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Extraordinarily Unintended Results

Orlando Weekly | March 27, 2007

Even the best-intended projects, when left unsupervised, can yield extraordinarily unintended results. One would expect that the Catholic missionaries who once blanketed Latin America with their belief system returned to their European homes content that their converts would carry on the canonical traditions that define the Church. That isn't the case in the isolated Peruvian village that serves as the backdrop for Madeinusa. In this village, rich in the prevalence and reverence of images of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, it seems that a few details got lost in translation. Madeinusa takes place over an Easter weekend, when the village acknowledges the temporary "death of God" in that brief span of time between Christ's execution on the afternoon of Good Friday and his resurrection Sunday morning. A dead God is an unseeing, unknowing God, so for these people, in those 39 hours, the concept of sin is set aside, because who's going to know? Debauchery in all forms and levels of excess takes place, observed in disbelief by a handsome traveler from Lima who can comprehend neither the madness nor the willful participation of the innocent and beautiful Madeinusa (pronounced mahd-en-oosa). Madeinusa's likeness to the Virgin and her relationship with the mayor make for the story’s central and unsettling conflict, but the film's arched-eyebrow study of rural Catholic insanity is what makes it compelling.

Tags: Claudia Llosa, Madeinusa

Orlando Weekly

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