In 1972, a
Uruguayan rugby team flying to a match in Chile crashed in the Andes, and spent
over two grueling months surrounded by snow and their dying comrades. In order
to survive the ordeal, they resorted to cannibalism. This is a well-known
story, told in multiple feature films, books, and "Where are they now?"
human-interest news items. It's no exaggeration to say that Gonzalo Arijon's Stranded:
I Have Come From A Plane That Crashed On The Mountains is the definitive version.
Arijon
structures his film as a fairly typical "look back" documentary, with talking
head interviews, archival footage, and surprisingly well-done re-enactments.
Arijon doesn't use the re-enactments exploitatively, to create a sense of
creeping dread or revulsion; he uses them to ground the viewer in the
desolation. By the end of the film, the audience knows the layout of that plane
wreckage and the ground around it as well as the survivors did, and when two
members of the party hike away from the crash site in search of rescue, we
understand the scope of their journey.
Stranded drags a bit in the middle—as
the actual experience did for those rugby players, no doubt—but that's
mainly because Arijon has so many good quotes that he uses more than he needs.
Arijon's interviews are well-shot, framing the survivors against clear blue
skies, and his re-enactments never detract from those survivors' articulate,
poetic reminiscences. The film doesn't dwell on the cannibalism angle, but it
doesn't shortchange it either. The survivors—many of them medical
students—discuss the decision to eat their comrades biologically, in
terms of how the procedure worked, and philosophically, in terms of the
finality of death. In that context, Arijon's choice to film the survivors
returning to the Andes with their children pays huge dividends, leading to an
ending that puts the real meaning of their ordeal in moving terms. Stranded pays the proper respect to those who
didn't make it, by focusing on the generations spawned by those who did.