Los Bastardos aka The Bastards
Country and Year: Mexico/USA/Spain (2008)
Director: Amat Escalante
Starring: Jesus Moises Rodriguez, Ruben Sosa

Rating: 3.5 out of 4 stars (very good)
Review by: Charlie Prince

Los Bastardos really is lovably obnoxious. Intentionally discordant and uncomfortable, even the opening scene comes off as a shot across the bow — literally for several minutes we watch as two men (who will be the stars of the film) start hundreds of feet away as little dots, and slowly walk towards us down a long stretch of abandoned cement in near silence. At first you can’t even see the two guys. It is an astoundingly dull way to start a movie. Most films try to hook the audience in the first few minutes, but Los Bastardos goes to considerable effort to send a different message: “we’re going to do this our way — deal with it”.

That’s a lot to ask of Cannes audiences, many of whom are watching films, taking meetings, and pitching their hearts out from 8:00 am to well past midnight each night. I, for one, had been up for about 30 hours when Los Bastardos began, and my only hope of making it through the film was that the beginning would wake me up. I could hardly believe my eyes as minute after minute passed (in near silence) and still nothing was happening — the camera hadn‘t moved an inch, nothing was moving in the background, absolute nothing. This struck me as so obnoxious, I was actually intrigued. How in the world would the film recover from this atrociously boring opening? When the shot finally ends, a very loud, single, unpleasant metallic CLANG rings out, like a foghorn blast or someone banging a giant pan in your ear to wake you up now that the director had just lulled us to sleep. Each of us in the audience was now the persecutee in a Looney Tunes cartoon. The joke’s on me, but I have to admit, that’s actually kind of cool.

The opening finally gives way to narrative, which is shot almost documentary-style: our two stars are immigrant Mexican workers who have made their daily trek to a particular highway intersection in what appears to be Los Angeles. It is apparently known around town that Mexican workers gather he each morning to offer their services for day jobs, which we see may include picking strawberries, digging, clearing areas of trash, etc. Our stars have met up with about ten other workers, and six of them are hired and taken to a place to dig a channel for the foundation of a house. The point of this opening scene is to set the atmosphere: the kind of work they’re doing is tough and the people hiring them are shady and/or jerks all around. And just to drive that point home crystal clear, the employer for the foundation digging project announces at the end of the day that he won’t drive them back to where he picked them up from, that they’ll have to find a way back on their own (even though, of course, he had promised to bring them back when he hired them).

Of course, it’s not just at work where they get mistreated — on their long walk home, we see our two stars get bullied by drunk (white) locals who throw things at them shouting “you’re on the wrong side of the border!” All of this sets the mood for what will be the main story: it turns out a man has hired them to kill his wife, and as they walk home they struggle with what to do. On the one hand, of course, it’s wrong and nasty work. On the other hand, it’s a lot of money, and they need that money (we’ve just learned) to help their Aunt who is going blind and is running out of time to get an expensive operation that can save her. The older of our two stars had apparently accepted the job when it was offered, accepting money and a sawed-off shotgun as part of the deal. The younger of the two unsuccessfully tries to talk him out of it as they walk home.

Now let’s meet the victims: although we don’t meet the despicable father who hired them, we do meet the mother and son. We initially meet the son as he is blaring music in his room, apparently learning how to mix “beats” like a DJ at a rave. He’s one of the many people (including our stars, and who knows, maybe the audience generally?) to whom the title Los Bastardos may be referring. The son openly ignores his mother and treats her like crap, even when they are sitting alone together at the dinner table, inches apart. She makes a fumbled effort to breakthrough to him, saying she knows he’s doing drugs — that she’s not an idiot and for that matter she doesn’t like the people he’s hanging out with. He ignores her and leaves, and now we see just how unhappy and disengaged from life she is. Despite the accusation aimed at her son moments earlier, we see that her way of dealing with these family problems is to get high herself, which she promptly does, obviously disheartened by the encounter with her son. She has the appearance of someone who has given up.

This is the dynamic in which the bulk of the film will take place, and it would be hard to go much further without ruining the story. But it’s clear where this is going generally: normally oppressed in their daily routine by whites, our two Mexican stars are being paid to attack a white woman, which will of course put them in the position of power and control, albeit momentarily. They’ll be in a position to make threats, and also maybe to raise the money needed to help their urgently ill Aunt. But are they willing to become “bastardos”, to sink to becoming criminals? Are they willing to murder in cold blood?

It sounds more serious on paper than it looks onscreen. Remember that the audience at this point has hardly forgotten the playfully obnoxious opening, which frames everything that is to come. Not that it’s a comedy by any means, but there is a surreal goof going on under the surface that brings some levity to the situation. The closest comparison that I can think of is Lars Von Trier (in the days before his America-bashing trilogy). Take The Idiots, for example, a serious drama combined with a blasé willingness to break the rules and screw around. Other comparisons that come to mind as far as the tone of Los Bastardos are Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q (one of my demented favorites) or the recent French film festival favorite 13 Tzameti. As with Von Trier, some will find this kind of material insulting or offensive, and I do note that a few people (though only a few) walked out during the premiere here at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. It’s inevitable whenever shocking developments appear as suddenly and uncomfortably as the CLANG-ing music that started the film. In that sense, the filmmaking style reminds me a bit of Takeshi Kitano’s gangster movies, just with much less violence (though there’s plenty of that too).

In sum, if you have a twisted sense of humor, you might just love Los Bastardos. I have a hankering for obnoxious films myself, and for better or worse I actually rate this film among the best I’ve seen here at Cannes so far. Maybe the best, we’ll see. It’s definitely not for everyone, but if you enjoy defiant explorations of serious subjects, in this case the mistreatment of immigrant workers in the United States, I highly suggest you check it out.

© Charlie Prince

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