Dos Monjes (1934)

Not rated because it is a Mexican film from 1934, not an American film from after 1970.  It's funny, because I'm going to write what might be considered offensive in this movie and the movie is as tame as can be.  Um...one of the monks tries bludgeoning another monk to death with an oversized crucifix.  The movie is fundamentally about an affair that spirals out of control.  Um...it seems worse than it is.  Still, not rated.

DIRECTOR:  Juan Bustillo Oro

It's Star Trek Day and I'm pressed for time.  I tend not to write these things on weekends, but I also want to get it out before the weekend because I have goals to watch a ton of movies that I'll eventually have to write about.  It's not like I want to do Dos Monjes a disservice, but also...I don't have that much time.  If this comes out on Friday and has a decent length to it, we'll both be shocked.

I am going to tell you the odd perk about the Martin Scorsese box set.  Because the movies are from all over the world from different time periods, the movies I'm watching have a kind of schizophrenic personality.  I took a hard left from Pixote going right into Dos Monjes (not my normal philosophy, but I really didn't want to stop the treadmill to switch discs) and it was a trip.  Before I watch these World Cinema Projects, I admit that I know little-to-nothing about these films before I go into them.  That's kind of the point, right?  The World Cinema Project is meant to bring to light movies that were influential in the language of film and culture, but for some reason have been forgotten to history.  After Pixote, Dos Monjes might have been exactly what I needed.  It's about 80 minutes, so I'm already rooting for this movie. (For a guy who devotes so much time to movies, it's weird that I'm all about the short movie.) But also, it's a precursor to Rashomon, a movie that I swore to have reviewed, but that clearly isn't the case here.) 

It's funny because I'm going to start my unit on German Expressionism today and here I am, talking about a film that embeds itself in Mexican Expressionism.  Before I go all grandiose about the movie, I just want to stress how awesome this movie looks. If this movie didn't have the aesthetic it had, I could easily see this film being reduced to simple melodrama.  But the visuals compliment the story so well, that the whole work is elevated.  It's not a perfect movie.  I'm actually probably going to whine how Rashomon did the whole concept better (but later!).  But the movie takes an 80 minute storyline, which is really two about-thirty-five-minute stories with bookends and creates a really tight narrative on how there might not be objective truth?  I'm going to embrace the phrase "objective truth" because the Catholicism surrounding the film.  One of the biggest frustrations about my faith since Trump is the skewing of the concept of objective truth.  I know.  Ironic, isn't it?  But our protagonists (odd way to put it in a movie where you don't know who the main character is) are monks and there is so much religious imagery, that I'm going to embrace the concept of objective truth.  

It's odd writing these things, by the way.  A good part of my soul wants objective truth to be a thing.  But I have to look at the movie from Oro's perspective.  We are placing these two monks in the same scenario and stressing that their stories thrive on their differences.  The facts, for the most part, are the same.  Juan even stresses as much about Javier's testimony.  Juan acknowleges that Javier is telling the truth about the events leading up to Ana's death.  What Javier is advocating for is the notion of perspective.  While this is super cool as a concept, I'm glad the movie doesn't just rest on its laurels here.  I mean, for the most part, Juan is right.  Most of the beats of Juan's story match the beats of Javier's story.  But it's the small stuff that brings me joy.  Not everything is the same.  Some of it would come down to interpretation.  This is where stylistic choices and metaphor almost transcend literary and cinematic terms. 

In the first story, Javier sees himself as the noble victim of circumstance, both between his health and Juan.  In that narrative, Ana absoltuely loves Javier and Juan's advances are fully unwanted.  But Javier, in that story, is the hero.  He's the one who has all of the goals to achieve.  He needs to win over Ana.  He needs to survive to see his children.  He has the love of a woman that is so clear and delineated that there's no room for love to fall apart.  But in this story, he's wearing grey (code for "White Hat") and Juan is wearing black ("Black Hat").  Juan's story sees Javier never as a villain, but as a selfish jerk.  He is a burden on Ana.  While Juan's story takes place often devoid of Javier there, because he wants to give context to Javier's story, what scenes he's in make him seem clingy and frustrating.  That makes sense.  After all, we're all the heroes of our own narratives. But the color scheme is inverted for these stories.  In this version, it is Juan who is the White Hat and Javier who wears the Black Hat.  It's super cool.  This is a long way of me filling in space saying, "While Juan says that everything Javier said was true, the clothing proves that something there is either a lie or misremembered."

But this leads me to a confusing ending of the movie.  (This also might be one of my final paragraphs, if not THE final paragraph because time is short and so is this movie.)  Listen, I want to keep the chaos of the end.  The end is visually *chef's kiss*.  It's perfect.  It's what I love about expressionism and it gets appropriately weird.  The monks with their abstract saints are fabulous.  Also, it's really cryptic with its end.  We have Javier and Juan as their respective monk names.  Javier is wearing the grey tunic and Juan is wearing the black tunic.  Cool, the movie is maintaining its visual language and I like that.  It also keeps the two characters visually distant, considering that everyone looks the same in a monestary.  But if we associate grey as being good and black as being evil, it means that Juan's story is less than noble.  Don't get me wrong.  Even after seeing Juan's side of the story, I still see his story as the less admirable take on the night's events.  But if the movie is stressing that truth isn't as clear as black-and-white, then the ending kind of steps on its own toes.

Now, Oro does one thing that kind of forgives that.  The absolute final shot has either Juan or Javier (probably Juan, based on the events of the story) reaching up to God.  It is shot from the rear and we never see the person's face.  This is the character wearing the black robes.  While I want to intrepret this as Juan reaching up for forgiveness for his crimes, like I said, we never see his face.  Technically, if we're trying to maintain the notion that everything is about perception, that last shot may save the notion that Juan was wearing the black robes to begin with.  I don't know.  It's just a thought.

Maybe that wasn't going to be my last paragraph because I just remembered my strongest argument.  I will always love Rashomon better.  I know.  The movie came afterwards and is way more famous.  But this movie leaves out one important narrative: Ana.  Ana is so central to the story and we never get her perspective.  The thing that Rashomon does so well is the concept that everyone has a drastically different take on the same events.  But the most important one, in the case of Dos Monjes, is Ana's.  Ana is the woman character in the story.  She's really relegated by the two narratives as the woman to be possessed.  When Rashomon makes that shift in perspective, we see how much different the actions of the male characters is. Ana has the added bonus of representing the dead.  Now, the weirdest element of Rashomon is the notion of the dead giving testimony.  But Dos Monjes almost needs it.  When talking about objective truth, Javier and Juan tell stories that are too similar.  I want the bananas other versio of the story that contradicts everything that is said.

Still, this movie slaps.  I wasn't ready for it.  I never knew that there was a Mexican expressionism movement and it got me good.  It's so good.  Yeah, Rashomon is better, but who cares?  It does it for me.