Like its seemingly innocuous protagonist, director Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias’ “Cocote” straddles two worlds. The film, which follows a Dominican groundskeeper returning to the rural village of his youth following the death of his father, possesses traces of the revenge thriller genre and its requisite narrative beats. However, outside of these moments, “Cocote” is an entirely different beast—a challenging watch that swings from the avant-garde to an ethnographic model of filmmaking. With only a pair of documentaries and a handful of shorts under his belt, de Los Santos Arias expertly navigates stylistic genre modes and adventurous audiences will soon get a taste when Grasshopper Film brings the film to U.S. cinemas later this year.
“Cocote” opens with a formalist shot of the swimming pool of a wealthy estate; a tall man emerges from the background to ask his employer for a week’s leave of absence from his servile work. We come to learn that the towering Alberto (Vicente Santos), who wears a bright white collared shirt and tan pants like a uniform, has built a new life in Santo Domingo as a devout evangelical Christian. He is compelled to return home for the funeral services of his father, a nine-day mourning process that combines West African traditions with elements of Christianity. Alberto’s family has wildly different expectations of him, and it is not only over religious beliefs that they butt heads. More ominously, they expect Alberto to take over the patriarchal role and exact revenge against Martinez (Pepe Sierra), the man who murdered his father and controls the area through brutality.
Certain components of “Cocote” are liable to fly over the heads of many spectators, like the structuring device that tethers Alberto’s journey to a folk tale and proffers onto it a mythic dimension. Numbered titles set against white screens break up the story into separate chapters: I – Santo Domingo, We Move Further, II – Pedernales, The Antillean Tale, et cetera. Likewise, evangelical religious programs surface on televisions periodically—in one case an almost parodic aside about a chicken, similar to the miracle in “La Dolce Vita”—opening up to the larger religious dialogue in Dominican society.
The most disruptive formal quality of “Cocote” is the unpredictable nature of the frame itself, shifting from film stock to digital, color to black-and-white and alternating between widescreen and Academy aspect ratios. The shift from one mode to another can occur within scenes, and often comes across as arbitrary; monochrome photography doesn’t communicate a flashback, the boxier 1.33:1 framing isn’t indicative of claustrophobia. These alternations have less to do with meaning than they do with function, leading to an affinity (albeit on a wildly different scale) with the employment of IMAX cameras for spectacle, shifting scales from one shot to the next. Simply enough, these are the resources at hand, and moreover, de Los Santos Arias feels out the best tools for each constituent unit—shot, not in sequence. The effect, if initially schizophrenic, speaks to the layers of detail at play in “Cocote.”
The protracted nine days of the funeral rites take on a hypnotic effect, discreetly building towards a rum-fueled nocturnal climax. It’s a tricky sensation to pin down, but the structure of “Cocote,” which at times can come across as haphazard, has a cathartic effect. It manages to communicate the grieving of its buttoned-down, stoic central character, whose universe often seems so far removed in its specificity. And just like Lynne Ramsay’s discordant, uneasy vengeance flick “You Were Never Really Here,” “Cocote” illustrates that there are creative ways to present violence on-screen that also communicates the interior turmoil of the avenger. The inevitable confrontation takes place under the cover of darkness, in a series of shots lit exclusively by muzzle flashes and high beams. The resulting sequence serves to fulfill expectations while simultaneously undermining them.
De Los Santos Arias creates a space for the women that drive the community, beyond their ecstatic grief. A great deal of runtime is dedicated to the organization of the various funerary events during which—trigger warning—women bleed out goats and butcher chickens to fuel the feasts. The fieriest on-screen presence is Alberto’s adopted sister Karina (Judith Rodriguez Perez), the only villager brazen (or foolish) enough to call out and hurl obscenities at the gang lord that took her father’s life.
Unveiled last summer in the “Signs of Life” programming strand at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias’ fiction-feature debut is truly emblematic of the blurring of genres and forms at cinema’s front lines. Perhaps, like this author, you’d be hard-pressed to recall any recent films that have come out of the Dominican Republic (or much of any Caribbean cinema, for that matter). Certainly pockets of the world remain under-served on screens big and small, and adventurous festivals like Locarno and ND/NF play a key role in giving a platform to essential voices like that of de Los Santos Arias. [A-]
