Cocote

With each new scene comes a new styl­is­tic flour­ish, or per­haps sense that a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tor has got­ten their mitts on the cam­era, in Nel­son Car­lo de Los San­tos Arias’ bold­ly intrigu­ing pover­ty belt revenge film, Cocote. This often cacoph­o­nous saga cen­tres on pas­sive, push-around-guy Alber­to (Vicente San­tos) who appears to work as a gar­den­er for a mid­dle class Domini­can fam­i­ly. The mur­der of his father has forced him to take a dark jour­ney back to his rur­al roots where he must con­tend with the­atri­cal fun­da­men­tal­ist reli­gion, yam­mer­ing in-laws, tooled-up gang­sters and alco­holic goats.

Just as the film reg­u­lar­ly returns to shots of church­go­ers jud­der­ing in parox­ysms of spir­i­tu­al fer­vour, Cocote is a work which writhes, squirms and just gen­er­al­ly prefers to head in a direc­tion deter­mined by its own off-kil­ter mus­cle mem­o­ry. Some sequences come across as on-the-lam cap­tured frag­ments of doc­u­men­tary reportage, filmed secret­ly in order to cap­ture the pure tex­tures of the imme­di­ate moment. Oth­ers are more sculpt­ed and tra­di­tion­al­ly cin­e­mat­ic, like one lat­er scene in which Alber­to runs down a road at night with the head­lights of cars illu­mi­nat­ing his flail­ing shad­ow from behind, an omi­nous, Bernard Her­rmann-esque musi­cal cue played over the top.

It’s not a plea­sur­able film in any tra­di­tion­al sense, and view­ers should be warned that a high tol­er­ance for extend­ed, com­i­cal­ly repet­i­tive shout­ing match­es is most cer­tain­ly required. Indeed, most of the peo­ple Alber­to meets kick off the con­ver­sa­tion by humil­i­at­ing or demean­ing him in some way. Even when he has plucked up the courage to face off against the hood­lums who may have had a hand in his father’s death, he’s the tar­get of an extreme tor­rent of abuse before any­thing phys­i­cal is allowed to happen.

While the sto­ry itself remains pur­pose­ful­ly opaque, the film nev­er­the­less com­mits to bring­ing an unex­pur­gat­ed and unvar­nished ver­sion of Domini­can parochial life to the screen. This in itself offers rea­son behind the intense anger har­boured by every­one, as well as a sense that these peo­ple are look­ing for some­thing, any­thing to ral­ly around in order to find a sweet release. But there’s also an absurd humour at play, espe­cial­ly in the fact that Arias sel­dom resorts to a tra­di­tion­al medi­um shot when actors are talk­ing. In one ear­ly sequence, a con­ver­sa­tion plays out as one char­ac­ter plucks and fil­lets a chick­en with a machete. Which sums up the film, all told.