Looking back at Fujimori’s Shakespearean saga

The words “absurd,” “ridiculous” and “surreal” recur frequently in Ellen Perry’s documentary, “The Fall of Fujimori,” which traces the surprising rise, initial popularity and eventual implosion amid charges of corruption and murder of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori. Perry has compared Fujimori’s trajectory to a Shakespearean tragedy, complete with a “bitter and estranged wife, a fiercely loyal daughter, a cruel and diabolical enemy and even a treacherous confidant.”

The comparison is certainly apt, but Perry’s characterization of her initial fascination also hints at the limits of her nevertheless fascinating film. Watching Fujimori on CNN after the 1997 hostage crisis at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima, she remembers thinking, “Who is this Japanese guy and how did he become president of Peru?”

The real question, which she fails to ask, is how this unknown, non-European, non-indigenous political outsider came to seem at the time the only obvious choice against entrenched political corruption, particularly that of then-President Alan Garcia, who shepherded Peru into hyperinflation, terrorism, social unrest and total economic disaster from 1985 to 1990.

An obscure, middle-class engineer and academic, the son of poor Japanese immigrants, Fujimori (jokingly but affectionately known as “El Chino,” or “The Chinaman,” in Peru) came to power at a critically low point in Peru’s already checkered history. And indeed, while stabilizing the economy and presiding over a boom in foreign investment, he also instituted major social reforms, bringing roads, power, schools and other social services to the country’s millions of disenfranchised poor. (Something that Peru’s currently outgoing President Alejandro Toledo, the first indigenous Peruvian elected to office, failed to do despite presiding over the strongest economic growth of any country in Latin America.)

But Fujimori’s infatuation with and abuses of power (including the alleged use of death squads in combating terrorism) and his illegally procured partial third term eventually caught up with him, and he fled to Japan to avoid prosecution.

Incorporating extensive news footage and interviews with Fujimori in exile, his daughter Keiko, several prominent Peruvian journalists and legislators, the film traces Fujimori’s surreal rift with his wife, Susana Higuchi, who while living in the presidential palace and serving as first lady began to campaign against her husband; his suspension of congress and rewriting of the constitution in a bizarre “auto-coup”; his Machiavellian tactics in a war on terrorism that led to the capture of the bloodthirsty Maoist leader of the Shining Path; and his eventual ensnarement in a bribery and corruption scandal spearheaded by his shadowy right-hand man, and head of the National Intelligence Agency, Vladimiro Montesinos.

A confoundingly mercurial figure, Fujimori is a fascinating subject. But in her focus on the man, Perry fails to paint a broader picture of a racially diverse and extremely complex country marked by sharp class and socioeconomic contrasts -- a picture that would have revealed as much about the story of Fujimori as Fujimori reveals about the story of Peru.

“The Fall of Fujimori” premiered at Sundance in 2005, a year before Fujimori left Japan for Chile, where he is under arrest and awaiting extradition. In the meantime, his 30-yearold daughter, Keiko (who served as first lady after her parents’ divorce, while a student at Boston University), ran for Congress last month, receiving more votes than any other congressional candidate in the race.

Also, meanwhile, last month’s elections (24 hopefuls ran, “American Idol” style) hopelessly fractured the vote and resulted in a run-off between the Hugo Chavez-supported Ollanta Humala, whose family advocates execution of gays and Chilean investors, and former President Garcia (clearly, a sequel is in order) -- a choice that is commonly being referred to as “a choice between AIDS and cancer.”

These developments followed the wrapping of the film, of course, but they add extra poignancy to a remark made by the Fujimori-persecuted journalist Gustavo Gorriti near its conclusion. Commenting on Fujimori’s (aborted) intention to run again in 2006, Gorriti says, “Fujimori is free, safe. He has been able to secure the loyalty of the Japanese government ... knowing that in the surreal conditions of subtropical politics, memory is short.”

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‘The Fall of Fujimori’

Rating: Not rated. Contains graphic images of the aftermath of violence.

A Cimena Libre Studio release. Producer-director Ellen Perry. Screenplay Ellen Perry, Kim Roberts, Zack Anderson. Directors of photography Junji Aoki, Mel Henry, Ellen Perry. Editor Kim Roberts. 1 hour, 23 minutes. In English and Spanish with English subtitles. Exclusively at Laemmle’s Grande, 345 S. Figueroa St., L.A., (213) 617-0268.