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Synopsis

Caídos del Cielo (1990) tells three loosely connected stories about Lima residents trying to achieve their dreams. From a landowning couple desperate to get a mausoleum, a blind woman doing whatever she can to flee poverty, and a radio presenter trying to save a young woman, director Francisco Lombardi shows us how their economic and societal woes make everything a struggle.

The 1980s in Latin America is a decade that is best left forgotten. Thanks to hefty borrowing from US commercial banks in the 1970s, most Latin American countries in the 1980s woke up to a harsh reality. Though US and other foreign banks had encouraged this borrowing, Latin America soon found that they could not pay their foreign debts and would have to spend the rest of the decade as indentured servants to the IMF rather than continue any economic growth earned in the early half of the 20th century. Peru, perhaps, was hit the hardest by this decade. By the end of the 1970s, demand for Peru’s main exports, copper and silver, began to decline. By the early 1980s, the price of copper and silver had reached a 40-year low. To add to this, El Niño devastated the Peruvian landscape and economy leading to economic stagflation and deep unrest, with political guerrilla groups like Sendero Luminoso, rising up throughout the country.

It was in this environment that Peru also found their great director, Francisco Lombardi. With a mix of tragedy, melodrama, and comedy, Lombardi told the stories that mattered most to Peruvians at that time from La Boca del Lobo, about the military’s 1983 Socos Massacre or the Mario Vargas Llosa adaptation, La Ciudad y los Perros. Caídos del Cielo may be his best examination of the economic turmoil experienced by all Peruvians across class lines. From the landowners to the middle class, and the peasants, every character is held back by the station they were born into. Lombardi’s satire is searing right from the start. As the camera pans over the Lima skyline, we hear Don Ventura, the radio presenter and self-help guru, tell us that we can change our world if we want to. Then he uses his motto: you are your destiny. As his words ring out, we see more and more images of extreme poverty. Individual willpower is not strong enough to overcome this tide.

The first people Lombardi properly introduces us to are Don Lizardo and his wife, Cuche as they enter a cemetery. Their only focus and drive becomes their imminent death thanks in part to their stagnant financial situation. Lizardo’s trips to get rent from his tenants are hilariously fruitless. The economy is so topsy-turvy that not even a menacing landlord can scare the money out of them. Any other business deals made on firm handshakes and the honor of a gentleman’s agreement are no match for the rising levels of inflation. In this kind of situation, Lizardo seems to have no recourse and his wife’s only plan is to pray as much as she can. A land-rich couple that seemingly had much of their assets taken during the Velasco government and a dead son whom they visit regularly, they are without an heir or an inheritance. All they can hope for is the most immaculate mausoleum.

Our other lost souls, a blind woman named Meche and the grandsons she works like dogs, live in abject poverty in a shack near a trash dump. Based on the short story “Los Gallinazos Sin Plumas” by famous leftist Peruvian author, Julio Ramon Ribeyro, we meet this dysfunctional family when Don Lizardo gives her a pig. When she finds out the pig is worth a lot of money, she begins to dream about how she will be able to use it to pay for her eye surgery. In turn, she forces her grandsons to go searching in the dump to find food for this pig, causing both of them to get sick and become fatally resentful. For Meche, it’s a dog-eat-dog world so it’s only natural that she doesn’t see this pig as only an opportunity for her own betterment, but an opportunity to further exploit. In the most poetically tragic and violent moment of the film, Meche finally gets what she gives, when one of her grandchildren watches as she falls into the pig’s pen and gets mauled. The cycle of poverty and exploitation only ends when she dies a painful but just death.

However, in one of our stories, Lombardi does show us someone who is able to change their circumstances with Humberto also known as Don Ventura on the radio. An upwardly mobile middle-class man, he tries to emulate his impenetrably positive radio persona. This is finally tested when he meets a woman he calls Veronica as she stands on the edge of a cliff, threatening to commit suicide. While the rest of the crowd around her yells that she is a sinner responsible for her own cruel fate, he shows her compassion. To the rest of the world, they seem like an odd pair. She is beautiful and eternally pessimistic and his optimism overcomes even his visible facial scars. He falls deeper and deeper in love with her but she refuses to allow their relationship to become physical. This comes to an abrupt end when one night while she is sleeping, he discovers an ugly scar on her stomach. Suddenly his pure heart cannot overcome his disgust and her criticisms of his radio program are proven to be true. He is a liar who doesn’t understand that some wounds cannot heal. He is a salesman and not a believer. Upon making this realization, Humberto has to kill his chances at class mobility by telling the truth. The next time he receives a message of woe on his program, he refuses to tell them to simply believe in themselves. He is subsequently, unceremoniously dismissed.

Lombardi shows his audience all of the different paths of the citizens of Lima from violence to resignation or revolution. However, in the end, all these people will go to the same place regardless of class. Just as they began, Don Lizardo and Doña Cucha end the film at their newly built mausoleum, now obsessing over how much additions would cost. In another cemetery, Meche’s grandsons also stand at her grave as an older relative tells them to take care of it. With her death, these boys will also have to bury the secret of her demise and their abuse. And in yet another grave, Humberto honors Veronica, who committed suicide shortly before, with an informal grave. No matter what class, we all have to meet in the land of the dead, but for Lombardi, we do choose whether we get consumed by it or not. 

While it seems that Don Lizardo and Doña Cucha will be consumed by their material aspirations even in death, and Meche’s grandsons will have to guard this secret for life, Humberto is finally free. A voice-over from a new radio host reveals that he has been let go of his job and can live divorced from his previous aspirations. Humberto is not the positive man he so desperately tried to be at the beginning, but he is on a better path, unlearning his salesman behaviors. As Joseph Conrad put it, “to cut oneself entirely from one’s kind is impossible. To live in a desert, one must be a saint.” On his lonesome journey, Humberto might find a way to live well.