El hoyo en la cerca - The Hole in the Fence
El hoyo en la cerca - The Hole in the Fence
Director: Joaquin del Paso
Starrings: Rafael Ayala; Dante Carrillo, Giovanni Conconi, Apolinar Nájera Contreras, Eduardo Nájera Contreras, Pedro Nájera Contreras, Joaquin del Paso, Yubáh Ortega Iker Fernández, Alfredo Flores, Gabriel Fritsch, Santiago Barajas Hamue, Bárbara Hernández, Héctor Kuri Hernández, Lucciano Kurti, Valeria Lamm, Enrique Lascurain, Franco Legorreta, Diego Lozano, Concepción López, Carlos Morett Joaquín Mcarthy, Patrick Mcarthy, Francisco Medrano, Carlos Morett Joaquín, Takahiro Murokawa, Emilio Navarro Roselló, Matias Del Castillo Negrete, José Alfredo Nájera Nuevo, Charles Oppenheim, Bernardo Ortega, Adolfo Osorio, Jacek Poniedzialek, Santiago Rodríguez, Alejandro Rubio, Juan Pablo Ferreiro Soria, Santiago Tirado, Marek Tokarcik, Raúl Vasconcelos, José Manuel Vázquez, Eric David Walker, Alexander Waters, Shota Yamada
Country: Mexico, Polonia
Year 2021
Click Here for Italian Version
“Postura! Puntualictad! Penitentia!” (Posture! Punctuality! Penance!)
For years, Catholic schools have contributed positively to the education of young people around the world.
In all countries, public schools have a very low cultural level. This gap has been filled with Catholic colleges. Their quality has attracted the children of the upper and middle classes, indifferent to paying expensive fees. These funds have enabled religious institutions to enrol many deserving youngsters from poor families, helping them to improve their lives.
On 30 January 1979, Pope John Paul II met in Mexico City with the students of the "Miguel Angel" Institute. The Pope affirmed the supreme value of the Church in managing schools:
“I now wish to confide in you a problem that is very near my heart. The Church is aware of the underdevelopment that exists in many areas of the Latin American continent and your country. My predecessor Paul VI, in his encyclical Populorum Progressio affirmed: "...basic education is the primary object of any plan of development". (1)
Filling the educational void is one of the primary tasks of Catholic pedagogic institutions. Their responsibilities are both pedagogical and spiritual.
In the same speech, John Paul II always affirms:
“... my fatherly supplication, goes also to Christian educators in order that, with their contribution, they may promote literacy campaigns and "culturalization" with a complete view of man. ” (1)
This is the difference between religious and non-religious schools. With the secular system, the "view of man" is absent, since its function is Enlightenment secularization. The latter is the theory of support for liberalism without rules, whose purpose is the disintegration of human beings as the fulcrum of life.
Therefore, the Christian presence annoys those who want a society based on consumption, on the materialization of existence, both physical and spiritual. To them, people must be the object of double exploitation. In the first, in developing countries people are the intensive use of productive slavery
First, in developing countries, people are enslaved in an intensive manner to product goods to sell. In the more prosperous nations, the population is treated passively as a spending object. In both cases, education must be massacred by the secularization of the school.
For young people, the consequence is ruthless; instead of increasing, the academic level decreases.
The supporter of a profane school is the Mexican director Joaquin del Paso in his film El hoyo en la cerca - The Hole in the Fence, presented at the 78th Venice Film Festival.
The first sequence is the beautiful Mexican countryside: trees, birds, music. Everything is clean and attractive, in the background, there is a mountain. It is the Christian college "Centro Escuela los Pinos". A pleasant place to study and have fun. A bus is arriving with children of various ages. They are the new scholars of the school year. They are all male. Professors welcome them with speeches full of rhetoric and celebration. They warn them of a mysterious and recent danger. Suddenly, in the school forest, there was an unusual event: a hole, a crack, a human-sized passage in the fence. Who entered through it? What intimidation is threatening the peace and serenity of the pupils? Fear is in the school: “escape from this hell”.
Joaquin del Paso attended a school run by Opus Dei. He must have been shocked by own the experience:
“I experienced moments of punishment and psychological manipulation e are taught how to be ruthless and without empathy for the other.
This film is based on real life events. I feel very close to this subject as I attended a similar school run by the Opus-Dei for a couple of years, over the course of which I experienced moments of punishment and psychological manipulation. At the time, it felt like I was being put through some sort of endurance training, in which kids are taught how to be ruthless and without empathy for the other. I felt an urgency to shed a critical light onto how this educational system, hand-in-hand with the catholic religion, are deployed in reinforcing entrenched structures of power, tailored to create psychological walls between people. These invisible barriers contribute fundamentally to ongoing racial, gender and class-based abuse, as well as leaving deep wounds in the lives of those who experienced first-hand the almost cult-like indoctrination practiced in such institutions. I want to consider how this educational system might function to create hard people, ready to crush anyone in order to succeed and to reinforce the status quo of power.” (2)
Joaquin del Paso probably has a strong egocentrism. Perhaps he suffered traumatizing bullying at school. So, he films El hoyo en la cerca as if everyone had this problem. It is a generalization caused by his frivolousness.
Obviously, the director lacks a thorough understanding of culture and literary proficiency. For example, he does not have the same rebellious and philosophical knowledge as Roger Peyrefitte in Les amitiés particulières. He was a high school student at a French Catholic College as well. The protagonist challenges tradition but at the same time learns and studies classics.
Unlike Peyrefitte, Joaquin del Paso is insensitive to cultural stimulation. Thus, he wants to destroy any intellectual and educational centre of freedom, like the Catholic School.
Yet, the idea was adequate. The school is a metaphor comparable to a fortress.
The character of the students were strengthened after a year of waiting for an unknown threat. Now, they are united. They are a team against a common and mysterious enemy. This is the thought, but the director is distracted. He is unaware of how to use a metaphor.
It is a choral film. The characters are divided into two blocks.
The students are similar to those around the world. They deride each other. They have intense hormonal impetuosity. They talk non-stop about imaginary fucking. They play. They scream. They are selfish but also ready for eager friendships. They have homosexual impulses, as happens in classes composed only of male adolescents. They are naughty, pleasant and intelligent.
Teachers are the other aggregation. They are cunning, like herons patiently waiting for their prey.
Apparently corrupt, they are actually wise in pointing out the difficulties of becoming an adult. Like hieratic strategists, they invent a false scapegoat.
The theme is the rich and elitist community versus the indigenous village. There is a hole between them.
The symbolic scene, to exalt the exclusive and privileged college, is the arrival by helicopter of the snobbish former student, now minister.
The final fighting comes with the battle of the flags. Every year, the students go to the village and bring gifts. This time something goes wrong, a pupil has disappeared, causing a war between the two factions.
It is difficult to identify with the characters because of empathy is absence for any protagonists. The introduction of the identity is efficient. Students are rogues and restless.
Standard drop when conflict is born. The hole is the centre of this contrast. However, it is trivialized into a boringly politically correct theme without the realization of a real inner manifestation. Good and evil are unnecessarily exasperated.
The plot twist is structurally simple, devoid of tension or emotions.
The rhythm is broken, it moves sobbing. There are no expectations between events, everything is predictable.
The atmosphere is interesting, the school as an educational institution is composed of lively kids. The colour of the film is bright, with a naturalistic tone for sunlight, with lots of green, with a dominant woodland. This chromaticity enhances the ambience, together with the screams of the students.
The college is a microcosm of the author's politically correct thoughts. However, it is poorly artistic, perhaps he is a victim of personal restlessness. The result is a parody of a teenage film like American Pie.
The story is choral, the camera rotates quickly among all the boys, forming a circle, a group distinct from the rest of society. Outside, there are ghosts. They crossed through the hole: forward tracking shot, disturbing music, the adversary has been spotted.
The film is uncomplicated both in structure and in language.
The most hilarious sequence is the representation of Rossini's Barber of Seville, performed by a clumsy professor. After one school year of stress and peril, they are now united. they form a group against a nemesis and an unexplored emergency. This is the idea, but Joaquin del Paso is perplexed. He does not know how to use figurative expressions.
Directors: Natasha Merkulova e Aleksey Chupov
Starrings: Yuriy Borisov, Timofey Tribuntsev, Aleksandr Yatsenko
Country: Russia, Francia, Estonia
Year 2021