The Black Frost: Environment,Community,and Survival

The first thing one notices about the Argentine writer and director Maximiliano Schonfeld’s latest film, La helada negra (The Black Frost), is that it is set not in the country’s capital, Buenos Aires, but in the rural Northeastern province of Entre Rios. The film opens in an evocative and minimalist manner, mirroring the province’s landscape and setting the mood for the environmental fairy tale that follows. A small, nebulous white circle stretches across a dark screen, revealing a mysterious pattern that could be anything from an aerial map of a dry desert landscape to a blood cell on a laboratory slide to a magnified ice crystal. Emerging from this hazy circle is a young woman, Alejandra (played by rising star Ailín Salas), whose freshness and beauty contrast with the desiccated vines of the barren field in which she sits. She seems to have appeared miraculously out of nowhere when she is discovered by the dog of her young counterpart, Lucas (played by Lucas Schell). The film offers no explanation for Alejandra’s entrance into Lucas’s orbit, but once she is there the two characters remain dialectically intertwined as they navigate the town’s social and environmental problems. Alejandra’s subtle nomadic sophistication contrasts with Lucas’s provincial naivety. We learn that she is a widow who travels with a community of seasonal workers who live in tents on the outskirts of town, whereas Lucas has never left his family’s farm and seems to be sexually inexperienced. Alejandra’s physical appearance (she is olive-skinned with brown eyes and dark curly hair) contrasts with Lucas’s blond Germanic features, which can be read as a conspicuous marker of the dangers of insularity. Many of the inhabitants of his small town, who are also blond with fair skin and blue eyes, seem to be plagued by agricultural infertility or burdened with diseased farm animals.

On Lucas’s family’s farm, Alejandra is treated as an object of wonder. Local women are largely absent from the first half of the film. They seem to have abandoned the town or died, adding to the barrenness of the village. We learn that the clothing offered to Alejandra once belonged to one of the men’s wives. Alejandra wastes no time in familiarizing herself with the dire situation at Lucas’s farm and getting the family members involved in what appears to be a mystical healing ritual. She is a welcomed guest but is also expected to do “women’s work.” In addition to healing the crops, she cooks for the men and tolerates their desirous gazes. When invited to play truco (a card game) by one of the elders, she is told that in the game she is expected to lie. The dialogue in this scene provides an interesting window onto Alejandra’s temporary role in this unique community. We never know whether she is telling the truth or lying, whether her magic is real or fake, whether the elders think she can really heal the community miraculously or simply inspire change and hope.

Argentine audiences will recognize the film’s location, Entre Rios (the director’s home province), as a farming region made up of descendants of German immigrants. Environmentalists and viewers even minimally familiar with some of the dangers traditional farming methods face with the advent of neoliberal monocrop economies will pick up on the macroscopic implications of this small village’s struggle for survival. The villagers do not understand why their vines are drying up, why their tomatoes are black on the inside instead of red, why their cattle are dying. Alejandra represents a last-ditch effort to thwart the black frost that threatens to destroy their way of life. Suddenly, as if rising like a phoenix from the smoke of Alejandra’s ritual, Lucas’s family’s farm begins to produce new growth, and news of Alejandra’s talents as a healer spreads. People line up to visit her at a makeshift shrine among the hay bales in the family’s barn. She is worshipped as a mystic, and fertility seems to be returning to the land. Feminists might take issue with the film’s use of a tired stereotype that has, throughout history, feminized land and made clichéd associations between women’s bodies, fertility, and landscapes (to be owned, ploughed, painted, subdivided, and generally dominated), but the film’s resolution or lack thereof subverts this stereotype.

La helada negra’s fairy-tale qualities are emboldened by Soledad Rodriguez’s lush, pastoral photography and Nahuel Palenque’s eerily transcendent soundtrack, a combination that perfectly captures the meandering and steady pace of life on a farm. In a particularly memorable montage sequence, we see a close-up of Alejandra’s face and the shadows of local visitors as they line up to see her. She gazes directly into the camera, and her face dissolves into a fibrous translucent screen as she closes her eyes. The final oblique close-up of her face at the end of the sequence calls to mind the Shroud of Turin.

In spite of her growing fame, Alejandra remains part of a rural underclass, a subaltern. She does not seem to care about fitting in with the locals and shows no desire to put down roots. Her final act of healing has to do with the community at large. Alejandra visits a local folkloric festival with Lucas in which the young people of the town dress in traditional costumes and dance. Now in the role of matchmaker (perhaps an offshoot of her primary function as fertility goddess), she looks on as Lucas’s desire for her is transferred to a local girl from a neighboring farm. When she leaves, Alejandra takes none of the gifts of clothing offered by her temporary family. She simply changes back into her own clothes and walks away, as mysteriously as she arrived. Her departure reveals the temporary and unstable nature of a community’s dependence upon miracles for survival.

Schonfeld’s 2012 film Germania, also set in Entre Rios, shares some of the themes of La helada negra and even employs some of the same key nonprofessional actors. In a neorealist sense, both films present small yet provocative dramas about everyday people. Germania even makes use of German dialect the way some Italian neorealist films made use of regional dialects found throughout Italy. There are no miracle workers in Germania. When a plague hits the protagonists’ poultry farm, they are forced to sell off and leave their community for work elsewhere. Germania focuses more on the loss of culture than La helada negra, but the two films can be understood as two sides of the same coin.