DAN WEBSTER:
Here’s some friendly advice: if you’re about to take an across-the-ocean international flight, don’t pack your carry-on bag with a book about an airplane crash.
I did just that in May of 1975 when I made my first sojourn to Great Britain. The book I brought along, which I only halfway finished before we landed in London, was Piers Paul Read’s Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors.
Big mistake. Every time our plane shuddered because of turbulence, I shuddered as well, convinced that we were going down. But instead of hitting any mountains, I knew we’d be doing a poor imitation of what happened to the poor souls on the ill-fated Titanic. And I really wasn’t interested in seeing how long I could stay afloat in the icy Atlantic.
I couldn’t stop reading, though, obsessed as I was with the story that Read was telling. I didn’t finish until early the next morning. And even though safe and sound in the warmth of a London bed-and-breakfast, I—again—shuddered.
Clearly not as much as those Andes survivors did, who—by the way—are in the news again. They’re the focus of a new Netflix film, though it’s not as if their story hasn’t been repeatedly told. Besides what Read wrote, a number of other books and articles—as well as Frank Marshall’s 1993 film Alive—have covered their tale of survival against all odds.
The Netflix film, though, is a bit different. Titled Society of the Snow, it’s a Spanish-language production based on the 2009 book by the Uruguayan journalist Pablo Vierci. Directed and co-written by the Spanish filmmaker J.A. Bayona, it is a graphic—and I do mean graphic—portrayal both of the accident and the 72 days of frigid hell that followed.
From the accident itself, which occurred because the plane’s pilots lost their way in foul weather, all the way until two of the survivors hiked nearly 40 miles over 10 days to find help, Bayona doesn’t spare us much of anything.
It was on October 13th, an auspicious date if ever there was one, that Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 entered the clouds masking the Andes Mountains of Argentina. On board the chartered aircraft were 40 passengers and five crew members. Nineteen of the passengers were players on an Uruguayan rugby team that was headed for a match in Santiago, Chile. The rest were family, friends and supporters.
Society of the Snow begins in the days before the flight as Bayona tries to familiarize us with the various characters. His attempt to do this unfortunately conflicts with his desire to pay tribute to all 45 on the plane, which he does by noting on screen both those who passed and those who survived.
For those of us not up on our current South American actors, most of the cast of young men are hard to tell apart. Three, though, do stand out.
One is Numa Turcatti (played by the Uruguayan actor Enzo Vogrincic). A law student prepping for his final exams, Turcatti is reluctant to make the trip. But he is convinced to go by a friend, and Turcatti becomes both the narrator—of at least the first half of the film—and the conscience of the whole ordeal.
The other two are Fernando Parrado (played by Argentinian actor Augustin Pardella) and Roberto Canessa (played by another Argentinian actor, Matías Recalt). Those are the two who end up making the long hike out to find help.
In the end, the crash that killed several right away, the avalanche that killed a number of others, the unremitting cold, untreated injuries and—let’s not forget—lack of food meant that only 16 ended up being saved. And they did so, largely, because they broke one of the oldest of human taboos: they resorted to cannibalism.
Bayona stresses the moral arguments that took place over this decision, just as much as he captured—again graphically—the harsh conditions that are likely to warrant, for some viewers, what these days we call a “trigger warning.”
Which is something I totally understand. To be honest, I could have used one before boarding my own flight in 1975.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is a senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com/7blog.