MOVIE REVIEW : THE TRAGIC PARALLELS IN ‘MARUSIA’

You won’t find any reference to the massacre at Marusia, Chile, in any official records, but what happened in this bleak saltpeter mining town in 1907 persists in oral tradition.

When film maker Miguel Littin left Chile for Mexico after the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, he perceived in this tragic event at Marusia a source for an allegory of the cruel fate of his country. As a result, every frame of Littin’s “Letters From Marusia,” a 1975 Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, reverberates with implications of the events of more than a decade ago. It will keep on reverberating as long as people are oppressed anywhere.

“Letters From Marusia,” whose one-week premiere engagement (at long last) at the Fox International beginning today launches a “Political Cinema in Latin America” series, wrests such astonishing beauty and meaning from unrelieved suffering that it stands as a monument to human dignity. The politically committed Littin has always been a film maker of fierce passions, and “Letters From Marusia,” made on location in Chihuahua, is the equal of his superb 1970 debut film “El Chacal,” a devastating attack on a society that rehabilitates a man only to execute him, and more fully realized than his 1982 Oscar-nominated Nicaraguan feature “Alsino and the Condor,” a contemporary retelling of the Icarus myth in the setting of an idyllic Central American village about to be overtaken by civil war.

Trouble sparks at Marusia when the foreman of the British-owned mining company, which treats its workers like slaves, is found murdered and a hot-tempered Bolivian is swiftly executed by the government militia stationed there to maintain order. Rapidly the incident escalates into all-out war, declared by regular army reinforcements against the now-striking miners. The foreign mine managers eventually are willing to negotiate, but the military, in the frenzied grip of machismo , can’t tolerate the notion of anything short of total annihilation. Littin imagines his source for the massacre as being a series of letters written for the record by the miners’ leader (Gian Maria Volonte, intense international icon of the political cinema).

So profound is Littin’s vision, so controlled his tone, that he makes the unbearable bearable. “Letters From Marusia” unfolds with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, which it resembles in structure, and even at times in the suggestion of choruses. (The elegiac score was composed by Greece’s famed Mikis Theodorakis).

“Letters From Marusia” inescapably brings to mind Lidice--and especially Guernica, both the event and the Picasso painting. Indeed, the film’s key passages seem like tableaux from great classical paintings or one of Mexico’s immense, turbulent murals come to life in shades of brown relieved only by the dull red of flowing blood. Yet “Letters From Marusia,” also with echoes of Peckinpah and Leone (and even, it must be admitted, Jodorowsky), is a work of intuition, boldly stylized but never self-consciously derivative.

One remarkable image follows another in this hell on earth from which not even women or children are exempt. But there is some relief in Volonte’s memories. In contrast to the countless scenes of soldiers opening fire on the helpless, there is Volonte’s recollection of an amazingly formal dance at a socialist meeting hall where, under the supervision of a dancing master, men, because of the shortage of women, are trying to waltz with each other instead of trying to kill each other, as they are in the rest of the film. Sometimes it is a cockeyed, even comical moment like this that makes a work like “Letters From Marusia” (Times-rated Mature for adult themes and extensive depiction of human suffering) seem great.