36 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
LAW OF
THE JUNGLE
Alejandro Landes’s surreal, unsettling war story ‘Monos’ follows a squad of adolescent guerrillas
fighting for an unknown cause in an unnamed country. Here the director explains the challenges
of a remote shoot and why he was determined not to trade on pity in his portrait of child soldiers.
By Isabel Stevens
YOUNG SOUL REBELS
Guerrilla commander the
Messenger, played by
real-life ex-guerrilla Wilson
Salazar, inspects his troops
(opposite, top); and the
squad on the march through
the Andean jungle (opposite)
how me your war face!” barks a commander at
the start of Colombian-Ecuadorian director Ale-
jandro Landes’s survival thriller Monos. In front
of him on an unnamed remote mountaintop are eight
guerrillas, ranging from barely teenage to young adults.
Their DIY khaki uniforms may be muddy and make-
shift but their rifles and military drills are polished. By
day they play at war and make proof-of-life videos with
their American hostage – a woman identified only as
‘Doctora’, played by Julianne Nicholson. When the com-
mander, known only as the Messenger, departs, some-
thing resembling regular teen life, albeit cut through
with violence, resumes at the boot camp in the clouds. By
night, the squadron parties in the glow of the campfire.
“We’ve all had that dream as kids, right?” Landes says,
talking to me on the phone from Los Angeles, where he
has just closed a deal to finance his next film. “To be free,
surrounded by people your own age on top of a mountain
and at first it seems like there is no one to tell you what to
do.” Apocalypse Now (1979) and Werner Herzog’s doomed
Amazonian adventures (Aguirre, Wrath of God, 1972; and
Fitzcarraldo, 1982) have been the references critics have
boxed Monos into so far. But while Landes tracks the de-
scent of his band of guerrillas into hallucinatory chaos
amid the rainforest, we’re never allowed to forget that
what we are witnessing is war through teenage eyes.
SAVAGE YOUTH
“There have been a lot of films about child soldiers and
they tend to trade on pity. I didn’t want that,” Landes
says. “We already know that children don’t have a place
in war. I don’t think I need to take four years of my life to
tell that tired story. The idea was to take it further. Let’s
see the dynamics between teenagers that you see in the
schoolyard. A lot of child soldiers weren’t recruited by
force. They saw joining a rebel army as a better life or
they believed in the cause.”
Here, though, there is no obvious cause: we are simply
ambushed by a savage Neverland. Landes drops us into
the feral world of the squad, collectively called monos
(Spanish for ‘monkeys’, but the prefix ‘mono’ also has,
Landes notes, connotations of aloneness). He gives little
away about the teen commandos beyond their childish
nicknames: Smurf, Rambo, Bigfoot, Wolf, Boom Boom.
For these kids violence is a fact of life, embedded by their
own code of conduct, which decrees everyone should
receive a happy-birthday beating, and by the draconian
military protocol that dictates death for any member of
the squad who transgresses.
Two films that zero in on the highly subjective expe-
rience of young and isolated rebel armies stand out as
closer analogies than either Coppola or Herzog – Jean-
Stéphane Sauvaire’s brutal examination of child soldiers
in Liberia, Johnny Mad Dog (2008), and Wakamatsu Koji’s
account of real-life 1960s Japanese students in a paramil-
itary mountain training camp, United Red Army (2007).
But both of those filmmakers told their stories vérité-doc
style. What’s unique about Landes’s film is its mix of sur-
realism and hyperrealism: it feels like a post-apocalyptic
fable. Shooting in wide-frame CinemaScope, cinematog-
rapher Jasper Wolf captures the epic and remote nature of
life at altitude, where a pink flare from a faraway conflict
can burst through and light up the dusky cloudscape.
He pays equal attention to the harsh everyday reality of
the sodden camp with fog-framed shots and an endless
palette of sludgy greens. Meanwhile, Mica Levi’s score,
an anxiety-inducing haze of whistles, drums and animal
sounds, completes the immersive sensorial experience.
While Lord of the Flies is clearly an influence – sign-
posted perhaps a little too eagerly by the appearance
of a pig’s head on a stick – Elem Klimov’s Come and See
(1985), which depicts a 14-year-old’s view of World War
II in Belarus, also looms large: Landes wanted to recreate
that film’s waking-dream nature. The photographer Nan
Goldin’s intimate portraits of her family and friends were
also among the director’s visual references: “I responded
to the way she shoots exposed bodies and flesh. This is a
film that leads more with the skin and stomach than it
does with the head.”
THE FOG OF WAR
In the film Landes refuses to reveal the political ideol-
ogy of the kids or the organisation they report to,
and the film’s setting is equally opaque, though
S
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PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Monos, 1
