First-time Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas tells an especially dark tale about the confusing interactions between a brutal Caracas street thug, Elder (humpy newcomer Luis Silva), and a middle-aged denturemaker, Armando (Alfredo Castro), in From Afar. Armando pays to dominate bad boys like Elder without physically penetrating them. In a dance macabre series of brutal encounters, thug and denturemaker refuse to let each other or us glimpse their true feelings and needs, in a society that has been repeatedly brutalized and betrayed by politics from both left and right.
An early encounter between the boy and the man, right after the kid beats and robs the almost-senior citizen, shows an almost poetic escalation of macho pride through obscene street lingo.
Elder: "You won't get your wallet back, so piss off, old faggot."
Armando: "I don't want my wallet back."
Elder: "I'll beat you again. So piss off, motherfucker."
The old man presses a large wad of bills into the kid's hands and walks off with the cryptic, "I've got more of this at home."
Against the backdrop of a class-stratified, post-Hugo Chavez Venezuela whose citizens are re-evaluating the fruits of Chavez's petro-fueled revolution, Elder and Armando lurch toward some kind of intimate familial bond that defies an easy definition. Their bond appears to fetishize power on both sides, as both men struggle to trust the other and, for that matter, themselves.
At one point Elder asks Armando if his father ever beat him, and if he'd beat his own kids if he could. The older man shakes his head no to both questions while the kid snarls, "I would beat them as hard as I could, to show them how full of shit the world is." From Afar dramatizes, in a series of quick, violent takes, the kind of male-on-male violence seldom glimpsed outside the boxing ring. The filmmakers dare to step up the stakes of their ballet of blood and bruises without ever turning us off or making us less than complicit in this dirty little war.
Opens Fri., July 8, at the Roxie Theater.