OSCAR RUIZ NAVIA: LOS HONGOS (2014)


CALVIN BUENAVENTURA TASCON AND JOVAN ALEXIS MARQUINEZ ANGUILO IN LOS HONGOS

Youth and street art in Cali, Colombia

Los Hongos is a film from Cali, Colombia directed by Oscar Ruiz Navia, his second feature, the first being the 2009 Crab Trap. The title ("The Mushrooms") refers to its two teen leads -- flourishing like mushrooms in the rubbish of urban mess (or something like that). It's a semi-documentary coming of age drama that is notable for containing a wealth of contemporary flavor from its protagonists' environment. Scenes include family life, graffiti artists at work and conferring on a project, a raucous punk music concert, and an attack on the two young leads by cops for tagging a wall, which leads to their being handcuffed and dropped way out in the country and forced to walk back. This journey inspires them to make new plans and to do a wall mural of a big tree they saw and climbed out in the country.

Ras (Jovan Alexis Marquinez Angulo) and Calvin (Calvin Buenaventura Tascon) are buddies from different races and social classes who have been drawn together by a mutual attraction to hip hop culture. Ras, who is black, and whose mother has been forced to immigrate from the countryside, is never without his skateboard, and is forced to steal paint from the building site where he works, which gets him fired. His buddy Calvin is white, a child of divorced parents, who spends time taking care of his former schoolteacher granny, who is recovering from cancer treatments. He and Ras visit his father to ask him for money. He's a singer, as we learn from a clip from an actual appearance on a TV show. Calvin, who is a student at the local college of art, but often misses class, has a would-be girlfriend, also an arts student. In one scene, they have sex, apparently for the first time, but when Ras connects with an older woman at the punk concert, it's she and Calvin's girlfriend who pair off this time, leaving Ras and Calvin with only their friendship, and their dedication to street art.

In an early scene of Los Hongos the boys watch an intense video they find online of state violence against demonstrators in Cairo during the Egyptian revolution. Based on the power of this scene and the solidarity they feel with the revolution, they want to do a wall painting to express their feelings, and think of doing one based on a scene of women in dark veils engaged in political demonstrations. Later at a meeting at art school of other graffiti artists, other plans come up.

Los Hongos shows how widespread hip hop culture is, the skateboarding, the gliders, the graffiti, the music mixing punk, ska, rap, and other elements, and the universal Facebook culture of left and revolutionary youth sentiment. Ruiz Navia does not try to go into much depth, and his film can't compare with the hipness and complexity of such Latin American youth films as Alexis Dos Santos's Glue or José Manuel (Che)Sandoval's Te creís la más linda pero es la mas puta, or on an even higher level of cinematic sophistication the films of Fernando Eimbcke and Gerardo Naranjo. But it looks directly at local society and youth culture in a documentary manner in ways they perhaps don't.

Los Hongos ("The Mushrooms"), 103 mins., debuted at Locarno 2014. Reviewed there by Jay Weissberg for Variety. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series New Directors/New Films. It is a Columbia-Argentina-France-Germany production.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.