Birds of Passage

It’s a tale as old as the Hol­ly­wood hills: young Colom­bian upstart mar­ries into a trib­al clan by secur­ing a dowry through his drug traf­fick­ing pay­ola. But once he’s tast­ed the good times, it’s hard to resist tak­ing anoth­er lit­tle bite of the pie. And so the blocks of cash roll in, the bad eggs reveal them­selves and roll out, and the dream of a rich cash crop and inter-trib­al peace is scup­pered by a swathe of unnec­es­sary humil­i­a­tions and bru­tal hon­our slayings.

Cristi­na Gal­lego and Ciro Guerra’s Birds of Pas­sage is a rags-to-rich­es-to-rags nar­co saga we’ve seen a thou­sand time before. Yet it offers the rare chance of mon­i­tor­ing these time­worn machi­na­tions from the van­tage of a tin­pot car­tel oper­a­tion rather than the greedy, gak-snort­ing yanks. Begin­ning in the mid ​’60s and cli­max­ing in the ear­ly ​’80s, this true life tale offers a more lacon­ic, less glossy take on the minu­ti­ae of ille­gal trad­ing than its US coun­ter­parts, even though its ​‘crime doesn’t pay’ mes­sage rings out just as loud and clear.

The film recalls Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s The God­fa­ther, in that it explores the dis­par­i­ty between an ancient code of ethics and the grub­by minu­ti­ae of mod­ern crim­i­nal endeav­our. Raphayet (Jose Acos­ta) claps his eyes on Zai­da (Natalia Reyes) and enters into a bizarre pub­lic mat­ing rit­u­al in a bid for her hand. She pea­cocks around a cir­cle with a coloured shawl fanned above her head, while he nim­bly skips and hops in front of her.

Her impe­ri­ous, unsmil­ing moth­er (Carmiña Mar­tinez) takes the task of pre­serv­ing the fam­i­ly blood­line extreme­ly seri­ous­ly, and clear­ly sees some­thing way­ward in her enig­mat­ic, blank-faced son-in-law-to-be. Visions come to her in lucid dreams, and she also receives signs from nature in the form of vis­it­ing birds and insects. At one point, she cor­rect­ly pre­dicts an oncom­ing plague.

It’s a bit of a strange film all-told, in that it per­haps rides for a lit­tle too long on the idea of a tak­ing a high­ly con­ven­tion­al plot and trans­pos­ing to this unique set­ting. Even though the film deals with char­ac­ters who life and die by the dic­tates of trib­al diplo­ma­cy, it ends up sug­gest­ing that it doesn’t take much to bend the rules for the sake of a quick buck. As such, we’re even­tu­al­ly left with war­ring fac­tions who have tossed their ances­tors to the curb, exem­pli­fied in a sequence where a fam­i­ly member’s corpse is exhumed from the grave and his bones pol­ished, with the same graves shown again lat­er, now con­tain­ing crates of guns where the bod­ies once were.

As a cri­tique of cap­i­tal­ism, it couldn’t be more blunt, but there’s some­thing sat­is­fy­ing­ly absurd about see­ing these earthy folks ride across the arid flats in giant 4x4s and even­tu­al­ly upgrade their decrepit wood­en shack to a gaudy stuc­co man­sion. Strange­ly, the direc­tors have told the sto­ry in a way that makes it feel like it’s hap­pen­ing in the present day, main­ly due to a few mod­ern pro­duc­tion details and some stiff per­for­mances from the small US con­tin­gent of the cast.

The film rat­tles along pleas­ant­ly with­out ever real­ly tip­ping over the edge, or using the set­ting to say some­thing new about the haz­ards of the drug trade. No one scene or image real­ly lodges itself in the mind or stands out, mak­ing it feel like an intrigu­ing albeit super­fi­cial curios­i­ty rather than a sweep­ing epic with any real emo­tion­al depth.