Surreal Boredom on the Europa Express

Europa is the story of an American deserter who, a month or two after the defeat of Germany, lands a job as a conductor on the "Europa" line of the Reichsbahn. The job allows him to see the devastation of Germany. It also allows him to meet, fall in love with and marry the daughter of the line's owner as well as to come into contact with partisan nazi resistance to the occupation.

The mostly black and white film is annoyingly narrated by a "hypnotist" who can't decide whether he his hypnotizing us the audience or the hero of the film. The real role of the hypnotic voice over is to bridge the gaps in a movie that can't decide if it follows a thriller story line or a surreal Kafka-esque dream sequence. What is certain is that, minutes into the interminable two and half hour film from which there is no escape, the viewer is left staring desperately at a clock with no hands.

The only good feature of the film was some of the scenes of life amid the devastated ruins of the Third Reich. One scene in particular showing Christmas midnight mass in the snowy open air husk of a church starkley conveyed the harsh and primitive conditions to which people had been pathetically reduced.

Otherwise, the film falls into the "European films are obtuse and dull" category.

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Love and Betrayal in Solitude

Burnt Money "tells the true story of Angel and Sam, two gay lovers who turn to bank robbery and murder holding Argentina and Uruguay in suspense as they lead the authorities on a two month long manhunt." But the tale is something more than a gay-hispano Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Although the movie has lite moments (as well as a couple of transitional rough spots), it is almost unremitting in its claustrophobic depiction of estrangement and existential isolation.

Sam and Angel meet in a public restroom. Angel warns Sam that he hears voices but Sam takes him home anyway. The two become inseparable and, in the underworld in which they live, are know as "The Twins". The pair are brought in on an inside job involving millions of pesos, but as the heist involves higher ups and officials it quickly turns into a saga of betrayal, distrust and and multiple levels of solitude.


As the thieves band of five makes it over into Uruguay, Angel becomes more withdrawn and estranged from Sam who in turn becomes increasingly devoted to caring for Angel who mutters that he is saving Sam from himself. Their solitudes are not a question of not loving. Each is driven to his own distraction as Sam prouls restrooms while Angel haunts pews. Sam takes up with a whore who, as it turns out, has access to a safe-house on the Brazilian border while Angel, mutters through a Spanish-English dictionary as if it were a prayer book, explaining that he and Sam must speak English flawlessly in order to pass undetected when they make it to New York.

Meanwhile, the more the whole world looks for them, the more the group is cut off from the world. The crime boss who facilitated the their escape from Argentina advises the band's nominal leader that it will be impossible to do more given the international media and police focus on the case. He tells him that in Africa they catch monkeys by enticing them with a banana inside a box, so that to get free, all the monkey has to do is let go of the banana. One is left to think of the parable, Where your hand is, so there is your treasure.

But Sam and Angel are nothing if not professionals. As the police close in, the possibilities of escape become narrower, making greater demands on Sam and Angel's collaborative cunning and prowess until, in the end, they reclaim their bananas.

The cinematograpy is competent albeit prosaic. The acting is good. There is one scene-change in particular that is not only abrupt but a non-sequitur, leaving one to film-in the blanks and pick up where we are.... The movie's main defect is its failure to fully explain Angle's alienation and, with that, to inter-connect (or distinguish) the various levels of solitude that are going on.

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El Camino Hacia El Norte

Sin Nombre is a movie about people trying to get to the United States. The title refers to the nameless thousands that make it or don't across the Mexican border.

From an American perspective, the movie is another tale in the immigrant genre portraying the hardships and determination required to arrive in the New Jerusalem of the promised land. Elia Kazan's lyric America! America! from several decades ago comes to mind.

From an Hispanic perspective, however, the movie is another saga in the genre of pilgrim tales recounting the haphazard encounters of humans with evil and good and good mixed with evil at the hands of fellow men as in John Sayle's Hombres Armados or Motorcycle Diaries.

I do not mean to suggest that the movie presents an interpretative choice. Every destination implies a pilgrimage as every pilgrimage seeks a destination. From both perspectives the story is one of survival -- the difference in accent depends on whether one thinks success lies in the travelling or in the arrival.


El Caspar is a young gang member who has been to the United States -- where he apparently earned his "tear drop" -- and who is now having second thoughts about the career path he has chosen. A flickering love of woman is casting a different light on the shadowy bondage rituals of men.

Sayra is a young woman whose father by a previous marriage convinces her and her cousin to make the trip back to the New Jersey where he has left his wife and children. For Sayra's father, the quest is as much aimed at re-uniting his family as getting back to it.

As an immigrant story, the hardships are real and appalling, engendering disgust at those arm chair xenophobes who disparage them "illegals" while stuffing their faces with Cheez O's.

The disgust goes deeper when it is remembered that the squalour these people are fleeing is the direct result of the policies of the country they are fleeing to. There is a vicious circle here. Not only does the United States plunder Hispanic America, what it gives back in return is brutality be it in the form of thug dictatorships or gang violence. Criminals have existed always everywhere, but the gang culture now rife in Mexico and Central America is a direct export from American inner cities. In this sordid dynamic, the United States perpetuates a double-despoliation.



The despoliation has in fact become environmental, although it is probably not so shocking to those who never knew how Mexico was. Poverty too has always existed in Mexico and like poverty everywhere it shows a harsh and ugly face, classically captured in Luis Buñuels Los Olvidados. But it was one of Mexico's many existential paradoxes -- which had to be suffered through like some sort of school drill -- that there was beauty in poverty. That phrase inescapably suffered the embarrassment of a moral piety, until one saw with one's own eyes that poverty could be not only beautiful but was, at times, aesthetically exquisite.

However, poverty and squalor are not the same thing. Today what metastasizes from the Rio Bravo to the Panama Canal is just an unremitting, garbage strewn squalor in which it is a godsend -- like a cloud burst in the dusty heat -- to come upon occasional pockets of the old style poverty.

For those who get their messages from movie trailers, the moral of this story might be that those who perservere are rewarded with finding their "better life". One can do better ... The moral lesson of this social and environmental despoliation is that what goes around comes around. The vintage is always trampled out, eventually. "What shall sinful men be pleading when the just are mercy needing?

The moral lesson from the hispanic pilgrimage is something else. There is no reason for any good to come out of this cultural, economic and environmental wasteland where everything from music to water is a species of sewage. And yet, somehow, in this wasteland and even while pursuing their own desperate self-interests, people do manage to escape -- not to America but into helping someone else at cost to one's self.

It is this kaleidoscope of human selfishness and generosity, softness and brutality, tumbling together amid mixed and pure motives that comprises the pilgrimage of the movie. The tumblings occur both inexplicably and expectedly as when in one scene children run alongside the train and pelt the migrants huddled on the roofs with free oranges while, quite naturally and seamlessly a few scenes later, Mexican police drive by and just as pointlessly spray the train with bullets.


Driven by their respective journeys, El Caspar and Sayra encounter one another on the train. One might say that Caspar befriends Sayra but, just as truely, she befriends him, as the two, their fates entwined, make their way north.

The moral lesson here is not that good wins out in the end but that whether it does or doesn't, whether one arrives or not, amidst all the despoliation and evil, there was still self transcendence and good, like those pockets of old time impoverished beauty.

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