Three Burials - The three burials of Melquiades Estrada

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Movie
German title Three Burials - The three burials of Melquiades Estrada
Original title The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Country of production USA , France
original language English , Spanish
Publishing year 2005
length 117 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Tommy Lee Jones
script Guillermo Arriaga
production Luc Besson ,
Michael Fitzgerald ,
Tommy Lee Jones,
Pierre-Ange Le Pogam
music Marco Beltrami
camera Chris Menges
cut Roberto Silvi
occupation

Three Burials - The three burials of Melquiades Estrada (Original title: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada ) is a film drama from the year 2005 , which is assigned to the genre of the neo-western . Directed by Tommy Lee Jones , who also played the lead role.

action

The first funeral of Melquiades Estrada

The over-ambitious Mike Norton, who has been transferred from Cincinnati , takes his job as a border patrol officer with the US Border Patrol very seriously. It doesn't matter to him how his wife Lou Ann Norton feels in the boring, new environment of Texas on the border between the United States and Mexico . Even during intercourse, he shows no particular passion or feelings for his partner. There is order and discipline.

Melquiades Estrada, an illegal immigrant from Mexico , has built a humble life as a ranch worker in Texas. One day, when his small herd of goats is threatened by coyotes , he shoots them. Norton, who is spending his time up in the mountains with an issue of the men's magazine Hustler , suspects an attack on himself and shoots back from a great distance. He kills Estrada with a bullet. He quickly becomes aware of the actual situation and leaves Estrada in the desert without telling anyone about it.

The second burial of Melquiades Estrada

The local sheriff Belmont cares little about solving the crime, because for him the victim was just another illegal immigrant. Therefore, he did not bother looking for the family members. The corpse eaten by coyotes is buried in a poor grave.

Belmont ignores indications that Estrada was killed by the US Border Patrol. Meanwhile, Norton goes about his work relatively carefree. But he didn't expect Pete, the monosyllabic senior foreman and Estrada's best friend, who finds out Norton was the killer. Pete kidnaps Norton and forces him to exhume Estrada's body from the poor grave .

The trip

It is not just about his promise to bury his friend in his home village Jiménez in Mexico in the event of an accident in the USA, but also about respect for the Mexican immigrants, and more about grief than anger. Pete and Norton head south with two horses and two mules in order to be able to bury Estrada a third time in his homeland - not without liming him first.

Sheriff Belmont knows that Pete has kidnapped Norton, and he goes in pursuit. The relationship between Belmont and Pete, who are both having an affair with the married waitress Rachel, is strained. During the pursuit, Sheriff Belmont Pete briefly gets into his crosshairs, but he lets the opportunity slip by.

On the way, Pete and Norton meet an old, blind American who has hardly anything to eat and only listens to Mexican radio, although he doesn't understand Spanish. Since there is no one left to look after him, he no longer wants to live. But in order not to offend God, he cannot commit suicide. So he asks Pete to shoot him, but he doesn't have the heart and leaves the old man alone again. Before leaving, he gives the mummifying corpse antifreeze.

Norton can no longer endure the grueling journey physically and mentally, tries to escape and is shortly afterwards bitten by a rattlesnake . He is discovered by a group of illegal immigrants, and Pete soon joins them again. In order to be able to continue his journey with Norton, he agrees with the guide of the Mexicans to take them across the river to Mexico in exchange for Norton's horse and to have the snakebite treated by a naturopath. Norton has to share his place on the mule with the corpse.

The healer is a woman who had beaten up Norton a few days earlier while escaping to Texas. Pete asks her to save Norton's life anyway. She succeeds in doing this, but later she scalds him with hot coffee and breaks his nose and explains that they would be even again.

When Norton is feeling better, Pete drags him on and they reach a small town that is said to be near Jiménez. Nobody in town has ever heard of Jiménez or recognizes Estrada in the photo they brought with them. The woman in the photo is recognized, but is said to have a completely different name. When she is visited, she says that she has never heard of Melquiades Estrada and that she has lived in town with her husband and children for years.

The third funeral of Melquiades Estrada

Pete is still looking for Jiménez, the place “full of beauty”, as Estrada described it. Eventually they find a derelict house in the middle of nowhere that Pete thinks must be Jiménez. The description of Estrada apparently sprang from his dreams. The two repair the house and bury Melquiades Estrada for the third and final time.

Pete asks Norton to ask forgiveness for the killing in front of the photo of Estrada's alleged family. At first he refuses and says he cannot do it - but then it breaks out of him and he deeply regrets what happened. Pete then leaves Norton a horse and rides off alone.

background

  • The film was inspired by the wrongful shooting of 18-year-old Texan Esequiel Hernandez Jr., who was herding goats near the border and was shot dead on May 20, 1997 by a US Marine soldier on patrol for drug smugglers. There was never any charge or conviction.
  • Instead of a chronological narrative, the plot of the film is characterized by three time levels, changes of perspective and narrative leaps.
  • Tommy Lee Jones grew up in Texas and owned a cattle ranch in the Davis Mountains for a long time.
  • The shooting took place from late September 2004 to early December 2004 on 43 days of shooting in Texas, mostly near the town of Van Horn , the surrounding Davis Mountains and in Big Bend National Park .
  • Production costs were estimated at around $ 15 million. The film grossed around 9 million US dollars in cinemas around the world, including around 5 million US dollars in the USA and around 60,000 US dollars in Germany.
  • It premiered on May 20, 2005 in the competition at the Cannes International Film Festival , and was released in France on November 23, 2005. The US release on December 14, 2005 was initially limited to New York City , which was released in theaters nationwide on February 3, 2006. The theatrical release in Germany was on November 8, 2007, as the film had initially not found a distributor. The German DVD release was a month later on December 6, 2007.
  • 1955 was in the comedy The Trouble with Harry of Alfred Hitchcock a corpse several times once excavated and again. The 1974 film Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia by Sam Peckinpah , in which the prompt in the title is taken literally and a corpse is dug up to take the head away, shows an extremely dark variant of this theme .

Reviews

  • Der Tagesspiegel , April 5, 2007:
    “Three Burials”, this mosaic that seems to have fallen out of time, initially looks like the sparsely sketched social portrait of a border town. But then the southern Texas no man's land - in the western genre always a terrain of passage and confusion - takes hold of the characters, literally absorbs them and gives them a purpose. This is grandiose and staged with severe melancholy. Whereby the parable that is inherent in the increasingly absurd path of purification of the main characters takes the grim sharpness of the film. Nevertheless: It's strange that the film, which was awarded an actor's prize for Tommy Lee Jones and an honor for the screenplay in Cannes in 2005, has not found a distributor anywhere in Germany.
  • Die Tageszeitung , April 4, 2007:
    Forgiveness and retribution are the two big themes that Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut calmly circles around like a vulture's prey. In “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” the viewer is taken deep into Sam Peckinpah Country. A film camera has not captured the area around the Rio Grande with such visual clarity for a long time. The Cinemascope format was developed for these images: Dusty, rugged and inhospitable lofty, the rocky desert extends to the limits of the field of vision. Only sometimes do the faults in the landscape allow small miracles of nature, such as the sunflower meadow through which a fugitive is driven.
  • DER SPIEGEL , May 20, 2005:
    “Three Burials” is a real festival discovery that is full of terrific comic scenes and bizarre characters. The acting country singer Dwight Yoakam as the neurotic police chief, who is scared of gunfire and can't get a boner from the buxom waitress, is an unforgettable original. The only downer: Tommy Lee Jones was refused entry to the Caméra d'Or debut competition because "Three Burials" is his first feature film, but he has previously directed a TV production. Small business à la Cannes.
  • Philadelphia Weekly, February 8th, 2006:
    […] perhaps the cutest film about a trip with a rotting corpse I've seen so far. [...] every life should be treated with dignity and respect, even if you first have to get it out of the ground in order to do that. 

Awards

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release for Three Burials - The three burials of Melquiades Estrada . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , October 2007 (PDF; test number: 111 715 K).
  2. ↑ Film explores Texas teen's killing by Marines on border on chron.com (English; accessed Oct. 4, 2012)
  3. ↑ box office results
  4. ↑ Start dates on imdb.de
  5. ↑ You only die three times, Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut Der Tagesspiegel for the film ( Memento of the original from December 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tagesspiegel.de
  6. ↑ The many days of the riding corpse taz article on the film
  7. ↑ Croisette Cowboys in Crisis DER SPIEGEL on the film
  8. ↑ Sean Burns: Tommy Boy. In: Philadelphia Weekly. February 8, 2006, archived from the original on October 23, 2006 ; accessed on April 13, 2008 (English): “[…] probably the sweetest movie I've ever seen about taking a road trip with a rotting corpse. [...] every person's life should be treated with honor and respect, even if you've got to dig 'em out of the ground to do so. "

Web links