Children see more than they understand, and understand more than they know. Their intense, limited way of perceiving the world, sometimes sentimentally rendered as moral
innocence, is one of the reasons they are frequently placed at the center of movies about war, revolution and other forms of social upheaval and political disaster. Gonzalo (Matias Quer), the 11-year-old boy at the center of Andres Wood's Machuca, is warily edging toward adolescence, preoccupied with the petty brutality of the schoolyard and the unspoken miseries of his upper-middle class Santiago household.
But because his coming of age takes place in Chile in 1973, his ordinary hardships, joys and rites of passage are charged with inordinate tension. The audience, aware from the start that the military coup against Salvador Allende's government lurks on the horizon, feels their sympathy for this child -- and their more general nostalgia for childhood -- shadowed by anxiety and dread.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
For the most part Wood, who based the film on events from his own early life, confines the story to Gonzalo's perspective. Intimations of Chile's volatile political situation pop up almost casually, via the television set, graffiti in the street and overheard adult conversations. But there is no question that Gonzalo's private world, like his country, is in a state of ferment. A soft-faced, passive boy, he is forced to accompany his mother (Aline Kuppenheim) on visits to her lover, an older, wealthy sensualist who buys the boy's complicity with handsome bound editions of Lone Ranger comics. At home, Gonzalo has to deal with his weak-willed father and his sister's loutish boyfriend. At the private English-language boys' school Gonzalo attends, the headmaster (Ernesto Malbran), a priest flush with the experimental, egalitarian spirit of the Allende government, has
sgranted scholarships to a few boys from the nearby slums.
One of them, Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna), becomes Gonzalo's friend, and introduces him to another side of life in Santiago. Pedro also introduces Gonzalo to Silvana (Manuela Martelli), a tough, fearless shantytown girl who becomes their frequent companion, and the crux of a sweet romantic triangle that makes parts of Machuca resemble a juvenile Jules and Jim. The three friends help Silvana's father take advantage of the political situation by selling flags at competing demonstrations, and play kissing games on the banks of a muddy creek.
Machuca is both sweet and stringent, attuned to the wonders of childhood as well as its cruelty and terror. Wood allows the story to unfold at a leisurely, almost dawdling pace, which matches the consciousness of his young protagonist. Wood ends Gonzalo's youthful idyll with a few short, painful strokes -- scenes of the military takeover that capture the harsh, emphatic force with which authoritarian rule announces its arrival.
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