The RiverRun International Film Festival is a regional event based in Winston-Salem, NC and is one of the premier film festivals in the southeastern United States. The 20th annual RiverRun was held April 19–29, 2018.
Opuntia is an unusual film for several reasons, but the biggest reason is that unlike most films, the telling and not the showing is the most interesting part.
Give it credit, at least, for a delightfully demented premise: Opuntia is the story of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, the 15th century Spanish explorer who traveled the American Southwest getting into all sorts of bizarre experiences and eventually transforming into a prickly pear cactus, the species of which grants the film its title.
De Vaca already has a film dedicated to him, and quite a good one at that. But his life more than supports multiple interpretations.
And, given the events of his journey, perhaps the stranger, the more appropriate…
De Vaca’s stories are told both via voice overs taken from the writings of de Vaca himself, as read by David Verdaguer and Vicente Celis, as well as by way of modern day interview subjects, each of whom carries some connection or another to his story.
(Why are there two narrators for one person? Who knows, it makes as much sense as anything else…)
Visually speaking, the film stakes its claim to its own eccentricity right from the start, which for reasons that will become only vaguely more obvious later, is titled “Land of the Living.” Images of a snake seemingly slithering up a rock wall and of peacocks traipsing around a ground covered in empty animal shells give this a visual sheen unlike what one might expect from the documentary form. All the cinematography was done by the director, David Fenster, whose singular vision manifests itself in just about every aspect of the film.
Fenster drops us into this strange old world with little in the way of signposts. He deigns to give us locations so we know where we are along de Vaca’s trail, but is significantly less generous in revealing the names of the soi-disant eccentrics we encounter over the course of the film (there is a full list over the end credits, but good luck figuring out who was who…).
Being essentially nameless, however, doesn’t make them any less memorable. This is a gallery of oddballs for the ages. Aside from the self-styled water diviner, waxing poetic about the magnetism of Mother Earth, there is the man claiming to be an ancestor of de Vaca who seems shockingly fuzzy on his predecessors’ exploits; the gay man who owns a 1st edition copy of de Vaca’s writings, which he calls “wonderfully homoerotic”; the owners of a landmarked site, discussing the “languid energy” of the yellow house on their property and a certain spiritual presence; and perhaps most amusingly, an artist in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua who sculpted a statue of de Vaca and couldn’t care less about it, far more interested in showing Fenster his current project, a bust of Pope John Paul II.
Fenster lets these characters pontificate to their hearts’ content, rarely interjecting himself into the proceedings. But for all their entertaining oddities, it’s difficult to forge an ongoing thematic thread between the current day people and the actual words of de Vaca himself, which form the spine of the film and are by far the most interesting parts… somewhat to the detriment of the film as a whole.
The tales de Vaca tells are harrowing, bizarre, and absolutely riveting. Hearing them makes one long to see them visualized as an actual film, instead of as voiceovers interspersed with these human interests character pieces. The story of the bay of horses alone begs for the big screen treatment, though it would be deeply, deeply, deeply distressing to watch.
The second half of the movie, titled “Land of the Dead,” shifts gears significantly. For starters, the optunia of it all comes to bear in full force, as we are treated to quite a lot of footage of prickly pears, as well as repeated images of rot and decay. We are treated to time lapse footage of prickly pears decomposing, and long loving displays of fossilized cacti and other remains.
A spiritualist is brought in to determine exactly how Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca became a cactus.
What does it all mean?
Who can say?
But perhaps the thesis statement comes in the final moments of the film, an extended encounter with an old man who is clearly on his deathbed. The camera probes him with feels to an outsider like an unseemly intimacy. To say more would perhaps give away the game. But if there is a point to it all, it is revealed to be either a strangely person one, or an unbearably ghoulish one.
Perhaps it is both.
It’s difficult to know whether or not to recommend Optunia; it’s certainly not a work for the casual viewer. But some of its imagery stuns, the stories of de Vaca are engrossing, and the vagaries of its construction might prove an interesting puzzle for certain minds.
Proceed at your own risk.
