In one scene, Chava picks up a rifle to defend his family from the government soldiers. Chava flees. Expecting to see an extra, Carlos instead found his brother in his sights. According to producer Lawrence Bender, it took a heated argument with Mandoki to get Torres to discuss his reluctance to pick up a gun.
We spent so much time exploring the issue that the story suffered. Instead, it keeps a close focus on Chava and his family. When you watch war on TV, you never see the kids, right?
Meanwhile, Torres is still writing, working on three new screenplays. One is the story of a guerilla Salvadoran radio station; another is about the massacre at El Mozote, in which government troops rounded up and executed members of a remote Salvadoran village. Mohammed can be reached at mohammed fas.. In that way "Innocent Voices" resembles the best film about insurgencies in Latin America, which is "Men With Guns" , by John Sayles , in which no country is named.
It is, I wrote, "an allegory about all countries where men with guns control the daily lives of the people. Some of the men are with the government, some are guerrillas, some are thieves, some are armed to protect themselves, and to the ordinary people it hardly matters: The man with the gun does what he wants, and his reasons are irrelevant -- unknown perhaps even to himself. That is certainly the case in "Innocent Voices," where politics seem meaningless at the local level and it is simply a matter of armed men, some of them boys, who have machineguns and fire them recklessly, maybe because it is fun.
Tactics and strategy seem lacking in this war; the armed teams on both sides travel the countryside, rarely encountering each other, intimidating the peasants, for whom the message from both camps is the same: Support us or we will kill you. In this world Chava Carlos Padilla lives a blessed life, as one of those street-wise kids like Pixote who knows everybody's business. His mother Kella Leonor Varela scrambles to feed and protect her three children, and they retreat for a time to the more remote house of her mother, but Kella fears to move to a safer area because if her husband returns and they have moved, "he'll have no way to find us.
Chava makes a living, of sorts. He talks a bus driver into making him an unofficial conductor, shouting out the names of the stops. He goes to school, until the school is closed because of the war. He befriends Ancha Gustavo Munoz , known as "fish brain" because he is retarded: "He is the only one not scared to have a birthday. The most frightening scenes in the film are not necessarily the ones where men sweep the barrio with machinegun fire, and the residents cower behind their mattresses.
They are the ones when the army comes to the school to take away the year-olds. On one of these sweeps, Chava improvises an inspired way for the boys to hide from the army; the secret is revealed in a single shot by director Luis Mandoki.
The frightening thing is that year-olds make good soldiers, up to a point. We see one kid transformed by a uniform and a weapon. He is too young to have a full appreciation of his own danger or the meaning of his actions, and it is great fun to have a real uniform and a real gun. That adults would use children in this way and they do, all over the world is a sin against the children and against the future. The movie is effective without being overwhelming. Perhaps that is because Chava still has a safety net of sorts, in his home and his mother and in the help of the local priest Daniel Gimenez Cacho , who takes a moral stand against violence but is given cruel thanks for his trouble.
Chava is never entirely alone, and his personality assures that he knows many people and is liked by them. His story is not one of a child in the urban wilderness, but of a child who was on a steady course through school and life when the war interrupted him. There is a link between "Innocent Voices" and another recent film, " Lord of War. His chief competitor will sell only to the side he believes to be right. The Cage character has no such reluctance, pointing out that guns and money attract each other, and he might as well profit as anyone else.
That brings us full circle to "Men With Guns. Guns make it so easy, even a child can do it. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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