El Ardor
Director: Pablo Fendrik
Talent: Gael García Bernal, Alice Braga, Jorge Sesán
Release Date: 19th June 2015
One of the essential thematic tent-poles of the Western has always been man’s struggle to tame the wild frontier. Argentinian filmmaker Pablo Fendrik’s latest plays off this long established motif but transposes the action from the sun-baked expanses of the American West to the suffocating rainforest of his native country. The film follows a mysterious jungle-dweller (Bernal) in his quest to assist a family of hard-nosed homesteaders at war with a band of land-grabbing mercenaries.
Bernal’s man with no name trades in a brand of brooding intensity that could be read as poorly drawn, but the combination of the picture’s quasi-mystical tone and explicitly Leone-indebted underpinnings afford Fendrik the capacity to paint in broad strokes. Though there is no small degree of artistry on display in El Ardor’s presentation, particularly in the use of smoke later in the picture to elicit the same claustrophobia of the earlier jungle scenes, thematically and narratively speaking, this is far from an exercise in nuance.
Words: Danny Wilson
