TORONTO, Canada—Two horseback riders emerge over a hill on the vast plains, five pursuers right at their heels. Gunshots ring out, and one man topples off his steed. The second is no more fortunate; lassoed and pulled off his stallion, he’s dragged behind his attacker for what seems like an eternity.
The camera trails behind him, capturing this in a widescreen panorama that’s all the more horrifying for being so strikingly composed. In voiceover, a narrator speaks about the need to “break up the Earth” in order to create “a better world” where everyone has the right to happiness and dignity—a destiny that, it’s clear, is not reserved for these unfortunate individuals.
The identities of these murdered men is never revealed by Without Blood, and that’s in keeping with its wholesale haziness. An adaptation of Alessandro Baricco’s novel of the same name by writer/director Angelina Jolie, this period piece—premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival—is dogged in its lack of specificity.
While that’s intended to render it a timeless parable about the lasting impact of violence on both victims and victimizers, the wounded and the unscathed, it results in initial confusion and, afterwards, frustrating thinness. By choosing to reside in abstraction, it imparts only generic and empty truths.
Following its initial scene, Without Blood segues to an older gentleman named Manuel (Alfredo Herrera) relaxing on his porch, his elbows on the railing and his mind lost in thought. Jolie doesn’t indicate what year it is or which country we’re in, but it appears to be Mexico in the middle of the 20th-century.
His reverie is interrupted by the distant sound of a car, and he responds to it by racing inside and instructing his son (Alessandro D’Antuono) to retrieve his guns. The boy dutifully carries out that task as Manuel hides his stoic daughter Nina (Karolay Fernandez) under the floorboards of the house. Dire trouble, it’s apparent, has arrived, and it comes in the form of three visitors led by Salinas (Juan Minujín), a man in a white linen suit whose upper lip boasts a formidable mustache and whose hand is decorated with a shiny gold ring.
A shootout ensues, and concludes when the youngest of the three assailants, 17-year-old Tito (Ariel Pérez Lima), gets the jump on the father, who turns out to be a doctor. Shot in the shoulder, he’s confronted by Salinas, who castigates him for the crimes he committed during a recent war. In particular, Salinas is enraged about the doctor’s murderous treatment of his patients at the local hospital, one of whom was Salinas’ beloved brother (Andrés Delgado).
Salma Hayek
Courtesy of TIFFAs he relays how he found his sibling and, due to his condition, was forced to end his life, the doctor denies any wrongdoing and argues that the war is now over. Salinas, however, doesn’t agree; for him, the conflict rages on. The doctor doesn’t make it out of this confrontation, nor does his son. Though she’s discovered in her shelter, the girl is spared, and survives despite the killers subsequently setting her home ablaze.
Decades later, the well-dressed adult Nina (Salma Hayek Pinault) arrives at a newsstand and asks to buy a lottery ticket from Tito (Demián Bichir). The man obliges, at which point Nina asks him to join her for a drink. He demurs, and she repeats the question twice more, each time with a sterner look that indicates that she won’t take no for an answer. They sit down at a swanky restaurant and begin to talk, and it’s not long before Tito confesses that he knows who she is, since he was the teen gunman who let her live during the massacre of her loved ones.
“Some stories are meant to have a moral. That’s why they exist. To say something profound,” muses Nina, and her own tale is a shocking litany of miseries. In the aftermath of her father and brother’s demise, Nina was taken in by a nun who handed her over to a pharmacist (Pedro Hernández) who would tell her scary stories while she lay on his lap, and the sight of his hand sliding down along her body suggests that his behavior with her was anything but appropriate.
The pharmacist then lost Nina in a game of cards to the Count (Luis Alberti), who married her at 14, leading to more pedophilic abuse. She gave her spouse three children, from whom she was later separated when, after the Count passed away, she was deemed insane and sent to an asylum.
Without Blood checks a lot of boxes when it comes to sexist injustice, yet the vagueness of the film’s every element renders it paper-thin. Nina doesn’t recount her entire ordeal; she allows Tito to fill in the blanks from his perspective. What he divulges is that he spent many years trying to find and kill Nina out of fear that she remembered his face and might turn him in (or worse).
Once he heard that his compatriots had died under mysterious circumstances, he knew her reappearance was inevitable. What he probably didn’t realize, however, is that their conversation would be so torturously drawn out, with the duo constantly pausing their accounts to stare at each other in oh-so-momentous silence.
Hayek Pinault’s pleasant demeanor is belied by her wicked eyes, but her rapport with Bichir doesn’t come close to approaching the dynamism of the similar, superior Death and the Maiden. In fact, their back-and-forth is frequently inert, suggesting that there isn’t enough material to pad out even a 91-minute feature. Face-to-face with the woman he harmed, Bichir’s Tito mostly just looks forlorn, and the director’s flashbacks are clunkily interwoven into the action proper. For all the echoes she creates between the present and the past, Jolie only manages to convey that formative traumas linger long after any superficial scars have healed.
Devoid of historical context and detail, Without Blood fails to reckon with the atrocities of yesterday or today; its protagonists and tragedies are merely intellectual concepts, divorced from everything that might give them meaning. Thus, its unresolved conclusion comes across less like a question to ponder after the house lights have come on, and more akin to another of the film’s affected gestures.
