Three steps forward - La Razón | News from Bolivia and the World

del Chaco, Juan Peñaranda Minchín/1933; Infierno Verde, Luis Bazoberry/1932-1935), Three steps forward, the first feature film by young Cochabamba director Leonardo Pacheco (21 years old) at the head of an equally inexperienced cast, joins Boquerón (Tonchy Antezana/2015), Fuertes (Óscar Salazar Crespo, Franco Traverso Chueca/2019), Chaco (Diego Mondaca/2020), a trilogy of the most recent retrospective views of our cinema on that crucial turning point in the country's history. And, as almost always happens with first works, the ambitious rush to say it all at once, and with the greatest display of sensationalism at hand, leads to some excesses attributable to the inexperience of those responsible. However, it is fair to point it out, the director intermittently shows off poor marksmanship in this type of first work.

The codes instituted by the entertainment industry in relation to the war film genre entail an unavoidable challenge: submit to these recipes, repeating the well-worn stereotypes frequented in countless titles aimed at showing armed conflicts as the non plus ultra of masculine courage , or get out of such a corset to reveal the profound stupidity of such events, mostly propitiated, throughout universal history, by the owners of power to legitimize or increase it. By communing with the jingoistic glorification of some episodes installed in the collective imagination by official history in the form of palliatives for the disenchantment that the enumeration of the missteps with which republican history is plagued brings, Pacheco does not leave the car unscathed. - a stake that he assumed when he looked at the crazy adventure into which Bolivia and Paraguay were pushed by the interests of some neighboring countries and the oil companies, spearheads of the neocolonial model implanted since the dawn of the Republic in complicity with the native oligarchies.

Pacheco addresses what happened on August 6, 1933 when, upon verifying the enormous number of casualties in the Bolivian troops, at the request of the stubborn then president Daniel Salamanca and his improvised strategic adviser brought from Germany, General Hans Kundt, the first, second and third year cadets of the Military College, many of them adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18, were urged to take three steps forward to voluntarily go to the trenches. The more than 160 cadets unanimously took those three steps forward on the same number of occasions and 10 days later left for those distant lands devastated by heat and drought, from where only less than 110 returned alive.

The story is divided into three blocks, somewhat unbalanced. The first, which lasts for 52 of the 107 minutes of footage, focuses on highlighting the human dimension of the characters and an exhaustive review of the minutiae of military routine. In the second, Pacheco takes a couple of licenses (the composition of the “pilas” officers Cabrera and Martínez) to accommodate the dramatic conflict to debatable sentences proffered by the bosses: “War demands men, not boys”, “living is a act of cowardice”, among others, thus believing himself exempt from questioning the essential absurdity of any war. The third completes his look at sacrifice as the passage to historical immortality, making use of the detailed immolation of the volunteers without skimping on any detail of the cruelty to which man is capable of arriving, in these extreme circumstances: the "other ”, of course —what Eco calls “building the enemy”—, allowing, with such an inventory, of atrocities, the filmmaker also seems to assume, adding a few centimeters to the heroic stature of the characters.

The characterization of Salamanca is ambiguous, to whose stubborn cabal irresponsibility one can blame, without the slightest doubt, the disaster of that war with its extremely high cost in human losses and there is no hint of geopolitical contextualization, anchoring itself in a myopic navelism, couple of inadmissible, at this point, omissions shared with the titles mentioned in the first paragraph, except in some instances of Mondaca's film.

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In his debut, as noted above, Pacheco sins of the usual excesses of the first forays into any creative area, feeling obliged to express everything in a single jerk, even though in the case of Tres pasos al front, he exhibits, for moments, unusual insight in beginners. But it is also verifiable a lack of knowledge of the function of the narrative tools typical of cinematographic codes.

Throughout the story there is an excessive abuse of close-ups, whose expressive value allows us to get the most out of the gestures of the interpreters, but if, at the same time, the latter vociferate without pause, instead of enhancing the denotative scope of iconic elements such superfluous underlining ends up neutralizing it. In the same way, the forced plaintive, sympathetic and feigned empathic accent, in addition to being overacted, of the long goodbye sequence at the moment the characters leave towards the front ends up being tarnished by the verbal emphasis. Wouldn't it have been more effective to deal with that overwhelming circumstance by focusing on the gestures of the actors and leaving the replicas to the imagination of the spectators, which would surely have opened up a clearer emotional empathy from the latter towards the former?

The music, without being too intrusive, does not contribute much to the dramatic enrichment either, as does the photography worked on a brown palette that does not submit to the “green” of that hell and thus manages to visually densify the overwhelming sensation of thirst , recounted with such precision by Augusto Céspedes in Sangre de mestizos (1936). The actors, for their part, attend to their task appealing to the (not very wide) range of their resources, except for a couple of failed characterizations, particularly that of Kundt.

At this point, and without detriment to the sacrifice made by those who marched into horror, it would not be superfluous to wonder if that group of volunteers took the three steps forward because they loved their country, or because of the known propensity of adolescents towards adventure, in that stage of existential mutation in which the group, the gang, the generational camaraderie, in short, become the referents of the behavior of individuals urgent to feel accepted, or, in short, because they were victims of contagion with the atmosphere of the time, impregnated with a jingoistic inflammation triggered by the Republican Party, self-styled Genuine, with Salamanca at its head, which believed it had stumbled upon the opportunity to consolidate a power that was beginning to falter. It doesn't matter, it will be said, and ultimately instance, it is so, but, keeping all due respect, the pure tribute seems to me insufficient to contribute to a more precise consideration of what happened in the Boreal Chaco.

And what are of the skills hinted at twice above, preventing Three Steps Ahead from ending up in a whim that has become a caricature? the reader will wonder. Detail: the composition of the characters, without stretching the emotional string until it breaks, and avoiding turning them into pieces of talking marble, allows us to sustain the credibility of the story. The eye to choose the locations in Cochabamba, Cotapachi and Tarata, located hundreds and thousands of kilometers from the seat of government and the scene of the war, respectively, thanks to which narrative reliability is not put at risk.

In addition. In times in which reading has become an alternative for the "weird", the few who opt for a book instead of today's brand-new nonsense on TikTok and knowing for the rest how little affection we have always been to reflect collectively about our history, to revive memory —even less with a critical sense—, perhaps the main merit of Pacheco's film is that of inviting his contemporaries to this exercise, even though the approach chosen for said retrospective look is small from the aforementioned gaps. In other words: the credit for Pacheco remains open in the face of his eventual recurrence in film.

PHOTOS: FILM ‘THREE STEPS FORWARD’