Spotlight on South America
Escobar: Paradise Lost examines the world of organized crime through an unusual prism. Visiting from Canada, Nick Brady sets up a surf camp with his brother near Medellín. While at the tropical retreat, he fixes his gaze on the lovely Maria, who turns out to be the niece of Pablo Escobar. The Colombian drug lord welcomes Nick into the fold, showing the 20-something gringo the ropes of the family trade and leaving him confused and overwhelmed.
Written and directed by the Italian actor Andrea Di Stefano and featuring Josh Hutcherson and Benicio Del Toro, Escobar: Paradise Lost debuted at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The French-Spanish romantic thriller is based on a true story but is, at the same time, largely fictionalized, taking some helpful cues from The Godfather and Apocalypse Now in imagining the cocaine kingpin’s final days.
In 1993, the Colombian armed forces shot Escobar, fleeing across a Medellín rooftop, in a hail of Scarface-esque gunfire. More than two decades after his death, Escobar remains as enigmatic as ever. His drug trafficking empire made him one of the wealthiest criminals in history, entering Forbes magazine’s list of international billionaires in 1987 alongside Giovanni Agnelli, the Fiat car magnate. Yet he also worked hard to cultivate a Robin Hood-like image among those he perceived as his people, building soccer stadiums, schools and houses for the poor in his hometown.
Unfortunately, while Del Toro’s casting is spot-on, Escobar plays a supporting character in his own production. But as Variety says, this “enterprising B-movie” is “never better than when Del Toro takes center stage.”
IMPASSIONED STRUGGLE
Last year, a film about another South American figure also premiered in Toronto. Libertador offers a glimpse at Simón Bolívar’s instrumental role in Latin America’s impassioned struggle for independence from Spanish rule. While the sweeping Venezuelan-Spanish venture is two hours long, the Hollywood Reporter deems it a “too-short look” since “the film would need to be twice as long to even begin to tell the whole story.”
Born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1783, the son of an old Creole family of considerable wealth, Bolívar is honored all over Latin America with the sort of reverence that citizens of the United States extend to George Washington. The campaign to wrest control of northern and western South America covered vast terrain and involved more than 100 battles. The later years of “El Libertador” — or The Liberator, as he was called — are marked by the collapse of his grand dream to unite the present-day nations of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama. In 1830, at the age of 47, Simón Bolívar died of tuberculosis in Santa Marta, along the Caribbean coast of Gran Colombia.
The mostly Spanish-language epic is not at all an art house offering, and should prove to be especially appealing to those of a Spanish-speaking heritage. In the title role is 37-year-old Venezuelan-born Édgar Ramírez, whose breakout performance in the 2010 French-German miniseries Carlos — as the 1970s Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal — established his reputation as a capable actor.
Libertador has been selected as the Venezuelan entry for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 87th Academy Awards, scheduled for February 2015. Going by its official trailer, it appears to have a fair shot at the coveted statuette.
