"Fauna" and the trouble with dramatizing the traumatizing

Mexican director Nicholas Pereda’s new film ‘Fauna’, recently screened at New York’s Lincoln Center, is a film that works to reveal how troubling is the often indiscernible boundary between fiction and reality in cinematic drama.  It does this in a setting that is consistently both bleak and tense.  A couple, who are both actors, arrive in a small Mexican town in the middle of the desert.  There is some personal connection that is left a bit vague and on arrival they each find themselves encountering locals in situations that are at least a bit uncomfortable, with most interactions involving demands for certain transactions or performances, efforts of approach or intrusion and avoidance,  exchanges of things like cigarettes and towels, or the effort to find or contact someone who has disappeared.  There is a back story of a man who mysteriously vanished, a sister whose imaginary character is suggested by the abstraction of her name being Fauna, Flora, or both, a local mine that the man was a worker in, and the boss of a major narcotics crime syndicate.  The film is shot in dull, washed out colors, and most of the characters are no more glamorous than the setting, a depopulated desert town whose visible industries are a motel, a restaurant, and a bar, and which is a site of boredom and a pervasive but ambiguous sense of menace that is engaged by the small cast of people that are met with and the demands they seem to be making on each other.  Some of the filmed scenes are shown while a description of them is being read from a book.  We first get a sense of the drama/reality problem when the young male visitor is asked by two locals, rather insistently, as they drink beer and stare at him across a bar room table, to perform a scene from a telefilm he is a well-known actor in.  At first he insists he has so far been filmed in scenes where he has no speaking lines, and so briefly performs his own just being there, but then gives in to the demands of the two local men he is with and dramatizes, as he uses the whole floor of the bar room as his stage, a monologue of the proud crime lord and how he became successful and now is a boss, ‘welcoming’ others to his provident business.  Like everyone in the film except the young woman, he does not seem particularly invitingly friendly.  This follows a tense scene in which he asks one of the local men to sell him some cigarettes since the store is out of them.  The last two scenes of the film are a scene in a hotel room where three characters are basically shown rehearsing roles for an unclear purpose, following which a ride through the desert is performed and mostly described in which a man who might be the missing person shown in what logically would be a prologue, or an enactment of the scene in which he goes missing.  And we recall that the film began as a return to a scene of trauma on the part of two actors whose apparent self-appointed task is to deal with or understand it better through a work of on-site dramatic representation.   

Against a clear background of the terrorization of people in a small town in the Mexican desert in consequence of the country’s ongoing problem with criminal organizations that have traumatized the nation with indiscriminate killings of uninvolved citizens, this film seems to want to show the thinness of dramatic and cinema art’s pretenses to create a safe aesthetic distance while staging traumatic encounters.  One wonders wherein derives and lies the desire the people encountering each other in this frontier almost ghost town for such dramatic stagings, which certainly lack any clear redemptive or otherwise useful social function.  Ultimately, what the film reveals as painfully lacking in such a context is the sense of distance from dangerous and traumatic events whether remembered,  imagined, or both that would enable the characters to make sense of their experience without being caught up in its repetition.  The film’s metacinematic character thus also places the very idea of a film that deals with worlds such as this one in the uncomfortable position of a description that is inscribing, etching onto the empathetic viewer’s consciousness the sense that in the ‘dark times’ we live in, the ability, and responsibility, of cinematic art to help us see and understand any of the more troubling events in our world comes with a very uncertain hope of a facilitating any becoming free from their power, rather than being submerged by a dulling obscurity.  

As if to the violence of events is added the compounding, confounding clouding of the ability of those affected to attain the lucidity that normally facilitates efforts to deal with what happens or become free of it. This is generically appropriate in a way whose metacinematic import is revealed upon a moment’s reflection, given that the object of the art of cinema is only secondarily what is encountered and represented, but primarily how we have come to, or can, see the world in which things are encountered. This is the hard problem with some common hard matters.