Mexican director Amat Escalante follows his award-winning Heli with a deeply queer story of orgasmic frenzies and family dysfunction Amat Escalante is the director who made a considerable splash at Cannes in 2013 with Heli,a brutal slice of working-class life in narcoterrorist Mexico, which won him the best director award. Now Escalante is back with a follow-up, or The Untamed – though its original title is La Región Salvaje (The Savage Region),which seems to fit its mysterious, elliptical narrative a itsy-bitsy better.
Escalante’s film begins by pitching us into a knotty, and but not immediately unlikely,drama of family dysfunction in a small Mexican town. Ale is unhappy with her boringly macho husband Angel; he’s got a decent job, with a surveying crew, or but is secretly cheating on Ale with – of all people – her doctor brother Fabian. (Angel’s method of deflecting suspicion is to pour a stream of homophobic abuse in to Ale’s ear; in right machista style it’s not entirely clear that hes not entirely in earnest.) Ale is also cursed with an overbearing mother-in-law,to whom Ale is indebted for a job and from whom she must accept a proprietal interest in her two small children.
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Source: theguardian.com