Tag Archives: mockumentary

La Bachata del Biónico (Yoel Morales, Dominican Repubic, 2024)

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I saw La Bachata del Biónico with a friend last night in a commercial theatre in Santo Domingo, with an audience that laughed out loud throughout. It’s a brilliantly funny film about l’amour fou as lived by a crackhead. El bionico (Manuel Raposo) is crazy in love with La Flaca (Ana Minier), also an addict but now getting clean in a detox centre. The film is shot as a mockumentary in which a film crew follows El Bionico and his sidekick (Calvita) as they try to score a flat worthy of La Flaca so they could set up a home and get married. Their addiction, her ex, and well….life…all get in the way. The tone is up-beat, the pace is raggaeton-y, the world depicted is gritty, with surreal flights that recall magical realism. The film’s achievement is that it’s funny AND touching, that it depicts the pleasures of the drugs, the friendships and community that go along with the addiction, without once minimising its horrors and its sometimes deadly consequences. It’s a real achievement from director Yoel Morales. He has a great feel for the sights and sounds of a particular place in a particular time and conveys it so that it feels a structure of feeling come to life, wonderful to bask in and substantial enough to think upon. Comedy is like the Bermuda Triangle of discussions of national cinemas, they somehow disappear or are minimised in the final accounting. Yet this film brings a culture to life more vividly and with at least as much depth as so called serious films. Hugely enjoyable. I hope it gets picked up for distribution abroad.

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 258 – Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Fourteen years have passed since Sacha Baron Cohen’s first tour of the USA as Borat, his friendly, clueless, and decidedly un-PC Kazakh journalist. Borat gave his unwitting participants, real people who didn’t know that he was a character, space and encouragement to display their bigotry, sexism, racism, and stupidity – now he’s back to do it again, in a world in which bigotry, sexism, racism and stupidity are no longer deemed necessary to hide.

Sexism in particular is this film’s bedrock, the film introducing a daughter, Tutar, who Borat didn’t know about, and when she stows away on her father’s trip, he decides to offer her to Mike Pence as a token of Kazakhstan’s friendship. Women are chattel, and the only objection raised when Borat decides to give the fifteen-year-old Tutar breast implants is that he can’t afford them. Women’s role as playthings for men, and the society that refuses to allow them control over their bodies, shape almost every scene, including a debutante ball, a conversation with a Christian doctor, and of course, THAT scene with Rudy Giuliani.

We also discuss the question of the reality of what we’re seeing and how the film’s camerawork and editing fails to convince us of it, how comedy has changed in the last decade and a half, and how the film unexpectedly gives its unwitting participants the opportunity to be tolerant and welcoming. And we each share memories of our grandmothers.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.