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The Pearl Button: Patricio Guzman lite

THE PEARL BUTTON (Patricio Guzmán). Subtitled. 82 minutes. Opens Friday (April 8).  See listing. Rating: NNN


The revered Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán tries something a little more artful in The Pearl Button. 

Examining the history of the Kaweskar, indigenous people who thrived in Patagonia before European colonization, Guzmán adopts an -expressionistic approach, lingering on images of unspoiled nature (think Terrence Malick) to suggest a more innocent world.

This is not entirely unexpected: his 2010 doc Nostalgia For The Light applied a poetic aesthetic to its images of women searching for the -remains of disappeared loved ones in the desert while astronomers at a nearby observatory search the stars. 

But the mixture of materials in The Pearl Button is less deft the juxtaposition of the ethnic cleansing of the Kaweskar and Chile’s subsequent convulsions under Pinochet doesn’t line up as well as Guzmán would like, and the film has at least two ethereal montage sequences too many, as though the filmmaker were struggling to pad this one to feature length.

It’s not a failure by any means, but given the power and elegance with which Guzmán usually makes his points, it does seem rather slight.

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