, eventually, a nightclub singer. However, in keeping with The Condor Daughter's rustic claustrophobia, the narrative remains with Ana as she agonises over, and eventually sets off to retrieve, her daughter. In a moment of animal terror, we see a flock of sheep slaughtered; possibly by foxes, or even the titular birds of prey. Could there be an implication that the massacre was carried out by Ana herself, to fire up the community with a bad omen? When she is in the city, Ana bemoans that the "earth and mountains ask for her" in relation to Clara, a projected personification upon a landscape naturally harsh and uncaring.
There is an insinuation that the world of nightclubs and entertainment is exploitative towards its young female charges, but the film leaves this aspect within a neon haze, focussing more upon the progressive disintegration of the mountain community, for better or worse. In the film's final scenes, in an enigmatic coda, we see Clara return, more worldly wise now. She visits Ana's grave, and then, in a circular narrative, delivers a child using the traditional procedures we witnessed in the film's opening. In this ambiguous moment The Condor Daughter seems to suggest that the atavistic worlds of the Andes persevere. The scene is positioned as positive, but it ominously instructs that some fates are too big to escape.
The Condor Daughter is in US cinemas from September 11th. A UK/ROI release has yet to be announced.
