Compadre (review)

This film is a dense, well-wrought portrait of the Barrientos, a poor Peruvian family, as they struggle with their low social status in an intensely status-conscious society. It is also a highly self-aware exploration of the potentialities and limits of the human relationships between the structurally poor and structurally rich—including, ultimately, the relationship between the family being filmed, and the filmmaker himself.

Mikael Wistrom, a Swedish filmmaker, met Daniel Barrientos in the early 1970s when he came across Daniel and his wife Nati combing through rubbish on the outskirts of Lima. Thus began a thirty-year relationship, during which Mikael and Daniel corresponded and Mikael periodically visited and filmed the family. Daniel and Nati eventually carved out a small niche of stability for themselves, with Nati cleaning houses and Daniel driving a rickety motor-taxi, as they raised two daughters and a son in a cinderblock house in the dusty desolation of Lima's urban periphery.

Wistrom's skill as a documentarist ensures that each member of the Barrientos family emerges here as a rich, complex character. The younger daughter, Judi, in her twenties, is depressed because she has no marketable skills, but refuses to work as a domestic servant, for, she says, "If I had to wear a maid's uniform like my mother, I would die." She struggles to escape her class by becoming the partner of Alfredo, a successful radio personality; but it is a bad relationship. She wants desperately to do more with her life, but Alfredo will not hear of it. Sandra, her older sister, is happily married and has a child; she is a sensitive advisor to Judi during her crises with Alfredo. Sandra and her husband manufacture ceramic pots, but they long for a better life, which they hope to find in the unknown world of Brazil. Nati, Judi and Sandra's mother, is tough as nails, and knows that if her employer were forced to pay her a higher wage "there would be war." She bites her lip and will not cry when her daughter leaves for Brazil, for she knows that her husband Daniel will weep enough for them both. Daniel is the most complex character of all. On the one hand he is proud to have provided a roof, stability and food for his children as they grew up. But he is also acutely aware, as he tells Mikael, that driving a mototaxi "is low." When he travels to the village in the highlands where he was born, he weeps because he realizes that after forty-five yeas of urban life, he has nothing of value to bring his Quechua-speaking aunt as a gift.

The tensest, most revealing aspect of the film has to do with the relationship between Mikael and Daniel. The two men have developed over the course of thirty years something that looks like a friendship of equals. Mikael wishes to imagine that the two of them have transcended their class differences and are now working as collaborators on the film. But when Daniel asks Mikael for $2,500 to buy a new engine for his motor-taxi, the class difference suddenly becomes unavoidable, and perilous to the relationship. "I have already helped you," Mikael complains, "and money isn't endless. If the money ends, I have to stop filming." Daniel responds by threatening to withdraw from the film, saying that "friendship is friendship, but work is work." Mikael is stunned. Finally, the two reconcile, but the issue is never resolved—or rather, Mikael gets his film and Daniel goes without his engine. It is to Wistrom's credit that he does not shy away from this disturbing asymmetry, forcing the viewer to wonder what friendship—and inter-cultural connection—means across such a profound class divide. Overall, this is a brilliant and beautiful film that would be of great utility in courses of anthropology, Latin American Studies, and the sociology of class.