THE SHADOW OF THE SUN – Review by Jennifer Green
The Shadow of the Sun (Sombra del Sol), Venezuela’s submission for this year’s International Feature Film Oscar, is a heartwarming crowd-pleaser featuring stellar lead performances from Carlos Manuel Gonzalez and Anyelo Lopez. The two play somewhat unlikely brothers looking for a way out of their stifling small-town lives. The film stumbles in a couple of key places, but it brings to life a cast of compelling characters and paints a moving portrait of the difficult realities of contemporary life in Venezuela.
Giving this film the platform of an Oscar run could provide its talents, especially star Gonzalez, with a deserved international stage. It could also earn the film comparisons with the Oscar-winning Coda (a remake of the French film La Famille Bélier). The press materials highlight that the making of this film created nearly 200 jobs in Venezuela and employed six deaf actors among its cast members.
Economic hardships and pervasive violence provide the context for Shadow’s tale, set in the provincial city of Acarigua. Leo (Gonzalez) works a dead-end factory job, while his much-younger brother Alex (Lopez), who is deaf, works at a local bakery. Alex, who may also be gay, is an easy target for local thugs, led by the gun-wielding Lucky (David Olaves), though one of the gang (the sensitive Brayain, played by Jeizer Ruiz) seeks him out on the sly, and the two form a sweet but short-lasted friendship.
Alex is intent on convincing Leo to try out for a national singing competition that comes with a hefty purse for its winners. We know Leo has a powerful voice because he uses it in an early scene involving a drunken exchange in a bar. When Leo loses his job, he agrees to Alex’s plan and, in exchange, Alex helps Leo hustle some side jobs to make a living.
In a fun montage, Leo gathers the members of a band he used to front as a younger man – and who now include a priest (Richard Clark), a father (Pedro Alonso) and the daughter (Camila Curtis) of a bandmate who passed away. The group begins practicing in a makeshift space on an abandoned property.
Debut feature director Miguel Angel Ferrer makes the curious decision of not letting us hear the song Alex has written for the band (which gives the film its title and whose poetic significance is explained in an emotional scene). We never hear Leo sing again, even when he makes his appearance on stage in the contest. Ferrer overlays that scene, like many others, with an original score by Venezuelan composer Sandro Morales Santoro, which is poignant but overly exploited throughout the movie.
Maybe Ferrer wanted to leave viewers wondering what the song said or sounded like. Leo gives Alex a voice, and Ferrer’s decision not to let us hear Leo clearly ties into Alex’s deafness – if he can write beautiful songs without hearing, we can appreciate them without hearing them. It is possible to grasp all this and still feel disappointment not to hear Leo singing in what is built up to be a climactic scene.
What Ferrer does exceptionally well with this film is depict the daily degradation of poverty and violence in Venezuela. Leo’s live-in girlfriend Yolanda (Greisy Mena), always worried about money, constantly questions his actions and seems shockingly unconcerned about his feelings. Most things seem to end in violence in Acarigua, where we find out Leo and Alex were orphaned quite young.
The film rests on Gonzalez’s shoulders. His rocker wardrobe (think muscle t’s, necklaces and acid-washed jeans), motorcycle and innate sex appeal with women hint at the man he once was. Now, he’s been beaten down by circumstances, approaching middle age with not much to show for it and increasingly less energy to fight for anything better. He exudes anger and deception as well as strength and sensitivity. Venezuela’s answer to Javier Bardem, Gonzalez embodies all of this with naturalism and innate appeal.
