MIFF Session 7: MONOS

A group of teenage guerrillas are put in charge of an American hostage in the mountains of an unnamed South American country. When their trainer leaves them to it their paramilitary prep gets scrapped and they turn back into teenagers, firing off rounds for the fun of it, fighting with each other. Their hostage, named Doctora, must navigate a narrow and rocky channel.

This film is less a narrative than the development of a situation. There are moments that read like a political thriller but the overall purpose is closer to the story the writer/director openly attributed: Lord of the Flies (there's even a shot of a fly riddled pig's head on a stake at one point). While we are given little plot there is much to follow as internal tensions or crises arise. Rather than acts we are presented with passages that better resemble musical movements that begin with the atonality of the initial chaos and gradually form into a more terrifying discipline.

This often severe scenario is set in breathtaking natural splendour, providing a constant juxtaposition of what nature we are witnessing. As the human side of that falls into cruelty or violence its creative side also blooms and the cast of local stars and unknowns create a disturbing tension that frequently breaks into sudden explosive action. Around it, greater nature, that of the endless jungle and the power of the river, dispassionately metes its various hazards and bounty as a human leader might punish or reward.

More than one voice has made a comparison to Apocalypse Now and what I'm about to write might sound strange: I felt more than once a kind of homesickness for that film, as though it was a place I'd lived. In a stretched sense I did as I wrote reams on it as an undergraduate and saw it at the cinema more times than I'm comfortable admitting. But my point is that Monos both made me long for Coppola's great epic and the weight of its grim story to guide us through its eye popping setpieces and wonder that it didn't do something more like this recent film and just present the setpieces like a massive living tableaux.

Here, I'll put a word in for the increasingly powerful music of Mica Levi whose groaning scores for Under the Skin and Jackie have been searing highlights of recent mainstream cinema. There is a little strings glissando at times which feels a little too signature but mostly we are given flutes and drums which often blur between film music and the sounds the monos themselves cultivate.

Perhaps the best way to zip this up is to share what I learned about the title. Mono in Spanish can mean child or monkey with a sense of cuteness. It's a term the kids use for themselves without further elucidation. They have nicknames from popular culture like Smurf, Rambo and Bigfoot but whether they style themselves after the tricksters of the jungle or boast that their youth has allowed them warrior status is kept ambiguous as though examining it by the coloured light of the forest might reveal far too much.