The Voyage

Solanas's cinematic trip - ramble, rather - from tip to toe of South America comes as a disappointment after the melancholic pleasures of Sur. This is a voyage round my fatherland: part magic-realist travelogue, part politico-satirical parable. It follows the journey taken by 17-year-old Martin - by bicycle! - from his snow-frozen school in Tierra del Fuego in search of his 'real' father, a cartoonist turned anthropologist believed to be in the Amazon. On his way north - visiting his grandmother in a drowned valley outside Buenos Aires, then on through the Andes to Nicaragua, the gold mines of Peru and Mexico - he meets various 'characters' from his father's work, a mysterious girl, a blind Jamaican, a drummer. Where Sur was suffused with fragile optimism, reflecting the hope that came with the return of democracy, The Voyage presents a more diffuse, enervated vision, expressive of an anomie of political failure and neglect. As a sad state-of-the-nations address to the younger generation it has pertinence, but its length and aimlessness often prove tedious.