Cabeza De Vaca

The film recounts Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's eight-year trek across the hitherto unexplored regions of the Gulf of Mexico, one of the most astonishing feats in early American history. Treasurer to the 1528 Florida expedition headed by Panfilio de Narvaez, Cabeza de Vaca (Juan Diego) and a small group of soldiers survive the expedition's shipwreck and land on unknown territory. Captured in a bloody ambush, Cabeza de Vaca becomes the slave of a shaman and his armless dwarf assistant. After learning the witch doctor's trade and curing a tribal chief's blindness, Cabeza de Vaca is freed, equipped with magic stones and amulets. He comes across fellow survivors of the Narvaez expedition, who travel with him on foot across vast territories.

Cabeza de Vaca's curative powers gain him and his companions the trust of the native tribes they encounter, but as they approach Spanish presence, he is talked into abandoning his shaman practice; he could be imprisoned as a heretic madman. Spanish soldiers find Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions, taking them to their outpost. The soldiers are slave hunters, expecting Cabeza de Vaca's help in capturing natives. Appalled by his compatriots' rapacious cruelty toward a people he has learned to respect, Cabeza de Vaca vows to tell his story.

A noted Mexican ethnographic documentarian, Echevarria makes his feature-length debut with CABEZA DE VACA, adapted from Cabeza de Vaca's book Naufragios by Echaviarra and Guillermo Sheridan. And a stunning debut it is; through outstanding art direction, locations, costumes, sets and photography, the film effectively transports the audience back in time to the sweltering, dangerous jungles faced by the Spanish explorers of the 1500s. Echevarria draws from his ethnographic background in his detailed depiction of tribal life: celebrations, feasts, religious and curative ceremonies are presented in an involving, uncondescending way. By not translating the diverse indigenous languages, Echevarria makes audiences experience the way the Spaniards must have felt, perplexed at not comprehending the natives while fascinated by their customs.

When captured and enslaved, Cabeza de Vaca's immediate reaction is anger at his powerlessness against what he considers "godless creatures" who can't even speak his own language. As time passes, he learns to live among the natives--at first because he has no choice, but eventually seeing positive qualities in the tribes he meets. He finds a common thread in the shaman's rituals, which resemble Catholic ceremonies in the use of chants and sacred objects. In fact, Cabeza de Vaca's version of the shaman mixes Latin phrases with native amulets, harmonizing Christian and pagan rituals. America's inhabitants are no godless savages. The Spanish conquistadores, on the other hand, are portrayed as overtly cruel pillagers who crack under extreme pressure.

Captain Narvaez willingly abandons his battered group to their own fates after the shipwreck disaster: "Spain has ended here!" is his response to Cabeza de Vaca's demands for leadership. Astray with no food, we learn from one soldier, Narvaez's men descend to murder and cannibalism. Cabeza de Vaca faces the consequences of Spanish conquest in a mortally wounded native, struck by a musket bullet. "There's no reviving this one" is his remark as he removes the bullet. Nowhere in the tribes he has lived with has he found the inhuman propensity latent in his own race.

While most often compared to the revisionist Western DANCES WITH WOLVES, CABEZA DE VACA's strong visual style best recalls Werner Herzog's AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD. Striking sequences like the sight of a mad monk--seven lances stuck in his back--deliriously chanting Latin prayers as he displays a wooden cross, and the concluding scene, showing a monumental cross carried along a desert by native slaves--Echevarria's most eloquent visual metaphor--share Herzog's spectacular style, without overwhelming the film's message.

Notwithstanding its stately pace and the uneven acting (in the title role, Juan Diego could have used some subtlety and control), CABEZA DE VACA deserves to be watched for its necessary reinterpetation of history as well as its impressive cinematic merits.(Violence, nudity.) leave a comment