Song without a Name (Melina León, 2019)
This beautiful Peruvian film by first-time director Melina León initially interweaves two parallel plot strands. These are two strands inhabiting very different and discrete parts of its 1980s Lima setting, separated by divides of class, ethnicity and gender. On one side, a pregnant young woman from an indigenous community, surviving by buying and re-selling potatoes with her husband in the impoverished outskirts. On the other, a middle-class journalist in central Lima with issues both professional and personal.
In his professional life, he tirelessly reports on the ongoing political turmoil and guerrilla killings; he feels he has to, but is also conflicted at not being able to make a difference to a corrupt society. As the repeated mention of curfews, glimpses of angry political graffiti, and occasional TV news reports remind us, these years of the Alan García presidency, full of corruption, inequality, rampant privatisation and further loss of rights for the marginalised communities, were particularly turbulent in Peru’s history. (Not that Peru’s politics are any more stable today, the country having gone through six presidents in the last five years — the film in some ways is about how the shadows of the past are yet to be escaped.) Meanwhile, the journalist’s personal issue is being a closeted homosexual in a conservative country, and trying to enter a relationship with his lover, a more extroverted theatre actor, while constantly worrying about social persecution.
These are two characters worlds apart, but eventually, of course, their strands converge as the journalist unearths a potentially explosive story that allies him to the young woman. It all begins when, strapped for cash, she is duped into going to a fake medical clinic to give birth to her child, where those posing as doctors and nurses have more sinister intentions than she could have imagined. It is a notorious real-life case which León’s father, a journalist himself, had covered in ’80s Peru. So journalistic political drama merges with a tale of personal sorrow and mourning, as two characters independently come to realise their painfully marginalised status as outsiders in Peruvian society. I have probably made this film sound cliché so far, like your typical investigative Spotlight type movie, but not a bit of it. León is not going for any kind of conventional thriller here and that is what elevates this.
Stylistically and tonally Song Without a Name is a very assured debut, eschewing sentimentality for more a poetic sensibility. The aesthetic of faded-out black-and-white make the film look like a despatch from the past. Not that the beauty of the film numbs any of its underlying rage or sorrow. The rhythms of its methodical editing and its wide frames full of negative space conjure up the timeless silent scream which the film’s title refers to, as if it is ever-present in the edges and the margins, an empty lullaby to all those dispossessed parts of people’s lives that linger on through pain within them, like phantom limbs. A film beautiful and painful like not many others.
Cinescope 