Indeed, it is conceivable we could soon find our southern neighbor dominated by a criminal enterprise, not unlike Hamas in the 'Palestinian Authority' or a Lebanon controlled by Hezbollah. Still, its unvarnished portrait of a state teetering on the brink of complete lawlessness is a timely wake-up call. Documentarian Natalia Almada captures a sense of the everyday turmoil engulfing Mexico through the eyes of Martin, the cemetery night watchman in El Velador (trailer here)… Clearly, El Velador addresses an issue of critical importance, but Almada's oblique perspective might not be the most efficacious. "There is a new form of bling in Mexico: pimped out mausoleums." Joe Bendel: "Tacky even in death, the drug cartels have kept the staff of Culiacán's so-called 'narco-cemetery,' quite busy. Winter Vacation screens this evening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and on Tuesday at MoMA. It's scorchingly funny, a hysterical satire of social conformity in stasis directed at a snail's pace, observing the cycles of meaningless rituals to their inevitable ends like it's a slapstick act under a microscope (VIFF programmer Mark Peranson liked to call it ' South Park in slow motion,' which is as expressive a description as any)." When Sean Axmaker caught it in Vancouver, he reported back to the House Next Door, calling this winner of the Golden Leopard in Locarno "a portrait of passivity at its nadir, an absurdist take on 'Whaddya wanna do tonight, Marty?' with the youth of central China as the hopeless of the future. While Andersson builds his comic miserablism directly into his mise-en-scène, a succession of formalist recessionals in which his hapless characters remain trapped, Li, just as concerned with the exact placement of figures in the frame, strips down the Swede's deadpan minimalism to the point where there's barely anything left."
We begin again with Andrew Schenker in Slant: "If the early films of Jia Zhangke employed a rigorous fixed-take aesthetic to pin his dead-end kids to their rural northern Chinese surroundings, then, in Winter Vacation, director Li Hongqi channels instead the absurdist formalism of Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson to depict a similar cast of characters stuck in an identical provincial setting.
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