In director Nicolás Pereda’s Copper, Lázaro (Pereda regular Lázaro Rodríguez) discovers a corpse by the side of the road. It’s unusual enough for him to mention this to his mother Tere (Teresita Sánchez) and his aunt Rosa (Rosa Estela Juárez — these eponymous characters also a Pereda hallmark), but not important enough to report to anyone else. Lázaro is much more concerned with obtaining an oxygen tank as his breathing has been infrequently more laborious, likely due to his time spent in the mines. It’s a mining town, El Carmen, and everyone seems to work for the mine in one way or another, including the doctor who tells Lázaro that his problems come from and will subside with his small smoking habit. His further attempts to get this oxygen tank are treated as suspect by his bosses and family, though his mother knows he’s not lying — after all, she says, his eyes haven’t changed colors.
This time, Nicolás Pereda has toned down the magical realism from last year’s Lázaro at Night in favor of a political thriller, though still in the laid-back Pereda vein. One is tempted to call Lázaro’s situation Kafkaesque, but these roadblocks to Lázaro’s oxygen tank are more so built by the town’s conformity to the company and a personal dismissal of Lázaro than an opaque, labyrinthine bureaucracy (though some semblance of that does still exist). But this situation is, to anyone who’s ever had any kind of job at all ever, still frustrating because it’s so real. It’s one thing for an impersonal corporation to accuse you of an unknown crime and deny your access to basic bits of information; it’s another for your own aunt to not believe you because of petty grievances or a doctor to deny you an examination because she thinks you’re annoying. That said, the film’s politics happen in the background. Lázaro is instructed by Tere not to tell anyone about the discovered body, and a short radio piece announces that this is the third such body in six months, implying a conspiracy by mysterious forces in the mine town’s administration. To what degree the company is actually murdering activists or directly denying its workers’ healthcare is, in classic Pereda fashion, never revealed.
But Copper never quickens its pace to match the urgent sleuthing of All the President’s Men (1976) or The Day of the Jackal (1973). Lázaro is no political journalist nor even a whistleblower, and Copper seems just as interested in long stretches of its subject riding his motorcycle (which, in his Job-like story, inevitably breaks down) as it is in delving into crimes and cover-ups. Similarly, the film is interested in dreams, as Lázaro, resting in his cavernous bedroom lit like a Baroque dungeon, explains to Rosa that he’s been dreaming of the dead man leading him around the town’s bars, ordering and sucking and eating lemons lest he begin to rot. Though this may sound like a slight surreal detail, this is actually an answer to a previous scene in which Lázaro himself sits in his aunt’s boyfriend’s car and sucks on a lime for several minutes. Scenes like this, of everyday events both banal and bizarre, dominate most of the runtime of Copper.
Near the end of the film, Lázaro has worked out a deal with another doctor: an oxygen tank in exchange for a date with Rosa. Lázaro agrees — an oxygen tank has never been so close — but doesn’t ask Rosa first. When the eventual date happens, Lázaro and Rosa’s boyfriend trail behind for her safety, but lose her after a quick detour for cigarettes. Where most films would play up the tension elicited by the now-missing Rosa, Pereda lets the audience sit with that for just a bit before revealing her again in that bedroom from Caravaggio’s dreams. It’s another moment of the unexplainable everyday, one in a series that helps make Copper but the latest subtly brilliant work of Pereda’s magical realist world.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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