reflexions on Claudia Llosa, La Teta Asustada and Madeinusa

Most of the criticism against La Teta Asustada (in Peru and by Peruvians) yields from Llosa's previous film Madeinusa. They perceive Llosa's portrayal of Andean life as racist and malicious, and condemn Llosa for depicting Andeans as savages and immoral beings. These critics are blinded by their own rethoric and prejudice and fail to see that Llosa is perhaps the only director who has taken the time to look at Andeans as something other than "pan flute bands" or stylized "folk dancers" or any other type of mocked cultural exports that must restrain themselves to concur with the mandated parameters of others. What both Llosa and Magaly Solier achieve is a more complete and complex portrait of Andean people and most specifically Andean women. They see Andean women as something more than brown women wearing braids (as was disappointingly the case with another Peruvian film set in the Andes: Paloma de Papel- where a Limena actress parades around the Andes with badly attached "braids" and a Lima accent)...Essentially I find the call for so called "political correctness"- to be an unwillingness to accept what was bound to happen in a country like Peru- where el Cono Norte and most importantly la Sierra are finally taking the places they deserve in society. Fortunately it seems that we are experiencing the beginning of the end of this paternalistic and hypocritical will to let things stay as they were for more than 500 years... Therefore what we have seen with Madeinusa and now again with La Teta Asustada is that this monumental change in Peru, as expected, is generating substantial discomfort...


"The debates around this new, non-national cinema have been most intense in the case of Madeinusa, a film praised outside the country but almost universally disdained by the intellectual elite within it. I argue, however, that there is no is no point lamenting the failure of Peruvianness, cinematic or otherwise. Such laments have defined the elite variant of (not) Peruvianness ever since the nineteenth century at least, but melancholy declarations of exasperation with Peru's multiple failures are no more than an inverted form of the snobbery, racism, and will to power of those who claim to condemn these same traits in others. Peru's newly exuberant subaltern cinema offers a way out, a line of flight, from such morose reflections on national identity on the part of a would-be hegemonic power whose project is now exhausted. " Jon Beasley-Murray