living with death
by Douglas Messerli
Emilio
Carballido and Roberto Gavaldón (screenply, based on a work by B. Traven,
based, in turn, on a story by the Grimm Brothers), Roberto Galvaldón Macario / 1960
Macario
is a film woven through with dire
conditions and death. From its earliest frames we realize that Macario’s family
is near starvation. Working as a woodcutter, Macario (Ignacio López Tarso)
brings home heavy loads of wood that hardly afford his family a full meal, and
after witnessing a table of roast turkeys—none of them for himself or his
children—the father determines that he will go hungry until he can eat a whole
turkey for himself. Fearful for his survival, his wife (Pina Pellicer) steals a
turkey, stuffing it without his knowing into his satchel as he heads off to
work in the mountains.
Discovering the bird in his pack, he
prepares to eat it, until suddenly a man appears before him, the Devil,
tempting the poor worker in order to get a piece of its meat. Unlike Faust, Macario
stands firm; he will eat the turkey by himself. A second stranger, God, also
passes by, in the guise of an elderly man, similarly asking for a piece of the
delicious looking turkey, but Macario again refuses.
Only when Death appears, dressed as a
peasant like Macario himself does the poor woodcutter gladly share the bird,
which Death (Enrique Lucero) gratefully receives restoring his hunger for a
century, expressing his wonderment that Macario has shared it with him while
refusing the other two. Up until this moment, the fable, based on a work by B.
Traven, itself a version of a story by the Grimm Brothers, is almost wooden in
its fairy-tale like structure, but Macario’s answer—“Whenever you appear, there
is no time for anything else.”—takes the film in another direction, toward the
mordant wit that infuses Macario’s whole culture, taking us into the dark world
of Colonial Mexican life wherein death and life are interfused. Death in this
dark tale is everywhere, a far more powerful presence than even the figures
called up by the Church.
Because of easy engagement with the
all-powerful figure, Death engages in a perverse kind of friendship with the
simple worker, presenting Macario a container of water that, he insists, will
work miracles, saving some of those who about to die. The catch is, however,
that Macario must look to the head and feet any of those he might attempt to
heal; if his “friend” appears at the head of the victim, he is condemned to
death, but if he appears at the feet of the sick person, Marcario may cure her
or him.
The potion is quickly put to the test
when Macario returns home to discover one of his sons has fallen into the well
and is near death. Fortuitously, Death appears at the boy’s feet, and Macario’s
son is miraculously cured. So begins, in this gossip-rich culture, Macario’s
fame as a healer, as time and again, he cures local victims near death. In this
poor and deprived culture it appears that nearly family has someone dying, and
Macario, accordingly, becomes a kind of local hero—although understandably he
is hated by local physician, who has none of the simple man’s healing powers,
and the undertaker! Together these men contact the authorities, who quickly
bring Macario’s actions to the attention of the church figures, who arrest Macario
for heresy. They determine he is either a charlatan or a witch, promising, if
he is the former, to cut out his tongue, or, if the latter, to burn him at the
stake.
At the very moment, however, fate seems to
offer him another possibility. The Viceroy’s young son has grown gravely ill,
and the authorities, accordingly, offer the prisoner an out if he can cure the
boy. We can predict the outcome: the Viceroy’s son is condemned to death, as
Death himself appears the head of the bed. The former woodcutter cries out for
a different verdict, but Death is unforgiving, taking Macario—in the most
spectacularly brilliant scene in this film—into his private cavern (filmed in
Mexico’s Cacahamilpa caverns), where thousands upon thousands of candles
represent the lifespan of every being. While the pleading Marcario looks on,
death holds up the candle of the Viceroy’s son, snuffing it out before the
peasant’s eyes. Death then holds up Macario’s own candle which reveals that the
wax is low, the flame fluttering.
Terrified by the prospect of his own
demise, our hero snatches up the icon, rushing off, with Death on the chase.
On the same day on which Macario’s wife
has sent him off with a full roast turkey, she is worried when he does not
return home. She and her neighbors discover him lying in the woods as if he had
simply fallen asleep. He is, of course, dead, his half of the turkey left
untouched.
In this Mexican picture, it is not so much
Death who controls the characters’ fates, but the characters’ everyday
association with and acceptance of the dark forces of the world around them that
predetermines their own destinies. In the little village where Macario lives
every day is “the Day of the Dead.”
If this simple tale seems, at times,
predictable in its moral simplicity, the beautiful camerawork of its cinematographer,
its assured acting, and director Gavaldón’s skills at cinematic storytelling
transform Traven’s far clumsier and fatalistic tale into a gem of cinema
history. The film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film from the
Academy Awards and shown at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.
Los Angeles,
October 12, 2013.
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