Magallan (2015)

Directed by: Salvador del Solar | 109 minutes | drama | Actors: Damián Alcázar, Tatiana Espinoza, Federico Luppi, Bruno Odar, Magaly Solier, Tatiana Astengo, Jairo Camargo, Nicolás Galindo, Camila MacLennan, Christian Meier, Graciela Paola, Paul Ramírez, Rodrigo Sánchez, Liliana Trujillo

Harvey Magallanes lives and works as a taxi driver in the Peruvian capital Lima. One day, when a young woman gets into his taxi, he recognizes her as Celina, whom he knew twenty years ago, when she was a young girl and he himself served as a soldier in the Peruvian army.

‘Yo puedo! Yo puedo! Si se puede! Si se puede!’ (“I can do it! You can do it!”): At the beginning of the movie “Magallanes,” the eponymous protagonist ends up at a pyramid scheme-style gathering to which he’s followed Celina. But no matter how loudly those present chant that it is possible, director Salvador del Solar asks with his debut film whether mistakes from the past can indeed be corrected. Is it possible to conquer the ghosts of the past? To forgive?

Magallanes supplements his daily income as a taxi driver by driving an elderly man around. This former army colonel has lost his memories, but the rigidity in his eyes is still not lost. This demented Rivero was in the years when the Peruvian army waged a bloody war against the guerrilla movement Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), colonel of an army unit that Magallanes was part of. At the time, Celina was a native girl who was captured in the attack on a village and taken to Colonel Rivero. He kept her locked up for a year. Magallanes appears to have in his possession a photograph of the Colonel with the young Celina, as proof of the horrors. Desperate for his ongoing financial struggles and out of revenge against the Colonel, he decides to use the photo in a very risky blackmail operation. Rivero’s son, a haughty lawyer, and Magallanes’ sister become involved.

Director Del Solar based this exciting story on the novel ‘La Pasajera’ by the Peruvian writer Alonso Cuento and tells the charged history of the characters piece by piece to his audience. As current events pile up, what happened twenty years ago is also unraveled. This shows how much some people want to forget that past, and how much the violent history still influences present-day Peru. It should be abundantly clear that the great inequality, initially a catalyst for the civil war of the 1980s and 1990s, is still ubiquitous. Where Rivero Jr. takes a swim in his private swimming pool in the morning, Celina touts from pawnbroker to pawnbroker and Magallanes also has to fight for his livelihood every day. The justified accusation against the inequality that Del Solar makes, give the film sufficient depth. Renowned actors Damián Alcázar as Harvey Magallanes and Magaly Solier as Celina are both superbly cast and captivatingly directed by Del Solar, who made his own acting career before stepping behind the camera.

Especially in the first part of the film, the director uses beautiful imagery, by having the camera look into the rear-view mirror of Magallanes’ taxi (a reference to the past with which he comes face to face) or with his hands. of the driver who signs what they have seen. Unfortunately in the last part the sentiments are a bit too strong, culminating in an emotional climax. It turns out that digging into the past can have major consequences for everyone.