Utama (Alejandro Loayza Grisi, 2022)

BY REQUEST: Gavin Petty

Over the years I've discovered a common trait among many, if not most, debut films. The filmmaker has spent years working toward the project in question, and they can never be entirely sure they'll ever get a second turn behind the camera. So debut films can often feel overstuffed, as though decades' worth of ideas are all getting put onscreen, come what may.

Utama, the debut feature by Bolivian director Alejandro Loayza Grisi, isn't crammed with ideas. It's a fairly straightforward "traditional elders squelched by the modern world" story, the sort that one finds liberally strewn across world cinema. But I think it's fair to say that Grisi directs Utama within an inch of its life, making sure that the barren landscape of the altiplano expands in all directions, its hopelessness also reflecting a kind of majesty. Northern Bolivia is framed like the frontier in a Western, and the craggy faces of Utama's protagonists, llama ranchers Virginio (José Calcina) and Sisa (Luisa Quispe), are often shown in close-up silhouetted against the unforgiving wasteland.

It's all working overtime to seem mythic, and in a way this compromises the presumed subtext of Utama. Everyone is abandoning this land because it hasn't rained for a very long time, and the press notes make mention of global warming. But somehow that pressing global issue isn't overtly present in Utama. Instead, these ethnically Quechua people conduct a "sowing ceremony," which involves slaughtering a llama and consecrating the ground with its blood. Grisi finds himself in a difficult position here, because he clearly has respect for the traditions of these Indigenous people, but also wants to convey the hopelessness of their efforts.

About a third of the way into Utama, this tension is manifested by the appearance of Virginio and Sisa's grandson Clever (Santos Choque), a young man who has come up north to convince his grandparents to leave their home and join him in the city. Predictably this rankles Virginio, who sees Clever as someone who, like his father before him, has turned his back on tradition for an easier, less honest life. Sisa is caught in the middle of this conflict, and eventually she upbraids her husband for being such a stubborn old ass.

There are not many places Utama can go from here, and Grisi doesn't exactly find a surprising conclusion. But then, to be fair, there is very little surprising about the effects of global capital and climate change on traditional ways of life. This is a microcosmic portrait of a community under erasure by broad historical changes they don't entirely understand. The thing that really makes Utama an unsatisfying specimen of this type of salvage-paradigm filmmaking is the fact that Grisi's plotting and characterization are so over-determined by screenwriting conventions. This seriously undercuts the ethno-fiction that exists beneath Utama's surface. And that results in a film that is neither flesh nor fish: too conventional for the festival set, but too grim and plodding for a popular audience.

Sidenote: while I was watching Utama, I realized that in Spanish, the question "what is the name of your llama?" would be "como se llama tu llama?"