Heli, 2013.
Directed by Amat Escalante.
Starring Armando Espitia, Andrea Vergara, Linda González and Juan Eduardo Palacios.
SYNOPSIS:
Love story between a young girl and a police man, both of them had connections with drugs but in opposite ways. This will create a conflict that love will try to overcome.
The flashes of brutality in Amat Escalante’s Heli aren’t enough to shock you into ignoring how ultimately flawed this award-winning movie is. Feeling like half of a quality crime thriller – the first half – Heli is undermined by its own coldness and a frustrating willingness to depart anticlimactically. Undone by its own neat set-up, Heli simply breaks off proceedings before it reaches a satisfying close, leaving a promising Mexican crime drama unfulfilled.
Young Heli (Armando Espitia), an unassuming factory worker, lives with his wife, young sister Estela, father and infant child out in the desert wastes of an anonymous Mexico town. Their lives are quiet, going nowhere, devoid of controversy. That is until Estela’s much older boyfriend, Beto, steals a stash of drugs belonging to a cartel. Hiding it at Heli’s home, things turn bad for the family.
I suppose it’s fair game that Heli won Best Director at Cannes earlier this year; on a technical level, the clearly low budget film impressively melds slick camerawork (there’s good use of steadicam, the perennial gangster genre technique du jour) with a down-to-earth aesthetic. The Mexican desert fits as rough metaphor for the unforgiving atmosphere among the local gangs, with eternal blue sky and sunlight an uneasy, yet appropriately symbolic setting for Mexico’s open-air crime problem.
With his unflinching camera eye, Escalante successfully convinces you never to mess with Mexican crime cartels, at least if you treasure either your pets or your genitals – undiminished close-ups of the various stages of a teenage boy’s penis set ablaze aren’t easy to forget. Yet the family drama, regrettably, is. It feels distant, Heli’s relationship with his family (and wife in particular) failing to elicit any real emotion. It could be because the performances are largely nondescript, with Espitia especially blank in the lead role.
More interesting is the relationship Escalante presents between Estela and Beto, a pairing that – due to her childlike appearance and his gruff, adult features – looks all kinds of wrong. Escalante dedicates more time to this icky romance than to the marriage between Heli and his wife Sabrina. We’re told Heli’s sexually frustrated and Sabrina’s resentful towards him for trapping her into the marriage, but its bearing on the plot never feels as crucial as Escalante wants it to be.
As a set of wince-inducing scenes prove, Escalante should’ve stuck with his genre and kept Heli as an expose on Mexican drugs crime. Its extremities may be burnt into your memory, but the film doesn’t hold up much beyond that. Most lasting of all is the sting of the film shortchanging the audience of a satisfying climax, with the director after all assuming (incorrectly) that the key interest is the main character’s domestic life. What starts out as a dark take on the wrong man scenario simply peters out disappointingly.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Brogan Morris – Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the young princes. Follow Brogan on Twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion.
Originally published November 19, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
