Mother Lode

When Jorge, the main character of Mother Lode, goes along the alleys full of garbage and mud from La Rinconada (the highest human settlement of the world, also one of the most inaccessible and unfriendly of Peru) the camera follows him in direct cinema style: concentrated on his silent march, full of loneliness, with heavy tread, out of breath, climbing rather than walking, sometimes sneak-like, up and down, zigzagging a shanty town that has the look of an unfinished work of a blind architect, with a nest of rummage sales, cheap prostitution and hooch, all this in restless motion; we are witnessing a journey through a somber Kay Pacha (the hic et nunc world) animated by an anachronistic chimera… Seduced as many other people by a gold rush, Jorge tries his luck in the most unsafe mine of his country, a place where men become modern Sisyphus, condemned to work in hard conditions for some meager earnings and to then spend them quickly on alcohol and whores.

[…] Named “the city that is closest to heaven”, La Rinconada is also the closest place to Hell…

Named “the city that is closest to heaven”, La Rinconada is also the closest place to Hell, with its mine a path between the Kay Pacha and the land of dead and unborn (Uku Pacha). To conjure a gloomy destiny, the workers give beverages, coca leaves and cigarettes as presents to a dummy miner, but if the subterranean Moloch is reluctant to hand the metal over, they pacify it with a special offering: a young human being (a “Pagacho”) with dynamite in its entrails. When this ominous sacrifice is revealed, what seemed to be a minimalist blend of contemporary neorealism and documentary turns to be a horror movie, and the labyrinthine underground a dark mirror of the tortuous citadel above. A mine within a mine. 

From the very opening, fatality is incarnated by a voice over the image of two cocks incited to fight, admonishing about the relativity and unpredictability of the many stories that will be narrated. When it enumerates their subjects —luck, love, gold and death— its tone has the pitiless certainty of an unavoidable and metaphysical herald of doom urging to abandon all hope, because – it says – no one can escape the designs of the fickle and elusive Devil. Another suggestive use of voices as an estrangement effect (reminiscent Kiarostami´s Close up and The Wind Will Carry Us) occurs during Jorge’s video chats with his wife, spoilt by irregular connection and reciprocal misunderstanding.

[…] The mise en scène of Italian director Matteo Tortone in this, his opera prima, is exquisite and accurate. The impression of narrowness is one of its main qualities.

Elliptical and never indulgent, Mother Lode is neither a spectacle nor an exotic tale, but an experience. The mise en scène of Italian director Matteo Tortone in this, his opera prima, is exquisite and accurate. The impression of narrowness is one of its main qualities. When the camera, steady in front of Jorge, shows him driving his motorcycle cab with only one shot, the frugal long take does not allow us to see too much of what is on both sides of him, but we´re very conscious of the space off screen; the same happens when in order to accompany his wandering around the dirty streets of La Rinconada, it comes near his shoulders, as if it were trying to breathe time with him and reinforce the sense of living in a precarious, oppressive realm.

The choice of black and white to narrate this fable of omitted violence and innocent dreams of sudden wealth serves to emphasize the banal catabasis of these specters that radiate light from their foreheads. The glitter of the longed-for gold, buried by the rocks, will always be absent, and the weak brightness that fleetingly breaks the immense obscurity of the mine remains only as a scary memento of the fate of those who live with the awareness of being prey. 

The restrained discourse of the “distant observer” Tortone has assumed is a powerful tool to produce free and disturbing visions of reality instead of predictable cartoon-like icons of an innocuous rhetoric of orthodox commitment, ad usum peregrinatores. Here things are seen through a kind of phantom mist, and folkloric events occur in nightmarish slow motion. There is no shelter. Sometime the sound of Jorge´s movements put aside the louder ones of a local band as he passes by, to emphasize that he (and us with him, thanks to cinema) is the unprotected creature of a never-ending story of violence and poverty. Tomorrow he will be a new Pagacho or maybe he´ll be back to his family with some coins in his pockets as the Wheel of Fortune spins and the Universe dries up.