Such Is Life in the Tropics (2016)

I briefly visited Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 2012. It was a mostly pleasant visit, but I recall, in a seemingly quiet and pretty neighborhood, two cops talking in serious tones near a young woman lying on a bench. Was she drugged? Dead? I never found out. But it came to mind during this Guayaquil-set film, whose native title, Sin muertos no hay carnaval, more accurately translates to "Without dead bodies, there's no carnival."

Some 250 people are squatting on land that theoretically belongs to one mobster, but his father had neglected it. A liaison has been collecting "rent" (read: protection money) from the squatters while assuring them that he's working to get their residency legalized, but they're getting impatient. Alas, so is he, and it doesn't take much of a challenge from them to get him to threaten someone's life -- or have someone carry out that threat. An impudent teen boy, out to protect his mother, grandmother, and girlfriend, learns this the hard way.

But that's not the only issue occupying the lawyer's mind. One of the boss's sons, who's a soccer celebrity, was seen with a rifle at the site of a hunting accident that killed a preteen German tourist. Even if authorities determine that he didn't fire the shot in question, since he neither came to help the victim nor wants to identify the shooter, he's in trouble. Strife comes to a boil within the family.

This is one of those stories so gritty that I needed a while to decide how to feel about it. There are no heroes per se; I couldn't admire anyone, tho I did root for the underdogs, however shaky their vindication. Even the resolutions aren't admirable; they come so easily and obviously that they're boring, which in turn may get us to reflect more on whether the victors did the right things.

I hadn't really thought of it as a thriller much of the time, but I see it in retrospect. I didn't take anyone's survival for granted. And might I say, the gunshots herein sound more convincing than in most movies. I almost jumped out of my seat, even when I knew they were coming.

This being the first screening at the year's AFI Latin American Film Festival, we got a bilingual Q&A with Andrés Crespo, co-writer and actor of the soccer player. He indicated a high degree of authenticity, partly because he knew many people who might well have had a story like his character's and partly because the filmmakers didn't fake as much as they could have. For example, in a fan-favorite scene, Crespo gets punched in the chest; he felt it for days afterward. Good thing they did it in one take. (The rain in that scene was unplanned, too, and a reason for no retake.)

It's not a bad way to spend 100 minutes, Q&A aside. I just hope the next South American feature I see isn't full of anger.