In a crowded subway car, a man coughs loudly before collapsing under the shock of his fellow passengers. Over the next few months, many more people will die from a mysterious respiratory illness that appears to have appeared without warning.
This opening alone might bring back memories of the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it’s the incisive social commentary that makes the 1979 film The Year of the Plague (El año de la peste) truly relevant to our current reality . It seems like a cinematic prophecy.
Mexican master Felipe Cazals directed the ambitious ensemble piece from a script co-written by Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez (one of Latin America’s most respected writers), Juan Arturo Brennan and José Agustín. Her clinical chronicle generously adapts Daniel Defoe’s 18th-century novel A Journal of the Plague Year into the context of a modern developing country.
As more and more victims of this unknown infection end up in the morgue, Dr. Pedro Sierra Genovés (Alejandro Parodi), a doctor at an upscale hospital, has a theory. He suspects that the disease that is spreading rapidly through the city’s poorest neighborhoods is the same one that has brutally decimated the world’s population for centuries: the merciless bubonic plague.
“Don’t tell me that the gringos have invaded us?” asks Sierra Genovés’ wife when he suggests that she and her daughters boil water and milk before drinking them as a precaution. Her comment reflects the shadow of American interventionism in Latin America at the time, implicated in the violent incidents against Mexican students just a few years earlier.
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Cazals’ previous film, Canoa: A Shameful Memory, released in 1976, the defining work of his career and now part of the Criterion Collection, addressed how those in power, including members of the Catholic Church, manipulated the weakest sections of citizens to denigrate the student movement and portraying them as atheist communists.
This theme runs even more catastrophically through the year of the plague. Despite the concerns of several experts, the government is launching a disinformation campaign to prevent a mass panic that will cost countless lives. Maintaining a façade of control is far more important to authorities than the threat of public health pandemonium.
To contain the spread, officials are tracking down anyone who came into contact with the first group of fatal cases. They visit schools to determine whether children have contracted the virus, and when a few children die, doctors are instructed to lie to the press about the cause.
More alarming sights follow. People in bright yellow protective suits, more reminiscent of astronaut clothing, enter a building to disinfect it with thick yellow foam and bring out residents wrapped in metal body bags. But on the evening news, a popular anchor spread the official narrative that it was a gas leak that prompted the rapid evacuation.
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It would be easy to compare Cazals’ fragmented depiction of these fictional events with Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, a recent work with a nearly identical theme and a similar multilinear narrative structure. But while both films jump between storylines to paint a complete picture of the situation from different angles, there is a disturbing lack of emotion and visual straightforwardness in The Year of the Plague.
Tensions rise as bodies line the streets. When protests break out, they are met with repressive force, further demonstrating that bureaucratic hierarchies take precedence over the safety of the masses, as well as the TV station’s collusion with government officials.
Their efforts to hide the horrors are in vain. The world learns of the disease – and the morally reprehensible cover-up – when a Norwegian diplomat falls victim to the aggressive illness. The Mexican president himself is committed to averting further international repercussions during his term in office by denying any wrongdoing.
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Yet for all its insights into class divisions and distrust of institutions, Cazals and his writing team include a handful of esoteric flourishes that treat this scientifically catastrophic crisis as more of a metaphysical event. Eva (Rebeca Silva), a humble epidemiology student in a romantic affair with Sierra Genovés, not only confronts the doctor about the dangers of his bourgeois life, but also suggests that a comet may be responsible for the collective illness.
Elsewhere, an older man hosts late-night parties to sing with friends, as if to deliberately ignore the chaos outside and indulge in an unsettling joy of living at the end of time.
Even though Cazals avoids putting landmarks on the screen and the actual name of the metropolis is never mentioned, there is no hiding the fact that the story is set and filmed in Mexico City. Footage of homeless people near death and unsanitary conditions in the city’s underdeveloped outskirts speaks volumes about who was most affected by this threat.
Later in the ordeal, Sierra Genovés learns that in one of these poor areas, a man who has proclaimed himself a prophet has convinced everyone to hand over the infected young women for sacrifice in order to end the plague. A scene in which one of these girls is saved from death by an uneducated, angry mob is directly reminiscent of Cazals’ Canoa.
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One of the film’s most disturbing images is the uncovering of a mass grave in which the naked bodies of dead people, whose families will likely never know what happened to them, are covered in copious amounts of disinfectant yellow foam. Three men – a doctor, a reporter and an official – look on and agree that this is a necessary evil, even praising it as population control. The sequence reads like a reference to the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, in which Mexican forces were ordered to murder hundreds of students who opposed the Olympics. Overnight, the government disposed of their bodies, washed their blood from the pavement, and erased all traces of their existence with complete impunity.
Yet as specific to its time and place as Cazals’ “The Year of the Plague” is, his observations remain applicable to the question of how today’s culture wars lead to real-world atrocities.
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