The Penal Colony (1970)

 

Director: Raúl Ruiz

Screenplay: Raúl Ruiz

Based on the short story by Franz Kafka

Cast: Mónica Echeverría as the Journalist; Luis Alarcón as the President; Aníbal Reyna as the Minister

Ephemeral Waves

 

A woman, a female journalist (Mónica Echeverría), upon entering a country is taken by their soldiers to their headquarters to document their new president's politics for an article in the outside world. If you did not know this was an adaptation of a Franz Kafka story, which raises concerns of what will be in front of the journalist the longer she stays here, this immediately sets up this country being ruled under repressive rules. Hotel Turismo is chosen for her to stay at whilst working, and it is clear that she is in a world which could easily turn on her. This is all in mind of its director, Raúl Ruiz, who would eventually have to flee his home land of Chile due to the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, starting in September 11th 1973 and ending March 11th 1990, something pertinent in how even this early film is depicting a fictional one. There is a tense air here from the get-go in the set up.

Set in a former leper colony near Ecuador, the Latin American island of Captiva, the elephant in the room is also that this is very early Raul Ruiz, a director I admire and yet is hard to find the films off outside of VHS rips. This is Ruiz at his most primordial, a reminder that for someone into the seventies, but especially his phantasmagorical eighties period as an exile, had to begin somewhere and develop as an auteur who made over a hundred productions in his life. The eighties period  especially produced incredible films but also made films which felt like fragments of larger texts, in a great way, and in contrast, The Penal Colony is absolutely a raw template for these films. Some of the style and imagination is here, but it feels a sudden jolt in how he has not found all his traits yet. There is thankfully the eccentricities slowly burning through the limited budget that has not fully taken advantage of it as Ruiz would later expertise, how the one man who comes to warn the journalist in her hotel room of the circumstances sneaks alcohol around in a hot water bottle. A foreigner in his own right, greeting and warning her of what to expect, jaded to how the island has turned, even sneaks poems to her to be read as if illegal contraband, to be memorised and to be burnt afterwards. The polyglot language that is spoken, and is said in dialogue to shape shift everyday, also would be a theme he would return to with greater weight with On Top of the Whale (1982), explicitly about this theme of language and cult in being about a Dutch anthropologist trying to study the last two surviving Yachanes Indians.

The film's plot, mostly dialogue based and set in confined rooms, enters the obvious conclusions. The rumours of torture rear their head quickly, and as a low budget piece with a few actors, it still shows slithers of Ruiz's idiosyncratic style as it progresses. His interest in deep focus aesthetic, with details in the foreground and background as in the later films, is yet to fully arrive but the world of its own logic is growing already. This "island of surprises" our lead enters, like asking why a man is on the floor in one room being guarded, really does not feel like a true Kafka adaptation, but Ruiz's attitude slowly cementing whilst presenting this paranoid tone. The aesthetic, its monochrome photography as a chamber piece, even in a grotty preserved copy or cleaned, also befits Kafka in its pure starkness to match the simmering tensions.

The hall full of screaming is not a good sign, like a Gothic horror movie in tone but with more meat packing freezer meat hooks on the walls, but there is an eccentricity throughout, such as the sword fighting practice which is transpiring throughout the film. Swords are very poignant in context in terms of power dominance, at one point a literally sword fight happening between the president and another man, but it also feels like Ruiz showing his surrealistic tendencies in how this, in this former penal colony from colonial rule of South America, is just an everyday hobby all men on the island practice. The tale within a tale, being told, of a man who turns into a woman, marries and ends up in a tragedy involving her husband and family is certainly Ruizian when it appears. Especially moments like this or the cut to pure black screen with a short musical interval show that this is proto-Ruiz. The nudges to satirizing a dictatorship, in-between are also there, such as the focus on singing and group song; on one hand, it is culture surviving, but as seen here, as it is the fictional military figures who sing, it is a propagandist masculinity on their part, matched by the fact the sole woman in the main cast is our protagonist trapped between them, contrasting as a nameless bystander these acts of proving masculinity in a fascistic way.

It is a difficult film to watch, just for the fact it is very limited with only the potential for Raúl Ruiz seen here. It is a film, certainly, that is text book example of an auteur where a film grows for all its flaws in context of the others, and connected to the films dealing with these themes, and unfortunately even reality forcing Ruiz having to leave his country due to a real dictator, The Penal Colony grows fleshed out as a result.