Lauded cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto — credited for Barbie and Killers of the Flower Moon within the same calendar year — makes his directorial debut with Pedro Páramo, adapted from Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel. A seminal and celebrated work of magical realism that reportedly shocked Gabriel Garcia Marquez out of writer’s block, Prieto’s lofty choice of material for his first feature-length rodeo seems ill-considered — directing such a project for Netflix even more so. Drained almost completely of any wonder, vitality, texture, or intrigue, the book’s trim 124 pages are dragged out to 130 agonizing minutes, bearing all of the weightless and waxen visual markers of the studio that produced it, and none of the pictorial acumen of the man who directed it.
Mateo Gil’s screenplay loyally mimics the nonlinear sweep of Rulfo’s plotting, loosely following Juan Preciado (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) as he returns to his late mother’s hometown of Comala, in search of the father he never met. The streets are conspicuously empty, and the occasional figure drifts through to remind Juan of just who was responsible; his father, Pedro Páramo (Miguel Garcia-Rulfo), used his inherited power to seduce and terrorize the townsfolk over multiple decades. The consequences of his actions are cryptically alluded to by the people Juan encounters, who seem to be straddling the boundaries between experience and memory, and — by revelations both thudding and shocking — life and death.
Páramo’s fragmented story takes the wheel from that of his bewildered, and ultimately doomed, son, showing the passing of time between his separation from his first love as a young boy all the way up to their eventual reunion as aging adults. Prieto conveys their romance’s ostensible truth and purity — and approaches the girl’s decades-long sexual imprisonment by her father by contrast — with timid and tentative shorthand. The emotional calculus of their failed connections paints Páramo as a tragic figure à la Charles Foster Kane (it even has its own Rosebud in the form of a burning kite), but this creates friction (and not the good kind) with the man’s patterns of sexual manipulation and violation (Juan’s mother included). The script tiptoes around this, and too neatly pins it on Páramo’s long-standing obsession with an unattainable woman.
A torpid, perfunctory ode to complexities it can only gesture toward, Pedro Páramo constantly adds insult to injury as the literal-minded Prieto smothers all of his film’s potential spectral power. Supernatural occurrences and slippages are reduced to hokey digital spectacles, and the film’s arid, airbrushed setting rarely breaks through the faded patina of a Netflix-approved aesthetic — a sense of tactility would have gone a long way toward anchoring the story’s temporal game of hopscotch, but the town of Comala is as anonymous as the characters that populate it. Pedro Páramo’s failures as a narrative are glaring, but the irony of a seasoned cinematographer’s film lacking any conviction or integrity in its imagery is a fatal blow.
DIRECTOR: Rodrigo Prieto; CAST: Manuel García-Rulfo, Tenoch Huerta, Dolores Heredia, Ilse Salas; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: November 6; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 10 min.
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