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Men Death Has No Master, Asia Argento stars as a disturbing guest Venezuela. Her character, Caro, is on a difficult journey to reclaim the wealth from her caretakers who are still living there. This is the installation of a psychological surrealist, where the Venezuelan-Canadian filmmaker Jorge Thielen Armand reveals his history along with the deep and “eternal” conflicts that still affect the world today.
“This film has multiple meanings,” says Armand, before the film’s debut in the directors’ fortnight at Cannes. “Recent events only add to that crowd.”
Armand questions the US intervention in Venezuela, which began with Trump sending warships to the region last August, ostensibly to combat drug trafficking, as production began on Death Has No Master.
In January, the US arrested Venezuela’s ruling president, Nicolás Maduro, whose government has been accused of political corruption and human rights abuses, while seizing the country and its oil industry, which many believe is routine.
“It’s very worrying, what’s going on,” says Armand, in a video with Argento. “I think that the video can speak to the darkness that the Venezuelan people feel, and the dishonesty of the domestic and foreign systems.”
With Death Has No Master, Armand returns to the same territory he explored nearly ten years ago, in his own style. Being Alonea picture of the struggle and desperation in Venezuela during the country’s economic crisis. Armand filmed the original film, which blurs the line between documentary and fiction, in the dilapidated house that his family owned. One of the residents, José, lived there with his wife, his daughter and his grandmother, who at one time worked to take care of Armand’s family before he left the house. The film follows José’s struggles when the estate where his family lives is to be torn down and sold.
Armand presents his ideas to the land owners in Death Has No Master, which is inspired by recurring dreams. In it, Armand wanders through a dark, abandoned house, where people party and take drugs, while searching for something uncertain; either an exit or an ambush. Armand said: “When I wake up, I think about my home and everything I left behind. “That’s why this film is so difficult to go back, and find that the people and things you left behind don’t exist; as if what you have left is rotting from within.”
From its first frames, Death Has No Master is suspended in a strange, abstract, dream-like manner. Time feels like falling. The colonial past takes over the present. Cocoa beans are an ominous symbol of wealth and historical violence such as oil rigs running in the distance.
That’s where Argento’s Caro comes in, in a sort of somnambulist way alone. He is an Italian from Venezuela, leaving the foreign country for undisclosed reasons, returning to the farm he inherited from his father. Caro walks with difficulty in the old places, if scared because the environment is full of human pain and history, but motivated by a legitimate idea of law. In turn, he stares and drools over Sonia (Dogreika Tovar), the Afro-Venezuelan caretaker currently taking over her place with her son.
“I went crazy,” Argento says of his immersion in nature, which included secluding himself from the scene he shot. “And I had a lot of fear; something big; something unspeakable that I thought my character felt when I came back. I have no way to explain the wisdom of it, to say it. A lot of it had to do with my unconscious, and my history, in a way that matched Caro’s, my character.”
Argento explains that Caro’s late father, the cruel man she still remembers, “has parts” of her famous parents. She is the daughter of Italian horror actor Dario Argento and actress and screenwriter Daria Nicolodi, the two behind the gialo classic Suspiria. Argento does not describe the ways in which Caro’s father acts, but he describes the influence of Armand’s film, and the ways in which he is dealing with the difficult inheritance he received, because his thoughts are in line with his own. “It has to do with my own dreams, with my own childhood, with the way I was raised, with my own blood, with my heritage.”
It is a reference to Argento that the explosion of fear and violence in Death Without a Master feels as if it is inspired by the films of his ancestors, as if they are also part of the heritage. “I know,” he admits, grinning. “I didn’t realize that until I saw the movie. It’s like some Italian thriller from the ’70s, with the zoom and the way they shoot.”
Argento talks about finding emotional relationships as if they were solutions to how difficult it was for him to play this character, whose “infantile ego” and “sense of ownership” he says he found “disrupting life”.
That’s the problem Armand created for himself with Death Has No Master. He said: “I wanted to make something where no one is abused, for example,” he says.
“There is a legal, moral and historical conflict. We can say that this conflict is represented by Caro being legitimate, Sonia with good morals and Johnny, who is the right-hand man of Caro’s father, (has) a legitimate history.
“But these are the thoughts we have had as a group. Finally, land is not owned, it is controlled by the use of force.
