A Political Shot in the Air
Kattia Barrientos
Mente Revolver
“Of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important,” Lenin once said, emphasizing the scope and the power that a film can have. The big screen exhausts itself, however, if the message is unclear, and that is the case of REVOLVER MIND (2017), the most recent work of Mexican director Alejandro Ramírez Corona, known for his cinema of political denunciation.
In REVOLVER MIND, Ramírez tells three parallel stories in which a revolver is at once a key component and a metaphor for social decay: Mario, Chicali, and Jenny all watch their lives deteriorate from the moment a firearm comes into contact with them.
Unfortunately, the narrative’s lack of internal cohesion prevents the director’s premise from being realized, as his political point is lost amidst episodes connected by forced coincidences and motivated by almost whimsical events, which lead the viewer more to wonder about narrative coherence than to formulate social conclusions. Moreover, the exaggerated sound effects of every gunshot, as well as the repeated close-ups of revolvers, underline unnecessarily the metaphor suggested by the title.
Thus, in spite of its clear intention to denounce, the film goes off like a shot fired into the air. We hear the deafening detonation, but we don’t know where it came from or who or what it was aimed at.
(translated by Gregory Dechant)
