La Pantera Negra

The first film I saw at the Edinburgh International Film Festival was La Pantera Negra, a 1950s Mexican film noir style picture. And out of all the films I saw at the festival, I think this is definitely the one that has been discussed the most with the four other people who watched it with me.

The film begins in a very interesting style. It initially has a dream-like sequence of the woman and two dogs in the picture above which turns out to be symbolic later on. The story then turns to the central protagonist, an alcoholic Mexican detective, apparently the best in the country. He receives a phone call from a man claiming to be God and is told if he accepts the case and goes on the hunt for La Pantera Negra, or The Black Panther, he will receive a large sum of money every day for the rest of his life. So far, I was really enjoying this film. It had some excellent cinematography and some of the shots were really great. The film noir style also seemed to suit it well and it reminded me of the style of Double Indemnity in a way. The story was appealing to me as well. A foreign detective case, mysterious phone calls and elusive names such as Black Panther, it seemed right up my street to be honest. And I was enjoying the film a lot, until this little beauty came along:

Probably in an instant a large number of people had been sucked out of the film. The appearance of a large plastic looking space ship in La Pantera Negra seemed to change the genre instantly from mystery film noir to low budget sci-fi. The story then proceeded down this line with the introduction of a lesbian martian. So as the plot became increasingly wacky and seemingly random, it became clear that the events were some kind of dream. I began to think it was the alcohol that was bringing these crazy events to the protagonist and that this was becoming the key message of the film.

But towards the end I started to enjoy it again more. All the different characters and events were starting to make slightly more sense and the symbolism became clearer. Themes of death and God and afterlife were very prominent towards the end and the imagery used throughout the film was gradually being explained. Kind of. And then the film ended and left us all very, very confused. I don't think there's one person who could come out after seeing La Pantera Negra for the first time and say they understood every single aspect of the symbolism. It was a very confusing film but there was something about it that I did enjoy and I had a strange desire to watch it again to see what I would take from it a second time round. It certainly had us all talking a lot about our own different interpretations of the symbolism and metaphors. Overall, I can't help feeling I enjoyed La Pantera Negra although I would like to have a word with the writer to find out what half the stuff actually means because it left us very confused people and there's only a certain amount of unexplained symbolism that films can get away with before they simply lose the audience completely.