Magical realism meets a grand family saga in “Pedro Páramo,” the directorial debut of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. As the man responsible for lighting and lensing countless renowned films — including “Barbie,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Brokeback Mountain” — Prieto brings a keen eye to one of Mexico’s most influential novels. A tale of ghosts and memories that slips through time, Mateo Gil’s screenplay follows the structure of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 text with stringent fidelity, laying the groundwork for a melancholic (if slightly imbalanced) adaptation that finds visual splendor in the macabre.
Tenoch Huerta (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) plays Juan Preciado, a man who travels to his late mother’s hometown of Comala sometime after the Revolution (1910-20), in search of the father he never met: a figure named Pedro Páramo (Manuel García Rulfo), who he quickly learns has died as well. The missing figure’s name is often spoken in full, numerous times before we meet him in flashback, as though he were a figure of myth.
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Upon arriving in Comala — an eerie, deserted municipality with cobblestone roads — Juan runs into various people who once knew his parents, and who begin regaling him with stories by candlelight. However, the line between the living and the dead is razor-thin in this township, and it isn’t long before numerous conversations reveal themselves to be rendezvouses with spirits, who may not initially recognize their true natures.
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As each story about Juan’s father comes to light, the film transitions seamlessly to the late 19th and very early 20th century — sometimes within the same shot. The camera pans between rooms in which different decades seem to unfold, as Comala’s dead streets and drab walls come to life in vivid hues, and the surrounding greenery pops. As the film hops back and forth, and Juan learns about his father from numerous sources, the gangland story of Pedro Páramo comes to light in nonlinear fashion, with puzzle pieces being gently laid.
The picture in question is riveting and ugly. Pedro is a powerful man with sway over the locals and violent thugs at his disposal, and he moves easily from woman to woman, for both personal and political reasons. One of these women was Juan’s mother, Dolores (Ishbel Bautista). However, the love of Pedro’s life was a different character entirely, Susana (Ilse Salas), whom he met when he was young and whose return to Comala he anticipates for many years — a sense of yearning fully embodied by Gustavo Santaolalla’s powerful score.
Tragedy and self-destructive inevitability pervade Pedro’s story, as though the pain he puts out in the world is lying in wait before coming back to haunt him, via twisted cosmic justice. The only son he recognizes as legitimate, Miguel (Santiago Colores), dies young in a horseback riding accident, though not before forcing himself on a young girl, leaving the looming question of whether or not Pedro deserves his grief. As Juan absorbs these anecdotes throughout the night, he moves from building to building and street to street, at first listening passively to other people’s recollections, but eventually watching scenes from the past play out through doorways, as though he were sitting in on old film to which he shouldn’t be privy.
These all add up to the Shakespearean tragedy of a man lost in selfish ambition and personal desire, forces of greed and love that often clash and rankle his soul. Along the way, the movie switches narrative point-of-view with surprising abandon, using its back-and-forth structure to shuffle the established traditions of storytelling, much as Rulfo’s novel once did. Unfortunately, one such switch is so definitive that when it occurs midway through, it nearly plunges the movie permanently into the past, leaving it unable to avail of the strangeness of its post-1920 setting, in which storytellers apparate before morphing in and out of their physical environments, whether the dirt or the sky.
These phantasmagorical happenings, aided by disjointed sound design that gets under the viewer’s skin, are limited to the film’s first half. Pedro’s “Godfather”-esque saga is certainly engaging, and each performance is powerful and operatic, but the film does lose at least some of its initial flavor the longer it stays with its title character, without returning to its dreamlike framing. Its introductory scenes are magnificently disorienting, between focus (and lack thereof) that doesn’t follow the conventional rules of background and foreground — Prieto doubles as his own DP, sharing duties with Nico Aguilar — and environments that appear to change so subtly that they prick and gnaw at the subconscious.
It’s hard not to get lost in “Pedro Páramo” even as the movie eventually gets lost in itself, taking on a more classical cinematic form that doesn’t fully click. Thankfully, its surreal allure — buoyed by a sense of tragic longing — is powerful enough to echo throughout its runtime.
