04 · 25 · 24

50 years after MERIDIANO 100

Rafael Aviña

Filmed 50 years ago and released in October 1976, Meridiano 100 (1974) is an atypical and militant story like most of Alfredo Joskowicz's work, with images by Toni Kuhn, which deals with a subject not commonly addressed in fiction in our cinema. It is an important forerunner of three films that would deal with the guerrilla theme: Caminando pasos caminando (1975), by Federico Weingartshofer; Bajo la metralla (1982), by Felipe Cazals; and El violín (2006), by Francisco Vargas. The credits sequence is shown over a map that refers to the film's name. Afterwards, a group of guerrillas is isolated in the mountains and the images are accompanied by a disturbing percussion sound that foreshadows the violence of the plot. This is a story filmed in Chalco and in Malinalco, State of Mexico, in which Joskowicz insisted on the theme of political opposition to the government through confrontation, in this violent case, in the story of a group of guerrillas who fail in their efforts to raise awareness among a group of peasants and end up immolated by the State's repressive force

A guerrilla group gets disassembled when one of its members, tortured by judicial authorities, tells on the group. The group gets the informer back and takes him to the Malinalco area, where they execute him and place a sign on him that reads "Justice of the revolutionary front." Just before that, on the radio, they hear that a guerrilla chief has died. They are El Rojo (Héctor Bonilla), a visible leader; El profesor (Álvaro Carcaño), a middle-class intellectual of Marxist affiliation who constantly clashes with the visceral Toño (Roberto Sosa), a lower-class student who later abandons them, taking much of the little food they have; and Urbano (Eduardo Lopez Rojas), a brave and robust man, who goes down to the village to meet other members of the communist party that support them, among them, a man called Teodoro, who asks them to disappear for a while until things calm down. The guerrilla group gets annoyed and accuses him of being a bureaucrat: "Hey, how much do you make squashing your buttocks on a desk?". What the Party wants is to protect the image of the urban guerrillas and not to be sacrificed.

Later, soldiers arrive in town. Maura (Martha Navarro), the beautiful wife of the bored doctor (Mario Casillas), is bathing in the river and is discovered by El Rojo, who threatens her not to scream. They become lovers, and she brings him food and two chickens that the doctor believes have been stolen by the villagers. A small plane explores the area. El Rojo asks Maura for medicine for El Profesor, who has been feeling ill, and to deliver a letter. Her husband discovers her and, despite this, auscultates the Professor and subsequently tries to draw the plane's attention. Urbano kills the doctor. They are chased and killed by the army, which also receives the order to cut off their heads, which they place in the plaza and burn the bodies. The municipal president and an army captain visit Maura to pay their condolences. At night, Maura tries to steal her lover's head, but a soldier shoots her.

In Meridiano 100, the stilted dialogues are not missing; however, the well-intentioned and attractive story and the militant position of Joskowicz and Bonilla, co-screenwriter of the film, inspired in part by the short story The Widow Aphrodisia, by Marguerite Yourcenar, is evident, in his attempt to criticize not only the repression of the State, the concentration of wealth in a few hands and the control of the people (“They rob them, step on them and they hold on like animals”) but also the mistakes of the left-wing itself, its closed-mindedness and bureaucracy. Many scenes reference his previous works: El cambio (1971) and, above all, his short documentary La manda (1969) with the scenes of the dancers, the processions, and the believers who move through the town on their knees. He also touches on themes such as the ignorance of the people —the doctor observes how a woman with a sick child, to whom he gave medicine, takes her baby to a healer— the topic of eroticism and passion when El Rojo awakens in the sensual Maura played by Martha Navarro, who a year later would film La pasión según Berenice, (1975) by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo.