“Copper‘s most incisive observations are sculpted into the negative space of the viewer’s experience.”

Copper is both the title of Nicolás Pereda’s latest feature and the sustenance of the community it portrays. In a remote town, somewhere in Mexico, life revolves around a copper mine that directly or indirectly employs every one of its inhabitants. It’s the heart of the local economy, but it’s also a slow-moving poison. Lázaro – played by Lázaro G. Rodriguez, a Pereda regular – certainly feels its effects. He’ll tell anyone who will listen about his difficulty breathing and his need for repose and medical aid. Above all, he wants an oxygen tank. That stubborn conclusion condemns the miner to a Sisyphean pursuit that plays like Kafka in a minor key until one sleazy transaction finally gets him his prize.

Nobody believes Lázaro, whether they be doctors or bosses, his mother or his aunt. Their skepticism is duly noted through undemonstrative performances whose airs of boredom only add insult to injury. Not that our forlorn protagonist is any more given to expressiveness than those who surround him. Tackling the world with a perpetual look of resignation, his demeanor suggests some bone-deep exhaustion that’s difficult to shake off. Despondency reigns supreme, so it should be no surprise that in the film’s very first movement Lázaro barely reacts to a dead body by the side of the road. He mentions it to the folks at home, but keeps mum about it to everyone else. The camera, too, seems to lack curiosity about the occurrence, as if trapped in pre-established designs that didn’t account for the macabre discovery. It elides the scene’s central subject, keeping it off-screen to such an extent that it’s impossible to understand what prompted Lázaro to stop his bike before we hear the ordeal described in dialogue. This soberness in form is common to Pereda’s oeuvre, always teetering on the edge of relative minimalism. Yet, its deployment here feels particularly pointed. Instead of serenity, the staging evokes constraints, perhaps an oppressive force bearing down on the very morphology of the moving image and those depicted within.

Hopefully, this doesn’t infer a suffocating experience devoid of Pereda’s past playfulness. When directly compared to his Lázaro at Night from last year, disaffected drama takes precedence over the theatrical fancies of yore in Copper. The tone is downright sepulchral in parts. As for the magical realism of his previous film, it is even more absent, only materializing in the miner’s impossible quirk – his eyes turn green when he lies. But of course even the direst narrative circumstances can inspire an unexpected variation, a relieving break, a necessary disruption. Like when Lázaro and his aunt play-act a date he has arranged between her and a lecherous doctor. In that moment an odd dynamic emerges where the performances get a degree or two livelier, looser, closer to what one might describe as recognizable human behavior. It’s as if pretending to be someone else unlocked and revealed what lies beneath the character’s placid countenance. After working with the same actors so many times over the years, the director has found a fragile alchemy with his cast. Without wanting to emphasize the point in excess, it’s what allows for reconfigurations such as these, which never seem to contradict what came before or will come after, despite manifesting in divergence from them.

Much of Pereda’s cinema operates on this wavelength, where apparent simplicity belies how complex his work truly is. Modest they may sound, but his scripts are intricate, experimenting with somnambulistic moods that skirt the oneiric. Copper weaponizes this aspect to imply a town’s collective affliction and the systemic causes at the root of it. All this without the need to follow the structure of more conventional tales about crime, cover-up, and conspiracy. That these observations come through and manage to form a cogent political stance that doesn’t so much announce itself as it burrows into the audience’s consciousness is testament to the filmmaker’s slyness. Similarly, the images Pereda conceives with DP Miguel Tovar can strike one as rather unambitious at first glance. However, as these shots linger between unhurried cuts, both their beauty and precision become evident. Baroque shadows emerge pristine against pastoral tableaux painted in the palette of a sickly dusk; daylight bursts harsh and bright into interiors but softens, smoke-like, outside. Compositions are often defined by what they omit, directing attention to the suggestive possibility of absence. As in the opening and the unseen corpse, Copper‘s most incisive observations are sculpted into the negative space of the viewer’s experience.