Boys Town
Childs' eye view of Allende's Chile in gripping 'Machuca'

History records cataclysmic events in terms of leaders and battles, clashing ideologies, politcal losses or gains. The human consequences are often left out of the equation as politics march across the world stage. But in Machuca, Chilean filmmaker Andrés Wood dramatizes complex political events from the viewpoint of a child growing up in the last days of Salvador Allende's Socialist presidency.

Gonzalo Infante (Matias Quer) is a red-headed, freckle-faced son of privilege attending a private Catholic boys school in Santiago. One day, the school's headmaster, Father McEnroe (Ernesto Malbrán) interrupts class to introduce five new students—poor, darker-skinned, part-Indian boys from the shantytown across the river, integrated into the school as a grand experiment in social equality. ("His mother does our laundry," one rich boy pipes up about one of the newcomers.)

Gonzalo strikes up a friendship with one of the new boys, stoic little Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna), who introduces Gonzalo to a world of illicit adventure. As right-wing fascists and communists demonstrate against each other in the streets, Pedro takes Gonzalo along with a shantytown neighbor who hawks cheap souvenir flags to each side in turn. The neighbor's saucy daughter, Silvana (Manuela Martelli) teaches the boys to drink condensed milk out of the can and play kissing games. By contrast, Wood portrays Gonzalo's privileged world as one of arid corruption: black market luxuries are available to those who can pay, while the poor can't even obtain milk or bread; Gonzalo's mother is having a fairly open afffair with an older married man, and his sister's fascist boyfriend thinks his nunchaku sticks make him a man.

The boys bear witness to the increasing perplexities of the grown-up world on both sides of the river, sharing an enthusiasm for vintage Lone Ranger and Tonto comics—even though Silvana chides them, "White men and Indians are never friends." Indeed, their friendship is as doomed as Allende's government, by both subtle class distinctions, and the physical invasion of soldiers into the shantytown after Allende is assassinated. At times lyrical in its portrait of childhood (there's even a montage with soft-pop '70s music), Machuca tells a harrowing tale. Yet it's most effective as Wood's homage to his own, real-life Catholic school headmaster, the role model for the fictional Father McEnroe, whose symbolic defiance of the military takeover of his school gives the film its uncompromising moral center.

MACHUCA Written and directed by Andrés Wood. (Not rated) 115 minutes. (***)
Review published in Good Times, Oct. 6, 2005