Alejandro Landes’s film has the feel of a journalistic study, using a handheld camera to document the teens’ behaviour under duress
“MONOS” OPENS above the clouds. Encamped on a remote mountaintop in an unnamed country, a cadre of teenage soldiers are keeping watch over an American hostage, referred to as the “doctor”. Why she is being detained—or what the purpose or ideology of this paramilitary group is—are not clear. When they are periodically visited by their commander, he beats them and refers to them as; he refers only in vague terms to a wider military operation. When the commander is not there, the troops relax.
The soldiers have relinquished their given names and answer instead to monikers such as “Bigfoot” and “Smurf”: childlike designations which jar with the task they are performing. Violent rituals are designed to snuff out individualism and encourage subservience to the group. It seems to work, for a while. Indeed, it is initially hard for the viewer to grasp each character’s personality.That changes when an enemy group bombs their compound.
The story clearly draws on Colombia’s decades-long civil war, which involved child soldiers and competing rebel factions, but does not address it directly. Alejandro Landes, the Colombian director, is more interested in telling an uncommon coming-of-age story than in making a political statement. His film is largely devoid of context. His characters do not speak about their lives before joining “the Organisation”, so viewers have no sense of what radicalised them.
Despite this tight focus Mr Landes’s film has the feel of a journalistic study, using a handheld camera to document the teens’ behaviour under duress, but it also bears traces of its artistic inspirations. The depiction of madness in the jungle owes much to “Apocalypse Now”; the elliptical narrative set deep in nature recalls the best work of Terence Malick. The focus on a forgotten generation of adolescents harkens back to François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows”.
“Monos” touches on all of these tales, but it does not linger too long. It forges its own path through the wilderness. There is no mentor figure to guide the soldiers through their moral challenges, and the nostalgic tone that softens so many coming-of-age stories is absent. Instead, “Monos” reveals the full humanity of its lost children by treating them like adults.
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