Amigo

Saw Amigo, a small film about the occupation of a village in the Philippines by American forces during the Spanish American war. The film was made in 2010 and is refreshingly told from the village-eye view. The Americans are not especially characters until they become integrated into village life. It is not the noble American sergeant who is the hero, but the head of the village who struggles to keep as many of his people alive as possible.

He struggles between the indifferent Americans, the freedom-fighting rebels, and the various scheming rivals within his own village who would steal his leadership. These last are the most frustrating and least sympathetic. The Americans, as I say, are largely regarded as forces of nature. They sweep in with chinese labourers and with complete indifference, if not outright hostility, for local custom. The rebels are seen as idealistic. On the right side fundamentally, but living far too dangerously, in caves and off of handouts from local villages. The entire village could not become rebels. There's also a cruel priest who is freed by the Americans from the village jail (I believe he was imprisoned for political reasons, but the details are obscure for me. I am very weak in history.) He instantly turns on the village head, the ownership of a patch of land being his motive. He is a great source of frustratingly self-righteous and duplicitous speeches about heathens and knowing one's place. He counsels one woman to put her rebel son out of her heart. "He has turned his back on God!"

Basically the film is about one man's struggle to keep his village alive and being ground up in the gears of machines beyond his or anyone's comprehension. The film is shot in a cheap, flat manner. I suspect this was a TV-movie or something. Most of the actors are unknowns and deliver their lines broad and flat. And yet the film has tension and pathos. It doesn't reach the hysteria of some of the American melodramas of the 50s but is quite effective in its own way. It also has something interesting to say about imperialism and occupation but these concepts are anachronistic for the time-period and thus are not harped upon (and good, I say! Nothing sets my teeth on edge like a character being the judgemental voice of contemporary culture, tutting primly at the sins of the past. So unrealistic.) This non-harping-on of the message though makes it a little hard to decypher. It clearly condemns the Americans but so to does it condemn the rebels. Everyone is tainted. An interesting film, I feel it could spark a good discussion in a sociology class.