Song Without a Name

May 19, 2025 00:03:29
Song Without a Name
Flicks with The Film Snob
Song Without a Name

May 19 2025 | 00:03:29

/

Show Notes

Song Without a Name, the feature debut, from 2019, of Peruvian director Melina León, starts in 1988, with newspaper headlines describing Peru’s financial collapse and the catastrophic inflation that followed. This was a time of conflict between the government and a Maoist terror group called The Shining Path.

In a small cabin within a stark mountain vastness, a fire blazing, a group of native people, Quechuans, are praying and singing while a young man, Leo, dons the beautiful costume of a traditional Andean musician. He’s leaving for the town of Iquitos to work a manual labor job while hopefully also making money playing music with local groups. Among those gathered we see a young woman, Georgina, who is in the late stages of pregnancy. She is Leo’s wife, and is going with him to Iquitos to work. In the windy morning they climb the steep hill leaving home, the black and white photography and the spare, almost abstract landscape making this all look like a fearful dream.

After reaching the town, Leo works in a warehouse, while Georgina sits on a street corner selling potatoes that have been assigned to them by Leo’s bosses. It’s a difficult adjustment, where they have to speak Spanish to get by, which they don’t know that well, instead of their indigenous language Quechua. They don’t usually get to see each other until the night time.

One day, Georgina hears an announcement on the radio. There is a free clinic in Lima that will provide childbirth care and delivery. Experiencing the beginning of labor pains, she takes the 2-hour bus ride, alone, to the address given on the radio. The austere looking clinic is in one room of a large, official looking building. Georgina is there coached through a difficult childbirth. “It’s a girl,” they say, and then the mother loses consciousness. When she awakens later and asks for her baby, they say she’s in the hospital. The next day, despite her frantic requests to see her child, they drag her out of the clinic and lock the door. In the coming days she will return, eventually with Leo, and keep banging on the door. No one answers.

It takes some time before Georgina can grasp the terrible truth that her baby has been stolen. At the police station, they shrug their shoulders and say they can do nothing. Georgina’s grief is conveyed in heart rending fashion by first-time actress Pamela Mendoza, whose intense determination and emotion carries the film. Eventually she goes to one of the Lima newspapers, and a young, very serious reporter played by Tommy Párraga, decides to investigate. The movie then explores his experience, as a member of the press, of Peru’s social and political malaise.

One notices immediately that León’s style is not at all traditional. She’s committed to an expressionism that magnifies the feelings of her characters, and her visual strategies are daring. The story is based on a real case from that time, with implications far wider than this one woman. The combination of the “solving a mystery” type story with the avant-garde visual technique is spellbinding.

Without reservation, I’ll say this is a great film that has not become as well known as it should be. And the profound meaning of the title, Song Without a Name, is eventually revealed, to devastating effect.

Other Episodes

Episode

December 06, 2013
Episode Cover

Big Deal on Madonna Street

Big Deal on Madonna Street, a 1958 film directed by Mario Monicelli, is a spoof of the heist film genre, exemplified by such films...

Listen

Episode

November 22, 2013
Episode Cover

The Act of Killing

   The Act of Killing, a documentary film by Joshua Oppenheimer, starts us out with some very minimal historical background. In 1965, the government of...

Listen

Episode 0

August 13, 2024 00:03:35
Episode Cover

Kind Hearts and Coronets

A young man plots to become a duke by killing everyone ahead of him in the line of succession, in this delightful comedy that...

Listen