Magical realism meets a grand family saga in “Pedro Páramo,” the directorial debut of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. As the man responsible for the lighting and photography of countless iconic films — including “Barbie,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Brokeback Mountain” — Prieto turns his keen attention to one of Mexico’s most influential novels. A tale of ghosts and memories slipping through time, Matteo Gil’s screenplay follows the structure of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 script with exacting fidelity, laying the foundation for a melancholic (if slightly unbalanced) adaptation that finds visual splendor in the macabre.
Tenoch Huerta (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) stars as Juan Preciado, a man who travels to his late mother’s hometown of Comala sometime after the Revolution (1910-1920), in search of the father he never met: a character named Pedro Páramo. (Manuel Garcia Rulfo) who quickly learned that he was also dead. The missing character’s name is often spoken in full, several times before we meet him in flashback, as if he were a mythical figure.
Upon arriving in Comala – a creepy, deserted municipality with cobblestone roads – Juan meets several people who once knew his parents, and they begin to regale him with stories by candlelight. However, the line between the living and the dead is very thin in this town, and it is not long before many conversations reveal them to be encounters with spirits, whose true nature they may not initially recognize.
As each story about Juan’s father unfolds, the film seamlessly transitions to the late 19th and early 20th centuries—sometimes in the same shot. The camera pans between rooms where different decades seem to unfold, as Comala’s dead streets and faded walls come to life with vivid colours, highlighting the surrounding greenery. As the film moves back and forth, and Juan learns about his father from many sources, Pedro Páramo’s story in the gang world unfolds in a non-linear way, with puzzle pieces gently placed.
The image in question is riveting and ugly. Pedro is a powerful man with influence over the locals and violent thugs at his disposal, who moves easily from one woman to another, for both personal and political reasons. One of these women was Juan’s mother, Dolores (Seville Bautista). However, the love of Pedro’s life was a very different character, Susana (Elsie Salas), whom he met when he was young and whose return to Comala he had anticipated for many years – a feeling of nostalgia that is fully embodied in Gustavo Santaolalla’s powerful score.
Tragedy and the inevitability of self-destruction permeate Pedro’s story, as if the pain he causes in the world lies in wait before coming back to haunt him, via twisted cosmic justice. The only son he considers legitimate, Miguel (Santiago Cullors), dies young in a horse-riding accident, but not before forcing himself on a young girl, leaving the looming question of whether or not Pedro deserves his grief. As Juan absorbs these tales throughout the night, he moves from building to building and street to street, at first passively listening to the memories of others, but eventually watching scenes from the past appear through doorways, as if he were sitting through an old movie. Which he should not be privy to.
It all adds up to the Shakespearean tragedy of a man lost in selfish ambition and personal desire, and the forces of greed and love that often clash and anger his soul. Along the way, the film switches narrative point of view with surprising abandon, using its back-and-forth structure to scramble established storytelling conventions, just as Rulfo’s novel once did. Unfortunately, one of these transitions is so crucial that when it occurs midway through the film, it almost permanently plunges the film into the past, rendering it unable to capitalize on the strangeness of the post-1920 setting, in which the storytellers appear before they shift in and out of the film. . Their physical environments, whether earth or sky.
These fantastical events, aided by the disjointed sound design that gets under the viewer’s skin, are limited to the first half of the film. Director Pedro’s epic “The Godfather” is certainly engaging, and every performance in it is strong and practical, but the film loses at least some of its initial flavor the longer it stays with the main character, without returning to its dreamlike setting. His introductory scenes are wonderfully disorienting, between a focus (and lack thereof) that doesn’t follow the traditional rules of background and foreground — Prieto doubles as his DP, sharing duties with Nico Aguilar — and environments that seem to change so subtly that they prick and gnaw at the subconscious.
It’s hard not to get lost in “Pedro Páramo” even when the film eventually gets lost in itself, taking on a more classic cinematic form that doesn’t quite gel. Fortunately, its surreal appeal – underpinned by a sense of tragic longing – is strong enough to resonate throughout its run.