A fine first feature, Lolo is a trenchant film about impoverished life in an urban slum. In its circling dance of shifting official responsibility for a neighborhood murder, played to the grind of a sardonic hurdy-gurdy, filmmaker Francisco Athié startlingly captures crisscrossing variations on hopeless human existence. Rarely has a film shown how dire poverty, terrible enough in itself, informs every aspect of the lives of its victims, dealing blow after daily blow after daily blow. It’s a round of circumstance enmeshed in two others: street crime, and the brutality and corruption of law enforcement. Moreover, Athié has created an atmosphere so dark and dank that one almost feels as if one is suffocating while watching the film. There’s no sugar coating here, as there is, for example, in Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) or, (much) worse, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961).
The film is contemporary; it is set on the outskirts of Mexico City. Athié wrote and directed the film, which is in fact a transmutation of Dostoievski’s novel Crime and Punishment.
The lead character is Dolores Chimal, nicknamed Lolo, an 18-year-old boy who works in a foundry. When Lolo asks for a raise, his supervisor decides to teach him—and other workers—a lesson. On pay day, after he has received his meager earnings, Lolo is stalked, robbed at gunpoint, and beaten nearly to death by thugs and the police. “Why didn’t you put up a fight?” his mother asks when Lolo returns from the hospital, where his five-day stay, absenting him from work, cost him his job and his family the lion’s share of their marginal income. (Señora Chimal has two daughters younger than Lolo also living at home, one way too young to work, the other whose stealing leads to her incarceration.) Señora Chimal pawns the gold watch she recently received from her children on her birthday; the elderly pawnbroker gives her little for it and, usurious, charges 50% interest. When Lolo is stealing back the gold watch, the pawnbroker’s daughter comes upon him and he kills her. The pawnbroker identifies the assailant’s red sneakers, which Lolo trades to his friend, Bobo. Lolo’s mother’s boyfriend, and perhaps his own best friend, Alambrista, is arrested for the crime, but Marcelino, a police officer who is Lolo’s cousin, suspects the truth and tries through a series of conversations with the boy to bring Lolo to the point of confession. Lolo eventually confesses to Marcelino, who takes the money that Lolo stole from the pawnbroker and gives his young cousin one day to leave town. The fall guy, both agree, will be Bobo. The neighborhood gang, though, knows the truth and beats Lolo, stopping short of setting him ablaze. Lolo beseeches his devout girlfriend, Sonia, for money so that they can both leave town together. Sonia prostitutes herself to raise the money, telling Lolo that she borrowed the money from her mother. After Lolo deposits the gold watch on a table by his sleeping mother, they leave town by bus, heading for as grim a future as the flypaper past that will dog them. There is a faint echo here of Tom Joad’s leavetaking at the end of John Ford’s great The Grapes of Wrath (1940).
The narrative is framed by shots of Bobo hanging in his cell, in both instances surveyed by Marcelino. In the last shot we see the red sneakers on his feet. We are never shown the corpse’s face. We recognize Bobo from the sneakers and from the polo shirt we earlier saw him wear. This instance of presentation is typical of the film’s elliptical nature. Superficially at least Bressonian in style, the film is a series of lightning flashes—and flashes of sound also—in profound and disturbing darkness and silence. The moment of murder, lucid and horrific, finds Lolo smashing his victim over and over with a handy, heavy crystal vase; the camera doesn’t leave his almost translucent young face as this outburst of sheer violence transports Lolo to a calm, gracious mental place—a place to which nothing in his miserable life has probably given him previous access. The moment is heartrending.
Lolo is a loving, decent boy doing his best for his family, trying with all his might to shoulder his responsibilities—an impulse made poignantly visible as he literally supports his little sister on his shoulders at their mother’s birthday celebration: an instance of rare happiness, with cousin Marcelino, perpetually sunglassed, even (as here) indoors, in ominous attendance. After Lolo, severely beaten, has returned from hospital, his mother berates him in a silent quarrel we see in the background of the shot. The camera is fixed instead on Lolo’s little sister’s distressed face as the living room, the scene of the family quarrel, spins around and around—a joyless merry-go-round: the corruption of childhood by poverty and its consequences. We watch Lolo slide into self-preservation, selfishness and cruelty. We later learn the reason for Marcelino’s dark glasses. When he was a boy he, too, committed murder and let a friend—Alambrista, by coincidence—take the fall and be brutally beaten. The police academy was the option he was given when “the law” realized its mistake. Corrupt, Marcelino now perpetually hides from the world and from himself—another index of poverty and its consequences.
The film, taut and etched, is resplendent with memorable imagery, such as the closeup of the pawnbroker’s aged, greedily agile hands as she turns the gold watch around and around in them. There is much circular imagery in the film, and indeed the opening and closing narrative frame—Bobo hanging in his cell as Marcelino, smiling, looks on—traps the whole film in a grinding circle. It is this circularity that renders Lolo and Sonia’s “flight” by bus sorely ironic; it is the form of escape, but the abiding content is entrapment.
Roberto Sosa’s acting as Dolores Chimal obliterates the difference between fiction and documentary realism. It’s an incredibly haunting performance. Why didn’t we pay more attention to Lolo’s friend, Bobo, when we had the chance? This aspect of the film also haunts. So many children are lost right in front of our eyes—or somewhere in the corners of our sight.
Count Lolo among the great films from Mexico.
