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Men With Guns
*Premiere*
From the Director of Lone Star,
John Sayles,
One of America's Greatest Filmmakers
"Men With Guns ranks with Sayles' best. This film means to shake us and it does." -- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
With a hugely enthusiastic two thumbs up, Siskel and Ebert described Men With Guns as one of the most important American films made in the past year, before going on to call John Sayles a living treasure (or words to that effect). Viewing this film more than confirms their enthusiasm. Equal parts politics and moving personal journey spiced up with doses of humour and magic realism, the film -- set in an unnamed Latin American country -- follows an aging, wealthy doctor named Fuentes (the great Federico Luppi) as he decides to spend his retirement checking on the progress of his former students. These students were part of a government-sponsored programme to turn poor rural kids into doctors so they could go back to their remote villages and serve their people. Fuentes considers the programme to have been his crowning achievement. His willful ignorance of his own country is revealed, however, as he soon finds that many of his protégés have fallen victim to hombres armados (men with guns), some sponsored by the very government that had previously sponsored the doctor's cherished programme... Partly filmed in Chiapas and culled from stories both true and invented, this is a film overflowing with emotion and ideas. Sayles deliberately set the film in an unnamed country in order to suggest that this kind of thing goes on all over -- in the former Yugoslavia, Africa, the former Soviet Union -- and in so doing he has fashioned a humanist epic of the highest order.
(USA, 1998, subtitles, 128 min.)
P.G. -- coarse language.
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