New Movies: Demographic Disaster

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In Europe and the U.S., Latin America and the Middle East, dirt-poor farmers and peasants whose forebears never dreamed of leaving the land are trekking to cities by the millions. Instead of finding the promised good life and good pay, most of them end up in a demoralized, debt-ridden limbo of menial jobs and ghetto housing. This contemporary demographic disaster is the subject of Voyage of Silence, a somber documentation of a Portuguese peasant's emigration to France. Produced by Philippe de Broca—a new wave filmmaker best known for frothy fantasy (That Man from Rio, The Five-Day Lover)—the movie is a small masterpiece of compassionate observation and emotional restraint.

Antonio (Marc Pico) is a young carpenter who decides to leave his village for Paris, where his craft, he hears, is in great demand. His friend Carlos had made the trip before him and had promised to find him a job. Since immigration regulations are troublesome, Antonio makes contact with an under ground network that, for a fee, smuggles men into Spain and across the French border.

Lugging their cord-bound cardboard suitcases, the Portuguese workmen trudge across fields toward the unknown. They make up little knots of young and old, converging to form a stream of humanity, silent with uncertainty. The trip turns out to be a nightmare of danger and betrayal, hunger and exploitation. When Antonio reaches Paris at last, Carlos is nowhere to be found. Fellow Portuguese are friendly, but there are no jobs in construction work, let alone carpentry. A pretty nurse he meets tries to be helpful, but her world is too different from that of a poor, illegal immigrant with no working papers and little French. When Carlos finally appears, he can offer Antonio nothing better than a day laborer's job and a filthy bunk in a mud-soaked shantytown.

Director Christian de Chalonge tells Antonio's story in straightforward documentary style, avoiding dramatic climaxes and resisting all the opportunities for easy sentimentality. The casting is superbly unactorish. Churlish hotel clerks, irritated factory officials and the nurse's sleek young friends making banal conversation about the beauties of Portugal—all look their roles and read their lines without a hint of theatrical emphasis or timing. The Portuguese peasants are clearly not actors at all. but no professional performer could hope to match the direct simplicity of their response to the tragedy that surrounds them. Best of all is Marc Pico, a young French documentary-film director making his debut as an actor. I He does not so much play Antonio as become him, reflecting with puzzlement and pain the bitter reality of a man who sees himself turning slowly into an imprisoned object.