REVIEWED - MACHUCA: The coming-of-age story which occupies the foreground of this beautifully made Chilean drama is a little too familiar. Indeed, the recent, cutesy Northern Irish drama Mickybo & Me, set a mere three years earlier, did similar things with the relationship between two boys from opposing flanks of a political conflict, writes Donald Clarke.
Machuca, which takes place either side of the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, tells the story of Gonzalo (Matías Quer), a middle-class lad, whose horizons are opened when the left-wing priests at his Catholic school decide to admit a handful of students from the Santiago shantytowns. The shy Gonzalo finds himself sitting in front of Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna), a confident tyke whose family makes a living selling flags at both communist and nationalist marches.
As in so many entries for the best foreign film Oscar, the young protagonists bond beneath sunsets and play kissing games with older girls while their parents tussle with the grim realities of adult life. It is skilfully acted, elegantly shot and a tad predictable.
But, when the coup takes place, Machuca turns into a tougher, more intellectually fibrous piece of work. From Jean Vigo's Zéro de Conduite through to Lindsay Anderson's If, schools have offered delicious metaphorical possibilities for politically minded film-makers. Here, director Andrés Wood allows the changes that befall St Patrick's College - bullies now run both the staff room and the playground - to stand for the ugly disembowelling of the state's constitution.
Gonzalo returns to the shantytown and, as soldiers run amok, terrible events reveal that the social chasm between the two friends has become unbridgeable. It is a powerful sequence, put together by a film-maker with an impressive ability to impose order on chaos. Few recent films have blended the personal and the political so well.
Catholic educators, recently deluged with films about ecclesiastic sadists, will be delighted to hear that the priest who runs the school (modelled on one Gerardo Whelan, a teacher of Wood's) emerges as a man of decency and courage. Such readers may, however, be bemused by a translator's howler in the subtitles which has the clergy praying for "Pope John Paul" in 1973.
