Innocent Voices movie review & film summary (2005)

What sets "Innocent Voices" apart from these films is its resolute point of view through the eyes of Chava. He has no political opinions. His uncle is with the guerrillas, so he supports his uncle as he would a football team, and he fears the government because he does not want to be taken into the army. But he sees these choices as events in his own life, and has no larger knowledge of their meaning.

In that way "Innocent Voices" resembles the best film about insurgencies in Latin America, which is "Men With Guns" (1998), by John Sayles, in which no country is named. It is, I wrote, "an allegory about all countries where men with guns control the daily lives of the people. Some of the men are with the government, some are guerrillas, some are thieves, some are armed to protect themselves, and to the ordinary people it hardly matters: The man with the gun does what he wants, and his reasons are irrelevant -- unknown perhaps even to himself."

That is certainly the case in "Innocent Voices," where politics seem meaningless at the local level and it is simply a matter of armed men, some of them boys, who have machineguns and fire them recklessly, maybe because it is fun. Tactics and strategy seem lacking in this war; the armed teams on both sides travel the countryside, rarely encountering each other, intimidating the peasants, for whom the message from both camps is the same: Support us or we will kill you.

In this world Chava (Carlos Padilla) lives a blessed life, as one of those street-wise kids like Pixote who knows everybody's business. His mother Kella (Leonor Varela) scrambles to feed and protect her three children, and they retreat for a time to the more remote house of her mother, but Kella fears to move to a safer area because if her husband returns and they have moved, "he'll have no way to find us." Her mother sadly shakes her head: "Those who go north get swept away."

Chava makes a living, of sorts. He talks a bus driver into making him an unofficial conductor, shouting out the names of the stops. He goes to school, until the school is closed because of the war. He befriends Ancha (Gustavo Munoz), known as "fish brain" because he is retarded: "He is the only one not scared to have a birthday."

The most frightening scenes in the film are not necessarily the ones where men sweep the barrio with machinegun fire, and the residents cower behind their mattresses. They are the ones when the army comes to the school to take away the 12-year-olds. On one of these sweeps, Chava improvises an inspired way for the boys to hide from the army; the secret is revealed in a single shot by director Luis Mandoki.