JARLIN JAVIER MARTINEZ, CRISTIAN JAMES ABVINCULA IN MANOS SUCIAS

Dire straits

Polish-American New York first time director Josef Wladyka and his collaborator and co-writer Alan Blanco have forged a vivid, muscular action film about the poor underside of the Colombian cocaine trade in Manos Sucias, a production with the blessing and push of Wladyka's NYU Film School mentor Spike Lee. The film could have more tonal unity and neatness of overall construction. But it makes up for this in the authenticity of its language and locations and the Hemingwayesque deadend machismo of its basic situations. The experience delivered at times approaches the austere desperation of a movie like Lisandro Alonso's Los Muertos. And it's also in a strange way a buddy picture and a rich cultural and musical document about black Colombian have-nots located in the heavily narco-trafficked seacoast city of Buenaventura and surrounding area, the drug-run tales' starting-off point and destination. The actors were recruited in Buenaventura and the dialogue was translated from English to Spanish to the local dialect. Above all this is a feat of out-back shooting that rubs your nose equally into the boredom and the danger of running an underwater "narco-torpedo" containing 100kg. of coke hooked up to a fishing boat along a dangerous river course to its drug lord receiver bosses, the kind of stuff novelist Robert Stone might tackle.

After a somewhat confused intro we're left with leaner, taller, handsomer, sadder, older Jacobo (Jarlin Javier Martinez) and his more innocent and cheerful 19-year-old estranged brother Delio (Cristian James Abvincula), plus their older, white trash ostensible boss Miguel (Hadder Blandon). Jacobo is a fisherman with tragedy in his life. It turns out his wife has left him and his cocky young son got killed for standing up to paramilitaries. He apparently wants to make this extra money to move to Bogotà, though Delio warns him there are no blacks there except in servile positions. Strangely, Delio and Jacobo haven't seen each other for years despite living in the same town, so it's news to Jacobo that Delio has a wife and baby now. Immature but cheerful, an aspiring rapper who also wants to set up his little family in better style, Delio smiles all the time. Jacobo can only turn on a smile with an effort sometimes, for example to put investigating coast guard at ease. By the end of this journey both men have aged and seen horror and their faces show it.

The defining moment in the trip is an argument about soccer heroes on the first evening when Miguel trashes the great Pele with racist epithets, then offers his black cohorts the water bottle, but instead tauntingly finishes the last of it. A law of the frontier or of the jungle begins to prevail. Miguel finds young black kids stealing the drug torpedo next morning and kills one as if for sport and winds up choking Delio. Jacobo finishes off Miguel with the man's own pistol. When he tells the drug boss on the cell phone that Miguel's dead, it seems to be no big deal.

In contrast perhaps the other most memorable moment comes in stillness, when during longueurs on the boat Jacobo argues with Delio about music, seeing the rap Delio likes as a trashy espousal of sex and killing -- but they join together in a classic song they both know.

Other scenes are less memorable, but do possess a strong measure of violence and danger and tension. The action highlights surely are a couple of chases back and forth riding quaint motorcycle rigs along an abandoned railway track through the brush as the brothers, with six hours to meet their receivers, frantically struggle to retrieve the drug torpedo again when it's slipped its mooring and been nicked by a kid with a sick grandmother, living in the jungle. Unfortunately, when they get their load to its destination and Delio has gotten his hands as dirty as Jacobo's, it's a bit of a letdown because it lacks the full sense of an ending. Though Wladyka and Blanco have delivered their action, sounds, and feel of the place, with a lot of physically demanding business for the two actors, to perfection, they have not rounded out their narrative as neatly as they might. Maybe next time. They've shown they know how to get their hands dirty anyway. The rough locations could hardly have been more effectively used. Josef Wladyka shows some of the flair and passion for working with indigenous population and exotic environment as did the young Israeli-born director Noaz Deshe in his Tanzanian-shot film about African albinos, White Shadow (also SFIFF 2014).

Manos Sucias/Dirty Hands, 84 mins., debuted at Cartagena and was shown at Tribeca, April 2014. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 24 Apr.-8 May 2014 (film showing 8 May).

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