Kritiken

Writer/director Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias does not cut away; he allows the image to dig its heels in, force you to look at it, to submit to it. "Cocote," filmed entirely in the Dominican Republic, is filled with such images, seemingly unconnected to one another at times and yet when placed in collage they create a powerful and visceral experience.

This is a straightforward story that Mr. de Los Santos Arias, making his fictional feature debut, tells in an ever-changing style, shooting in color and black and white. He also alternates the shape of the frame, mostly toggling between a boxy frame and the wider one most mainstream movies are shown in. Whatever effect was hoped for, this viewer just saw affectation.

Getting one’s bearings isn’t impossible; it’s like divining the trick of a Sunday crossword. But Cocote isn’t purely academic. It’s alternately clinical and sensual. . . . [De los Santos Arias] sees an impoverished community struggling to find solace in bygone traditions, or at least in each other. And he sees how that suffering can curdle into something dangerous.

Cocote is so much its own film that, even if you find yourself standing at one remove from its aggressive singularity, you can’t help but be affected.

An energetic, emotive film, it is when Arias’s camera—mostly found up close to its subjects—retreats that the landscape is revealed: a rich array of green forestry and ocean blues that offer levity from the film’s otherwise clamorous atmosphere, marked by the rising surge of rumbling music, raucous familial gatherings, and varying syncretic religious customs and rituals.

The physical surroundings seem to writhe beneath characters feet and force their way into the frame. Tradition, obligation, and superstition – often represented by feverish mourning rituals – are amplified by, or the product of, an almost oppressive landscape, vibrant but steeped in old violence.

Skillfully employing a variety of film formats from celluloid to digital, black and white to color, high-def digital to low-def, vérité camerawork to carefully lit shots, the result is an assortment of wildly different flavors, textures and notes that all come together within a very strong and thoughtfully constructed framework to harmonize on screen.

The result is an invigorating, if slightly exhausting, parade of near-perpetual innovation, in which the only constant is the filmmaker’s stylistic dynamism.

Not only is faith posited as a kind of lottery, but dialectics of the sacred and the profane, eternal and ephemeral, nature and custom (physis and nomos to Diogenes) are established within Cocote before the camera effectively rolls, laying the groundwork for de Los Santos Arias’ sensually syncretic vision.

Deliriously mixing film stocks and tonal shifts, handheld footage of actual syncretic rituals anchor viewers in a reality that its protagonist desperately wants to bypass.

Intuitively shot with little regard for aesthetic cohesion (which for sure will be off-putting to some), Cocote constantly shifts between different film stocks... and camera styles (360-degree pans, ultra-long takes), while scenes are one minute ethnographic documentary ritual recordings, and the next pure fiction acted by a mix of nonprofessionals and professionals dutifully trained by the director to act like nonprofessionals. Somehow, this all works swimmingly.

De Los Santos Arias' bold but never overly indulgent stylistic touches—mixing color and black-and-white film stocks, blending fictional scenarios with verité-like footage, and implementing a formally calibrated compositional strategy that never betrays the medium's observational nature—lend Alberto's inner conflict an apt aesthetic complement.