"Voces inocentes" is the powerful, tightly-directed--yet difficult-to-watch--story of a group of pre-teenage children caught in the madness of El Salvador's civil war. It is difficult to watch because it opens with a scene of the children being led to a killing field by army troops. As the movie bounces back and forth between happy scenes of children playing and the staccato bursts of machine gun fire, the audience senses that things will end badly.
This is clearly a political film, but director Luis Mandoki appears to have two conflicting messages that he wants to send. Through most of the movie, he is a cheerleader for the FMLN, the El Salvadoran rebel movement. He paints the guerrillas, especially Uncle Beto, in a sympathetic light and makes one of the songs of the movement "Casas del Cartones" (cardboard houses) into the movie's unofficial theme song. But in the climactic gun battle between soldiers and guerrillas, the action of twelve-year old hero Chava sends the message that the revolution too is madness. Perhaps it is a good thing that Mandoki leaves us to decide whether admiration for the guerrillas' ends is enough to balance our abhorrence of their means--for they too bring the innocent into the battle.
The biggest shortcoming of the film is the Hollywood ending. Without giving it away, let me just say it would have been more powerful to end the movie with the opening scene and let the audience draw its own conclusion as to what happens next. But Mandoki, who has directed box office successes such as "Message in a Bottle" and is able to hire the best available talent for filming, clearly wants "Voces Inocentes" to be a box office success. For that reason he has both added the Hollywood ending and cast the photogenic Carlos Padilla as Chava and Chilean beauty Leonor Varela as Chava's mother. These two look about as much like Central American peasants as J Lo and Jesse McCartney--although I must admit they played their parts convincingly.
While Mandoki should be commended for making a serious movie that shows the horrors of using children in warfare, this was a politically safe movie to make. The El Salvadoran civil war is over and we can now all agree that the government's forced enlistment of twelve-year olds was a bad thing. Mandoki could have made a more relevant political statement by making a similar film about a civil war that is going on today--the one in Colombia.
This is clearly a political film, but director Luis Mandoki appears to have two conflicting messages that he wants to send. Through most of the movie, he is a cheerleader for the FMLN, the El Salvadoran rebel movement. He paints the guerrillas, especially Uncle Beto, in a sympathetic light and makes one of the songs of the movement "Casas del Cartones" (cardboard houses) into the movie's unofficial theme song. But in the climactic gun battle between soldiers and guerrillas, the action of twelve-year old hero Chava sends the message that the revolution too is madness. Perhaps it is a good thing that Mandoki leaves us to decide whether admiration for the guerrillas' ends is enough to balance our abhorrence of their means--for they too bring the innocent into the battle.
The biggest shortcoming of the film is the Hollywood ending. Without giving it away, let me just say it would have been more powerful to end the movie with the opening scene and let the audience draw its own conclusion as to what happens next. But Mandoki, who has directed box office successes such as "Message in a Bottle" and is able to hire the best available talent for filming, clearly wants "Voces Inocentes" to be a box office success. For that reason he has both added the Hollywood ending and cast the photogenic Carlos Padilla as Chava and Chilean beauty Leonor Varela as Chava's mother. These two look about as much like Central American peasants as J Lo and Jesse McCartney--although I must admit they played their parts convincingly.
While Mandoki should be commended for making a serious movie that shows the horrors of using children in warfare, this was a politically safe movie to make. The El Salvadoran civil war is over and we can now all agree that the government's forced enlistment of twelve-year olds was a bad thing. Mandoki could have made a more relevant political statement by making a similar film about a civil war that is going on today--the one in Colombia.