Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Tatiana Huezo
Starring: Montserrat Hernández Hernández, Luz Maria Vázques González, Sarahí Rojas Hernández, María de los Ángeles Pacheco Tapia
A Mexican-German docufiction film directed by Tatiana Huezo,
The Echo focuses on a rustic farming family in the Mexican
highlands: a topic sentence which functions as a comprehensive summary of the
film, too. For two hours we watch a group of people work and occasionally rest; live and in a certain case, die; all within the scrubland altitude of
Puebla. The raison d'etre of The Echo is a stark
presentation of a specific lifestyle, the exotic depiction of an existence
which is radically dissimilar to that of the audience who will eventually
consume Huezo's (excellently made) film.
The Echo starts as it means to go on, with a clumsily immediate attempted rescue of a sheep who has gone and fallen into a bog. The
rain is falling with extreme prejudice, and it takes a small troop to
locate the poor little thing's bleats before yanking it from the ditch water.
Kids, dogs, adults; all are involved in the recovery. "El Echo" is the
name of this rudimentary village, where the tight knit community must work
together; tending to the old, teaching the young, farming the animals,
preparing the food, and even actually tightly knitting the garments they
wear. It is "authentic," a worthy blend of fictionalised events and
apparent real-world phenomena. The high sense of verisimilitude the film
creates, along with the naturalness of the "cast," is not to be underrated.
However, with this sequence of staged animal peril, I was against the film
from the off. It's one thing to attractively film Mexican crofters
harvesting grain or endlessly washing stuff (the film's leitmotif, which
reaches a slightly absurd depth when a young girl elegiacally bathes a
teddy bear), but purposefully placing an animal in danger for the sake of
a dramatic opening is a violently distasteful stunt (you're telling me
that the cameras seamlessly followed the villagers across treacherous
terrain and then managed to set up a perfect wide angle for exposition?
Poor little lamb, scared out of its wits it was).
The Echo's theme of mortality, and how close it is to our little lives, is
adeptly established and then extended via the decrepit presence of a terminally aged matriarch, and
the tender care which the denizens show her: a narrative through line for this
documentary proposition. A further underlying ideology relates to how
crucial women are to this culture, a topic explicated when a village girl
presents to her class in the school, and emphasised by the relative
absence of men, who seek work beyond the confines of the
village.
As ever with this sort of fare there is the discomfort that the lives of
poor, simple people are being paraded for the edification of an educated,
ostensibly refined audience. Such an assumption is probably unfair to
filmmaker Huezo (who has a history of valuable, subject specific films)
and nor is it accurate to say that the residents of El Echo are
necessarily exploited. Yet the film nonetheless predicates upon the
dynamic that the subjects of The Echo are distinct to the
spectators to whom they are presented, and the novelty of such
representations is what The Echo trades in: look at these
people, the film says, look at the hard handiwork of their lives. "Work is
work," a character tells a child, "It is not easy." With that, the
children who Huezo focuses on are delightful - clever, funny and stoic,
and as part of the village's manual democracy as anyone else. Is this an
existence which they are fated to (both the punishing labour of the
diegesis and the patronisation of art house audiences)? They are deftly
captured by Ernesto Pardo's sumptuous cinematography, which makes
even the most mundane of agricultural tasks look urgently photogenic:
The Echo's realm is palpably elemental, a vividly portrayed existence of dirt, water and
flame, visually culminating in the trifecta of a lightning storm. A
languid and poetic representation of an unsung society.
The Echo is on UK/ROI VOD now.
