Film Review: Iluminados Por el Fuego
Andy Newman
Iluminados Por el Fuego (Enlightened by Fire) held its UK premiere recently in
Manchester, attended by Director, Tristán Bauer, who himself is a veteran of
the Malvinas War (sometimes known as the 1982 Falklands Conflict).
This
first fictional film about the war from Argentina has been showered with
awards in the Spanish speaking world, and has hit Argentina like a meteor,
with over 400000 seeing it in cinemas, as well as being the most popular
rental DVD by a country mile, and is now being shown in schools, and even by
the military themselves.
The core of the film is a truly remarkable depiction of the war itself. Poorly
trained and brutalised young conscripts, abused, freezing and malnourished,
defending a wind blasted, rain lashed wilderness. Just enough time is allotted
to the tedious waiting, discomfort, gross military bullying and developing
friendships between the young soldiers, before Hell bursts upon them on Mount
Tumbledown.
I have heard from British veterans their utter chilled shock when they were
told they were going to take the hill in the dark with a surprise bayonet
charge.
The carnage and terror is portrayed brilliantly as the Argentinean soldiers
are overwhelmed, and despite individual bravery and solidarity from the boy
conscripts their line breaks and their army becomes a fleeing rabble. We are
shown brutal atrocities, and glimpses of broken corpses suddenly snatched from
the darkness by the flash bursts of fire and explosion, while cacophony and
broken continuity prevents us making any narrative sense of the events. This
is all the more surreal on a cold pointless rock grazed by sheep, with the
haunting calls of seagulls heard among the rumbling artillery.
The later regroupment and retreat to Port Stanley (Puerta Argentina) where the
army ultimately surrenders further shows the chasm between the self-deluded,
puffed up officers and the shockingly young and ill prepared conscripts. The
point is brilliantly made that the war was inevitably lost by the incompetence
and moral corruption of the officers who at that time had ruled Argentina for
6 years of bloody, inhuman terror. Despite the heroism and technical
brilliance of the Argentinean Air Force, the army had no self belief, and no
cause worth fighting for. In a back yard of a Port Stanley house a small group
of defeated soldiers rebuild some shared humanity with a game of football.
Fictional portrayals of the chaos and trauma of defeat are surprisingly rare.
Ian McEwan’s recent novel “Atonement” is an only partially successful recent
example, but Evelyn Waugh’s brilliant dark comedy of the British defeat in
Crete in the “Sword of Honour” trilogy, has closer echoes with this film.
Though Waugh, in a typically English way, prefers to play it for humour.
In
Iluminados Por el Fuego, the narrative of the war is framed as flashback from
the central character, Estaban, who has been called to the bedside of a former
comrade who has attempted suicide. This allows the film to have a much
stronger contemporary resonance as suicides by the ignored veterans of the war
have now overtaken the numbers killed in the three month long conflict. At the
end of the film Estaban returns to the Islands: an autobiographical episode
from the life of the Director Tristán Bauer, in an attempt to bury his own
ghosts. How bizarre it seems to encounter the anachronistic normality of Port
Stanley and its surrounding hills, for all the world like a small village in
Cumbria, as the canvas that his nightmares were painted on.
Although this was a stylistically conventional ending, further emphasised by
an unnecessarily sentimental song, the contextualising of the war from the
viewpoint of the veterans now in their forties increases the emotional power.
Not because of the suicides, or the more dramatically failed lives, but
because Estaban himself is shown as having held himself together, and become a
successful TV journalist with a stable family, but the demons are just quiet
in him, not still or gone. It reminded me very strongly of the subtle, hard to
describe, but oh so obvious, damage of my father and so many of his generation
who left the bodies of their young friends behind them at El Alamein, and
Monte Casino, or in the jungles of Burma, the deserts of Iraq or the forests
of the Ardennes, but have carried with them the memories of those dead boys
ever since. I cried at the end of the film, not for the dead, but for Estaban
who survived, and for my father.
March 2006
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