Violeta Went to Heaven :: Film :: VUE Weekly

GFA 2013-upper right

Jan. 17, 2013 - Issue #900: The ongoing musical evolution of Hannah Georgas

Share |

Violeta Went to Heaven

Josef Braun / josef@vueweekly.com
| Comments | Comments policy
{image_caption}

Violeta Parra: a portrait of an inscrutable, larger-than-life figure

The most celebrated of the three titles screening in Metro Cinema's Cine Chile series, you'd be hard-pressed to find a film with more Chilean content than Violeta Went to Heaven, Andrés Wood's portrait of Violeta Parra (1917–1967), the musician, composer, folklorist, visual artist and activist who spearheaded the Nueva Canción Chilena movement. Winner of Sundance's 2012 World Cinema Dramatic Jury Prize, Violeta, scripted by Eliseo Altunaga, takes a loose approach to chronology, history and the comfortable realism generally expected of biopics. Sliding between key transitional moments in Parra's life, the film emphasizes its heroine's mercurial, contradictory nature as much through collage-like narrative as Francisca Gavilán's mesmerizing, half-aggressive, half-impish central performance. Violeta makes no apologies for presenting Parra as larger than life, fundamentally inscrutable and probably crazy. This Violeta is a force of nature, still haunting Chile's psyche. The film implies that even 45 years after her suicide, she might only be playing dead.

Parra inherited her musicality from her father—literally; he was a lunatic drunk and lost pretty much everything to poker, but he left Violeta his guitar. A memorable early scene shows Parra's father performing at a rowdy rural dance party and stopping mid-song to guzzle wine. (Unfortunately, these abbreviated early scenes are pretty much all we see of our heroine's famous brother, the great "anti-poet" Nicanor Parra.) We see young Parra on tour, researching, bringing her eccentric approach to eroding musical styles and verses to the very country folk whose elders are dying along with their musical history. We see Parra giving birth and then leaving her family for Europe, where she brought her music and communist politics to folk-hungry audiences, and where she stayed for two years even after her child died. We see Parra falling into a long, troubled love story with Swiss flautist Gilbert Favre, and getting invited to show her paintings at the Louvre. These threads are interwoven in such a manner that one could be forgiven for losing track of the larger story, though the framing device of a TV interview made when Parra was at the height of her international renown helps ground us in this strange tale of a life ostensibly lived "for the people," yet dictated by fevered caprice.

Metro Cinema at the Garneau
 
4
Violeta Went to Heaven
Opens Sat, Jan 19 (7 pm)
Directed by: Andrés Wood

Showtimes »

vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
Comments policy

Comments go online directly without first being seen or reviewed by editors at Vue. Don't personally attack people, don't be defamatory, don't be spam-atory, don't hawk your band, don't pretend to be someone else, be clear, be on topic, be nice. Read our extended comments policy here. »

We use Disqus for our comments system. What's that all about?

We found that managing the comment community at Vue was easier to do with a system like Disqus. If this isn't straightforward to you, get help here.

Privacy Policy:

Vue respects your privacy. We will not forward your personal information to any other organization except as required by law, and will use your e-mail address only to respond to your comments. We reserve the right to edit and remove comments for length, clarity and/or if they are illegal or inappropriate. Your email address is never shown to visitors to vueweekly.com. Read the whole policy at: http://vueweekly.com/privacy

↑ Up to story | ↑ Up to comments