Rodrigo Prieto respectfully adapts one of Mexico's most famous novels in surreal debut

Magical realism meets a grand family saga in ‘Pedro Páramo’, the directorial debut of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. As the man responsible for lighting and lensing countless acclaimed films — including “Barbie,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Brokeback Mountain” — Prieto has a keen eye for one of Mexico’s most influential novels. A story of ghosts and memories that slips through time, Mateo Gil’s screenplay follows the structure of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 text with strict fidelity, laying the foundation for a melancholic (if somewhat unbalanced) adaptation that finds visual splendor into the macabre.

Tenoch Huerta (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) plays Juan Preciado, a man who travels to his late mother’s hometown of Comala some time after the Revolution (1910-20) in search of the father he never met : a figure named Pedro Páramo (Manuel García Rulfo), who he soon learns has also died. The missing character’s name is often spoken in full, several times before we meet him in a flashback, as if he were a myth figure.

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Upon arriving in Comala – an eerie, deserted community with cobblestone roads – Juan encounters several people who once knew his parents, who begin regaling him with stories by candlelight. However, the line between the living and the dead is razor-thin in this township, and it isn’t long before numerous conversations reveal themselves to be encounters with ghosts, who may not initially recognize their true nature.

As each story about Juan’s father comes to light, the film transitions seamlessly to the late 19th and early 20th centuries – sometimes within the same shot. The camera moves between rooms in which different decades seem to unfold, as the dead streets and dull walls of Comala come to life in vibrant hues and the surrounding greenery emerges. As the film jumps back and forth and Juan learns about his father from numerous sources, Pedro Páramo’s gangland story is revealed in a non-linear fashion, pieces of the puzzle being carefully placed.

The photo in question is compelling and ugly. Pedro is a powerful man with power over the local population and violent criminals at his disposal, and he moves easily from woman to woman for both personal and political reasons. One of these women was Juan’s mother, Dolores (Ishbel Bautista). The love of Pedro’s life, however, was a completely different character: Susana (Ilse Salas), whom he met when he was young and whose return to Comala he has been anticipating for years – a sense of longing fully embodied by Gustavo Santaolalla’s powerful score .

Tragedy and self-destructive inevitability permeate Pedro’s story, as if the pain he causes in the world is lurking before coming to haunt him through twisted cosmic justice. The only son he considers legitimate, Miguel (Santiago Colores), dies young in a horse riding accident, but not before forcing himself on a young girl, leaving the question of whether or not Pedro deserves his grief. As Juan absorbs these anecdotes throughout the night, he moves from building to building and street to street, at first passively listening to the memories of others, but eventually watching scenes from the past unfold through doorways, as if he’s in an old movie. of which he should not be aware.

These combine to form the Shakespearean tragedy of a man lost in selfish ambition and personal desires, forces of greed and love that often collide and confuse his soul. Along the way, the film shifts narrative perspectives with surprising abandon, using its back-and-forth structure to muddle established storytelling traditions, much as Rulfo’s novel once did. Unfortunately, such a switch is so definitive that when it occurs halfway through, the film is almost permanently plunged into the past, preventing the film from taking advantage of the strangeness of the post-1920s setting, in which storytellers appear before moving in and out of the change movie. their physical environment, whether it is the dirt or the air.

These phantasmagoric events, aided by disjointed sound design that gets under the viewer’s skin, are limited to the first half of the film. Pedro’s “Godfather”-esque saga is certainly compelling, and each performance is powerful and operatic, but the film loses at least some of its original flavor the longer it stays with its title character, without returning to its dreamy framing . The introductory scenes are deeply disorienting, between focus (and lack thereof) that doesn’t follow the conventional rules of background and foreground (Prieto doubles as his own DP, sharing duties with Nico Aguilar) and environments that seem to change so subtly that they poke and gnaw at the subconscious.

It’s hard not to get lost in “Pedro Páramo,” even if the film ultimately gets lost on its own and takes on a more classic cinematic form that doesn’t quite click. Fortunately, its surreal appeal – backed by a sense of tragic longing – is powerful enough to resonate throughout its running time.

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