The movie is a tale of class war, corruption, and murder. Yet a handful of the fragments are tantalizing. It’s not a problem that “Cocote” is a fevered art film, but the movie is slipshod arty - a lurching, fragmentary tone poem that relies on too much patching together in the editing room. The filmmaker is out to mirror the off-balance state of his hero, a goal he nails in a hallucinatory traveling shot of a red-dirt road, accompanied by a soundtrack that recalls the ominous score that Mick Jagger composed for Kenneth Anger’s “Invocation of My Demon Brother.” But de Los Santos Arias also has a penchant for lyrical ethnographic verité that’s captivating for about five minutes, until it starts to get in the way of the story he’s telling. He cuts between hot color and austere black-and-white, compositions suitable for framing and punchy vulgarities culled from reality TV, and he holds underpopulated long shots with a teasingly static suspense that may remind you of mid-period Antonioni. The writer-director, Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias (it’s his first fiction feature), has talent in the form of a certain avant pictorial audacity. ![]() That’s a refreshing thing to see, though it does make you wish “Cocote” were a better movie. ![]() Those are the existential questions that haunt “ Cocote,” a drama from the Dominican Republic that creeps up to the subject of revenge without exploiting it.
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