Alsino and the Condor

Alsino and the Condor

“Alsino and the Condor,” like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was one of the most vocal critics of this film; it consists of poetry, political reality, and illusions. Latin American artists appear to have some kind of romantic muse that tells them to festoon their tragedies with butterflies and dreams. This means that any description will make “Alsino” sound too factual; it’s a war movie mostly inside the head of a dreamy little boy.

Set in Nicaragua during its conflict with Honduras, the picture was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film this year. In the war against guerrillas, American advisers are working alongside the government. Helicopters fly over lush landscapes where peasants plow their fields in the rain as troop carriers and tanks rumble by, while Alsino stands gazing up at them.

Dean Stockwell plays a U.S adviser who takes him up in a helicopter. “I want to fly without the helicopter,” says Alsino afterwards. “I want to fly like the condor.” There is an ancient tree near his village where he spends much of his time climbing through its vast network of branches like a monkey; one day he jumps out from high up while dreaming about being airborne but falls badly hurting his back so that now he walks stooped over all his life.

This is not your typical tragic story though because instead what happens next? The 12-year-old Nicaraguan actor Alan Esquivel gives such an amazingly vulnerable performance here you can’t help but fall in love with him! Rather than feeling sorry (which might be more appropriate), when asked why he didn’t tell anyone how injured himself trying fly earlier didn’t say anything either just laughed off injury as if it were joke on himself!

The war goes on, and so do Stockwell’s lectures: ferociously scowling through green-tinted shades while pointing at parts of a map with fat fingers, he talks about containment and parameters; bombing the whole area into submission to remove guerrilla support bases. He could be an easy villain movie is openly against US military intervention on side of totalitarianism but “Alsino” has more complicated things in store for us than this would suggest. Stockwell becomes a figure deserving pity as his strategies & analyses remain irrelevant among events around him.

This is an important film for many reasons – it’s not only the first feature fiction ever made in Nicaragua, but also one that’s so intensely poetic you’d think it had been plucked straight out of a book by Marquez himself! It serves as a fascinating contrast with “Under Fire,” which stars Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman as American reporters covering fall of Somosa regime in neighboring country: here there’s no realism at all, just unashamedly heightened emotion from start finish the difference between drama and parable.

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