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David O'Connell
Mountain FogTrade @ the Festival of German Films
May 3rd 2009 21:53
David O'Connell is a guest writer on 20/20 Filmsight, and has his own excellent movie review site at Screen Fanatic.
Marco Kreuzpaintner’s powerful new drama takes pains to uncover the depraved indifference allowing thousands of helpless young men and women to be exploited as sexual trade every year. As pre-end credits statistics confirm, the horrible toll has reached unimaginable proportions, amoral consortiums vying for a slice of the profits whilst simultaneously feeding the unquenchable lust that stirs like lava through their veins.
A number of parallel stories begin in Mexico City: firstly, a local teenager, Jorge (Cesar Ramos), regularly engaged in ripping off tourists with his posse of hoods, luring them into side streets with the promise of illicit sexual pleasures, before robbing them at gunpoint; the tables are soon turned however when his young sister, Adriana (Paulina Gaitan), is abducted by a faction of trolling Russian criminals. Secondly, we witness the arrival of a young Polish woman, Veronika (Alicja Bachleda), one of many lured to Mexico by the prospect of convenient, cheap access to America, only to have their passports confiscated by their sponsors upon arrival and smuggled away against their will.
These two threads neatly intertwine as the frantic Jorge searches for clues to his sister’s whereabouts before it’s too late; he learns of the dire prospects confronting her from a wizened local mob boss and soon, in a friend's stolen car, he’s on the trail of a truck which he fortuitously spots transporting the abductees out of town. He runs out of petrol just prior to reaching the border in Juarez but sneaks into the boot of a car belonging to a curious American, Roy (Kevin Kline), prowling through an abandoned building Jorge's taken refuge in, involved in some private investigation.
When Roy, who it turns out is a policeman with the Fraud division, discovers Jorge, he’s determined to transport him back home but is won over by the young man’s story of his abducted sister. Jorge's tale hits home for there is special significance attached to his words: Roy has been on a mission of his own, searching for his missing daughter, thought to be sold by her junkie mother years previous. This haunted man and his unlikely accomplice join forces, their destination New Jersey where it is known the girls will be stashed whilst awaiting ‘sale’ via the internet to the highest bidder.
Meanwhile the road trip for the girls is shown in unflinching detail with various stops along the way as they're used to indulge the basest sexual proclivities of pedophiles seeking quick relief. The man charged with delivering them, Manuelo (Marco Perez) is shown as ruthless but not without a flicker of humanity, though there are many gut-wrenching scenes, played out in haunting, graphic detail, which offer little light to penetrate the darkness of their predicament.
Kreuzpaintner’s film, though perhaps portraying these people with a few too many black and white distinctions, is a gripping, humanistic one, full of heartbreaking insights into the all too real evil and callousness thriving beneath society’s blackened underbelly. His actors are magnificent contributors to the sense of reality that gives Trade its credibility; there’s genuine suspense too as Roy and Jorge get closer to New Jersey and attempt to manipulate these difficult circumstances to their own ends in extricating Adriana from her imprisonment. Kline’s stoical approach grounds the film whilst providing a perfect counterbalance to the irrational confusion threatening to mar Jorge’s objectivity in the face of danger.
The plight of these abused captives is a tragic one, and though the film has been glossed over with a liberal dosage of Hollywood sheen, its messages are important ones, impossible to sweep under the carpet. The fact that Kreuzpaintner has turned it all into something so compelling is a credit to his directorial skills; there’s very little in the way of compromise, and a chilling coda, followed by the CIA's sobering statistics illustrating the worldwide scale of this problem, put a conclusive end to any illusory feeling of having reached a satisfactory resolution.
*this image was found on[LINK=http://blog.beliefnet.com/idolchatter/2007/01/live-from-sundance-sex-trafficking-in.html] Idle Chatter.
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