Los Bastardos [DVD]

This low budget film puts a lot of big Hollywood productions to shame. Mexican director Amat Escalante uses that spare minimalistic style so beloved by budget filmmakers often out of sheer necessity. He challenges our usual perceptions of movies with his opening scene of the two central characters walking down a Los Angeles storm drain kicking a football. The initial reaction is one of bewilderment. What on earth is all this all about, you mutter to yourself? Is the director trying to send us to sleep before the film even begins? Strangely though it is a scene you remember, which is maybe the point being made. This is a story of the haves and the have nots. The haves are the f*****g gringos, as the illegal immigrant Mexican workers affectionately refer to the wealthy white Americans. The whites that mercilessly exploit the cheap Mexican labour that floods across the border despite Americas efforts to contain it. It is soon very clear who the title is referring to. The gulf between the societies creates a gulf of resentment that can never be bridged.We follow the two characters as they break into an affluent gringo home and hold the woman inside hostage. We later find they are being paid to kill the woman by an ex husband. Given the class and racial hatred festering inside the men this is a job that they are happy to carry out, but not before they indulge in a few simple pleasures, like using the swimming pool and feasting on microwave TV dinners. The abrupt ending is shocking in its finality. The film is smartly co-written by Escalante and his brother Martin, to highlight social inequalities that exist in modern America. It is scathing and visceral, and at times it can be very disturbing in its depiction of the sudden violence that can erupt from such despair. It is a film that may have you gnashing your teeth in frustration or delighting in its subversive techniques, but either way it is a film that demands a strong reaction from you. Are we any better in the UK in the way that cheap labour from abroad is exploted? The truthful answer has to be no. It is always the poor that reap the whirlwind of course! You see, Escalante already has a convert in me! It is not a film you can easily warm to, but it is one that challenges you and as such is a compelling piece of filmmaking. Typical of such work, it wears the cloak of obscurity, and is little seen. A pity because it deserves better!

There's a point you get to in this movie where you might well wonder where it's all going and start to look at your phone etc. But be ready, something is definitely coming haha. That thing made the movie for me. Wow.

Audacious, unique and riveting. This film will screech in your mind for days. Because of obvious 'Art House sensibilities' this is not for everyone, but its not long. Be patient and open-minded. I can't stop thinking about it.

Amat Escalante's 'Los Bastardos' (2008), which I had the pleasure of seeing at the Tate Modern in December 2009, fits into the existential `buddy narrative' of films and plays like `Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead' and Samuel Beckett's `Waiting for Godot'. The long opening shot is of a desolate urban landscape on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and shows two wandering figures in the far background. Escalante sets the scene for the film and introduces us to the broader social predicaments of the characters, who are illegal Mexican labourers in the United States.'Los Bastardos' opens slowly and the two main protagonists, Jesus and Fausto, don't come to the fore till at least halfway into the film. They have been contracted to kill an American woman. The woman's life is portrayed as rather drab. She lives with an uncommunicative and awkward adolescent son, with whom she can barely hold a conversation, and she seeks solace through drug use. When Jesus and Fausto break into the woman's home is where the narrative begins to unfold. `Los Bastardos' is very similar, stylistically, to the German director, Michael Haneke's `Funny Games' (1989) - Jesus demands food from the woman and she is constantly watched over with a shotgun. Whilst Haneke's film is very much a modern, dystopian fairy tale with the nice middle class family being tortured and imprisoned by two sadistic sociopaths from no particular place, Escalante portrays believable characters in Jesus and Fausto. Jesus and Fausto are not `natural' friends - Jesus is in his 30s, while Fausto is an awkward and reticent teenager. They are two people thrown together by their own social and economic deracination - neither of them can speak English; they are illegal aliens; and the very thing that has driven them to cross the US border - namely, money for a better life - is something they can only acquire in any substantial amount through killing another human being, whom they know nothing about.The incarceration of the woman is gruesome and harrowing to follow. Though the two Mexicans are not brutal to the woman, she is still their prisoner and when she is told to strip down to her underwear to go swimming with them, she takes on a clown-like character and adds an `absurdist' element to the drama. The woman cannot speak enough Spanish to plead or bargain with her kidnappers, and they take advantage of home comforts such as food, swimming pool and TV whilst holding her captive. Escalante could be mocking passivity and consumerism when showing the kidnappers aimlessly lounging around in their victim's home indifferent to her basic humanity, but on the other hand they could be seen as taking advantage, however unjustly, of what little comfort is available to them both in America and their home country.The narrative of `Los Bastardos' in many ways becomes larger than the sum of its parts. Whilst a writer like Samuel Beckett was seen as hinting at the existential, philosophical alienation and deracination of post-war Europe in `Waiting for Godot', Escalante's film opens up channels of discussion about the very real human and existential void created by irrational preoccupations in the Western world with issues such as illegal immigration and the notion of the `economic migrant'. The United States is so determined to keep Latinos out that it is prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on border security and perimeter walls. The inhuman consequences of these policies result in Latin Americans seeking even more dangerous routes, such as through desert, to get across the border leading to tragic consequences for those who perish at the cruel hands of nature.There is no proper debate about immigration in America or Europe. The real human issues are ignored and immigration is reduced to a merely economic and technical problem - albeit, a very expensive one in terms of the social and financial expenditure required to contain it. The ingenuity of Escalante's film is that it makes us think about what is happening in front of us. He avoids endowing the film with an explicit social message, but you can't watch and fully appreciate a film like `Los Bastardos' if it doesn't make you question why these things happen to people and why it is wrong.