A Matter of Honour

A film more about humour than honour. Set in a small town in the Colombian Andes, it concerns a feud between the local schoolteacher and the butcher - each of whom has a healthy and affectionate regard for the other, but is urged on by the differing factions determined not to spoil the chance of a fight. All the local characters and bureaucracies have their part to play: the mayor and the military, the priest and the police. They help to raise the temperature for the final duel, which is naturally assumed to settle every personal difference and show that might is right. But the scores the protagonists have to settle are those accumulated by long friendship and common politics, and these are the virtues that finally triumph. A touchingly funny film in the mould of post-war Italian cinema, pressing that most sensitive of Latin nerves, machismo.