Cóndores No Entierran Todos Los Días (1984)

“Condors Aren't Buried Every Day” - to which one can only say, how true that is. This Colombian obscurity (not obscure in Colombia, apparently) is an almost plotless, low-budget film that puts to shame many over-praised epics on the same theme – which is the nature of power and evil (yes, that's all). At first the film seems maybe amateurish in its refusal to develop its course with any plot-twists, but that absence is the clue to what the director Francisco Norden has done. Plot summary tends to be dead weight in a discussion about a film's virtues, but here there is so little of it that we’ll need to dig in to see the point.  

It tells the story of “the Condor”, an asthmatic, middle-aged bookseller in a loveless marriage (he can’t stand to see his wife naked) who is mocked and dismissed for his political views by the liberals who at first have power in the small town where he lives. All the rich successful people in town are Liberals and treat him with contempt as a lowlife: “shit on your Conservative party”. The film then goes on to show how he gradually becomes the head of a campaign to kill opponents of the new right-wing government, including those who have bullied him for years.

Except it doesn’t. That version implies a film that tracks a character’s change over time. Here it just happens; overnight, he is their new emperor. The sheer random speed with which he is elevated to absolute power is the first jolt of the film; what follows is then about an hour of a string of murders of his enemies, with no real variation. The Condor hears someone saying something he doesn’t like, and in the next scene they’re killed, over and over again, long after we’ve got the point. The repetition goes beyond making a narrative point to a moral one. There are hints of gangster movie and Western as the village descends into a lawless frontier town and, to underscore the madness of the dictatorship, the entire film never leaves this one small town where he lives and, day after day, has people killed. At a cafe, all the dogs are shot because their barking annoys him. Later, he shows no change in expression when the victim is a kid.

This bafflingly abrupt flip from picked-on follower to a tyrant with the power of life and death over others is not told as a story, removing any sense that we’re supposed to feel narrative investment in the Condor, and matching the shock of those who suddenly find out that their lives are now irrevocably and inexplicably in danger. It also doesn’t dignify his “rise” as a “story” – it refuses to accord him anything we might associate with a hero, including a “rise to power” plot. It omits any vicarious “ooh, he’s getting more powerful!” stuff because he’s just handed power by circumstance, there’s no achievement on his part whatsoever. This is the cold verdict of the film – in truth, tyrants are pathetic. A mousey prude, a freak of sexual disorder. This is Nero, Hitler, and many contemporary right-wingers besides. And this is what happens when those people, who liberals have demeaned for years, find themselves with the whip hand.

For a sense of how bracing this approach is, consider The Godfather or Scarface and how idiotic they look, by comparison, in lavishing such unwarranted heroic idolisations on their anti-heroes. Go through films with an evil overlord as their centre of attention and virtually every other one has the gangster, political or not, as a Satanic anti-hero, with evil charisma, a force of darkness, an aura of menace.

Here, with far more convincing ethical intuition, there’s no rigmarole of this small man going Giddy with Power at newly having a gang of thugs at his disposal: A Man Of Principle (the English title) is too sober for that. Some random putz gets raised by chance alone to have power over the people who belittled him and that fact, that absence of any personal input into his position, crucially deprives him of everything that might be expropriated into the dumb power-fantasies of American and British approaches to the same theme, where glamorous evil with power is the height of cool. Michael Corleone worships his family (why? To make him “complex”?): the Condor wants nothing to do with his. He has no bond with the thugs who do his bidding. He’s just a sad little loser who gets to take out his grudges on the world purely by getting lucky with the blowing of the political winds; a nobody who, again unlike virtually all these films, stays a nobody – ordering the deaths of the townspeople he loathes doesn’t increase his stature or scariness at all. All we see is how weak he is. All we feel is contempt. Enforcing this, the film stays completely flat from start to finish, doing nothing to make it a grand experience, quite the opposite. It’s as anti-epic as possible.

But going further, the unwavering objectivity of this episodic presentation, which means the Condor is not demonized, makes a political point which really puts it beyond the scope of the typical ways of handling this theme. Only the larger political shift in his country has made him possible, not his own ambition (he has none) and this very banality means he is done to by the political situation, ground through the political meat grinder as surely as his own victims. History picks this nobody out of nowhere and obliges him to repress the enemies of the system, neither adding nor subtracting to the zero of a man he is, and so all the camera can do is follow him around, watching him without inflection - there is no “character.” When history moves on, he is exposed as disposable. 

In the final scenes, this is brought home with acute force. The regime which empowered him is now over – he is back to who he was again. He, of course, knows what’s coming at that point. He’s just hanging around waiting to die. Now that his masters have fallen, the execution he has earned is a matter so easy to bring about that there’s no need to even present it as a triumph of justice: an off-hand throwaway anti-climax in which he is shot walking down the street and left to lie there like trash. There is no reaction, no recognition surrounding this event - another unnoticed murder, this time his. No music, no other people around, we don’t see who shot him, nothing. The most pathetic villain of all time accepts his pathetic fate with fear but without any fight. He dies perfectly in keeping with his life.

Overall, it’s the most uncompromising portrait of the tyrant mentality that I’ve ever encountered, and if there is a better realisation of the banality of evil, I would like to see it.