499
Rodrigo Reyes’s “499” holds up an interesting lens to both past and present. His film is a mix of documentary and drama that gives us a man from the past, confronted by the present. This isn’t a time travel film, however, but a way for the director to illuminate how the sins of the past have continued to the present day. It might be one of the richest, thoughtful films of the year, and its disarming in its simplicity of concept.
Just short of the 500 year anniversary of the Spanish Conquest, a conquistador (Eduardo San Juan) walks out from the ocean. He is on the coast of modern Mexico. His journey is to walk through the country he and Cortez conquered, to see what has come of it, and to contemplate what happened to the empire they tried to create. That is the dramatic part of the film; the documentary is everything else, where the conquistador, and us, are confronted by stories of heartbreak, violence, loss and a country plagued by corruption and difficult living conditions. In the end, was anything the Cortez and his crew did worth it?
It’s compelling to consider how historical figures would view the “progress” made in the countries they played significant roles in shaping. Hell, in America we have politicians and pundits doing that all the time. But does their vantage point really hold any weight, especially when their objectives were domination, or involved flawed senses of morality? The Spanish Conquest was about colonization rather than immigration; not a marrying on cultures but the destruction of one with the other. The conquistador looks on in “499” with sadness that the goals of Cortez and the rest of them seemed to be in vein. Meanwhile, we look on in sadness that the violence of the past has persisted to this day, as people are left in poverty, or forever wondering what happened to loved ones, or in jail for speaking out against power. The sins of the past continued in the present.
Reyes and cinematographer Alejandro Mejía create some striking images on the conquistador’s journey that place his haunted journey in a profound context of what’s changed in Mexico over the centuries, and what has not. This is a contemplative film that puts both past and present on trial for how it always seems to lean towards violence, subjugation and exploitation rather than genuine compassion and empathy. Seeing this a day after the chaos of the United States’s official withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years, it made me think this film might be more important to consider now than ever.
