A frequently edifying heuristic for approaching the films of Mario Rodríguez Dávila is to understand his shots as gleaned from attenuating the narratives of preexisting classic urban melodramas—like the films by Yasujiro Ozu, Emilio Fernández, and Ismael Rodríguez that he has cited as youthful influences—but then rearranged in order to deploy the ordinary drama (a kind of negation of melodrama) of urban history itself. Here we mean the history of Ecuador’s coast, especially Rodríguez’s home city of Guayaquil. Rodríguez’s newest film Proa Nublada(2025) is another work of his that resounds with the remark by poet Jorge Martillo Monserrate, as the filmmaker recalls it, of Guayaquil as a city that contains many cities inside it. But this is an understanding of urban history told emphatically without hierarchy: Rodríguez’s political horizontalism conditions his very sense of how to organize film shots.
Another way of capturing this point derives from a moment in the film in which Rodríguez’sfrequent actor Jorge Peñaherrera reads a poem by the filmmaker’s friend Carlos Luis Ortiz, “Consejos de Obregón,” part of his collection, El fuego de San Telmo, in which Guayaquil is referred to as the city that “had been shipwrecked.” Accordingly, we are faced not with the structured narration of the history of Guayaquil and its surroundings, but rather with the parataxis of the city’s shipwrecked parts. Even the film’s structuring by three numbered titles (“Uno,” “Dos,” “Tres”) is playfully deceptive, relative to its horizontal ordering, like the labeling of Rodríguez’s previous Mejana (2021) as “Second Movement” in a sequence where the “first movement” has yet to exist.
Instead, in Proa Nublada, stocks of history are condensed in individual shots, most emphatically in one of the actor Peñaherrera slowly and deliberately touching the exposed back of Afro-Ecuadorian actress Johana Caicedo. We might immediately appreciate this moment’s erotics of touching, continuous with motifs of skin brushing against skin, such as in hands tying a white cloth onto an exposed back, in Rodríguez’s earlier Vientos de Chanduy (2021). But those same erotics are revealed to bear historical weight: we see and hear Peñaherrera turning Caicedo’s back into a map and pinpointing on it the locations of the Indigenous tribes present in Esmeraldas, north of Guayaquil, when the first Africans arrived there in a 1553 shipwreck. Is this Afro-Ecuadorian history part of what Luis Ortiz’s poem refers to by a “shipwrecked” city?
The tight shot of Caicedo’s back is both emblematic of Proa Nublada’s vision of the history of Guayaquil and also something of an exception to the film’s typical declarations of deep space. The camera rarely moves in Rodríguez’s films, as though to render those instances when it does move, however subtly, all the more striking. In Proa Nublada, these movements are all zooms into the frame, in one important instance into the flat surface of a painting by the filmmaker’s friend Eduardo Jaime of a man struggling to take control of a storm-besot raft. For Rodríguez, the lightning striking the raft’s rod links the painting to Ortiz’s poetry book El fuego de San Telmo, referring to an electrical discharge named for the patron saint of sailors and traditionally regarded as a sign of good luck.
The opening juxtaposition of shots of this painting with a pair of actors (Peñaherrera and Valentina Ruiz eating cheese soup and fried corvina), against the backdrop of a violent rainstorm, nearly suggests that the painted “fictional” storm lies just outside the film’s immediate scene. In fact, this example stands for a wider range of imaginative resources that Rodríguez employs for communicating deeper spaces, especially of having appearances by artistic works open up entire worlds, such as the individuals viewing screens showing Ozu’s An Inn in Tokyo (1935) and João César Monteiro’s Fragmentos de Um Filme Esmola, A Sagrada Família (1972–1977) in Mejana (2017-2020) and Cordel (2020), respectively. The different senses of theatricality at play in his earlier work’s filmic references allow Rodríguez to express his ease in projecting so immediately and so tightly from “shot” to “scene.” On the other hand, the poems by Carlos Luis Ortiz read by Peñaherrera in Proa Nublada refer to yet another fiction: the tales by Colombian author Álvaro Mutis of Maqroll el Gaviero, and correspondingly to the titular gaviero’s travels through Turkey and the Caribbean. In any case, every artistic allusion in Rodríguez’s cinema functions as a telescope—a cone stretching from the local to the global—albeit always firmly situated on one coast.
The raft depicted in Eduardo Jaime’s painting also provides the only cloudy bow (Proa) that can claim relation to the film’s title, though arguably Rodríguez’s occasional motif of shots of buses (like also in Mejana and Cordel) offers terrestrial equivalents of ships in marking movement outside of the frame. First conceived of as a feature film and then interrupted by the pandemic, Proa Nublada is a work colored by the question, but never the anxiety, of when to stop and prod the interior (even just to listen to salsa and drink beers in a bar) and when to move outwards, or indeed fall downwards.
Should we see Proa Nublada as another manifestation of St. Elmo’s Fire? Our answer will have to depend on recalling that poetry (here rendered as film) can also be the light that kindles the promise of a return home.
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