Too Late to Die Young

The peo­ple of Chile in 1989 expe­ri­enced a lib­er­a­tion, as mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor Gen­er­al August Pinochet was vot­ed out in a Yes/​No ref­er­en­dum and democ­ra­cy flowed back into the coun­try like a warm cur­rent. Too Late to Die Young, the third fea­ture by the major­ly tal­ent­ed Chilean writer/​director Domin­ga Sotomay­or Castil­lo, charts a moment of bound­less polit­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty, a chance for peo­ple to reas­sume auton­o­my of their own lives and reject the vio­lent dik­tats of the jun­ta. It joins a fam­i­ly as they enter into an ad hoc rur­al com­mune close to the stage of its incep­tion. The hous­es are rick­ety wood­en frames and sheets of flap­ping plas­tic are the only pro­tec­tion from the elements.

Ques­tions of whether a tra­di­tion­al fuel gen­er­a­tor is nec­es­sary, and where to locate a water source inde­pen­dent from the local sup­ply, dom­i­nate con­ver­sa­tion – although, in the spir­it of these new, peace­able times, voic­es are sel­dom raised. Yet the rebirth of grass­roots democ­ra­cy is not Sotomayor’s sole con­cern – her film explores the idea of democ­ra­cy beyond the present tense. That is, how it effects the chil­dren and teens. She is not inter­est­ed in why we built these struc­tures, but who we build them for, and do those (ado­les­cent) peo­ple tru­ly com­pre­hend the import of the work being done?

The nucle­us of the film’s large ensem­ble cast is the deject­ed, qui­et­ly spo­ken Sofía (Demi­an Hernán­dez), who is the most scep­ti­cal of an alter­na­tive liv­ing arrange­ment that she had no oppor­tu­ni­ty to opt out of, almost as if democ­ra­cy is being forced upon her. The film doesn’t real­ly run with a tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive, it’s time­line con­sists of Sofía’s dai­ly life, her roman­tic clinch­es, her peri­ods of silent reflec­tion, cig­a­rettes in the bath lis­ten­ing to shoegaze, and her attempts to move back to the city to live with her moth­er. It’s an unshowy, yet sen­su­al per­for­mance, depict­ing a young woman’s attempt to secure per­son­al hap­pi­ness amid the hap­py mael­strom of this infant civil­i­sa­tion out in the forest.

Sotomay­or is mea­sured when it comes to tal­ly­ing the pros and cons of this rad­i­cal social exper­i­ment. On one hand, she sug­gests that chil­dren blos­som in this nat­ur­al set­ting. They are unteth­ered and free to express them­selves as they wish. They swim and frol­ic and com­mune with the sur­round­ings. One small kid even breaks out his Michael Jack­son dance moves at an out­door par­ty. And yet, the adults feel intel­lec­tu­al­ly clos­et­ed, locked into anti­quat­ed meth­ods and unable to dis­con­nect from the nos­tal­gia of life before the dic­ta­tor­ship. A vil­lage elder is seen tramp­ing across a com­i­cal­ly arid plain with a dows­ing stick and just say­ing ​“no water here, no water here.” Sofía looks on, facepalm­ing, and con­sid­er­ing her escape route.

If there’s any crit­i­cism, it’s that the film is per­haps a lit­tle too light on dra­ma, as rela­tion­ships and con­fronta­tions are often nag­ging­ly fleet­ing. The sto­ry is based on Sotomayor’s own mem­o­ries of her youth, and its cli­max sounds a note of reflec­tive bit­ter­ness. It says that if we can’t trust the archi­tects to spoil their own struc­ture, then we can sure as hell count on nature to bring it all down for them. Visu­al­ly, the film is a dream: final spe­cial men­tions should go to cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Inti Briones and pro­duc­tion design­er Este­fa­nia Lar­rain, who just con­struct each frame with shab­by-chic per­fec­tion, art­ful­ly bal­anc­ing colours, tones and shapes in a way than nev­er looks forced, and nev­er for­get­ting to add a lit­tle com­ic twist every so often.