Austinist Film Review: En El Hoyo

En El Hoyo documents the plight of the workers engaged in building “El Segundo Piso,” a massive second deck in Mexico City’s elaborate freeway system. As the movie’s introduction declares, over 15 million people and 3 million cars depend on the system to get to work each day. Yet for others, building the transportation system is work—and precious work at that. A prominent theme throughout the film is the damned combination of necessity and horror that constitutes work: you never get used to it, one man repeats. “Work never ends. The end’s gonna be for us,” laments another worker. But they march on toward that end, preferring the precarious and difficult construction industry to earning $5 a day for back-breaking field labor in the countryside.

The only alternative to hard work is corruption, in which some workers were involved before being thrown in jail for their sins (the crucial sin apparently being not having the money to pay off the police officers). An ex-mafioso laments that his wallet used to be so full that he couldn’t close it; now he worries about putting food on the table. The loss of past riches is another dominant motif in the film. The man who drives the trucks laden with girders for the bridge wishes he could meet a woman like his high school girlfriend—he’d marry such a gem in an instant. But somehow the good times and the good women have gotten away from these men, and they spend their days high above the city, cat-calling at female passerby and dreaming of better days past or to come. “If I were president, everybody would have everything,” says Shorty, the dirtiest worker (he’s constantly harassed about not showering), and you almost want to believe him.

A highly religious female construction worker continually repeats a local legend that says the bridge must take one soul for each of the massive pillars on which it stands: the bridge is built on souls, which help it grow, “like fertilizer.” This fascinating concept is repeated throughout the film, but the repetition doesn’t strengthen it. We see one sad scene in which a construction worker, struck by a car that disobeyed road closure signs, is carted off to the hospital, but beyond this, souls are lost only metaphorically: a poignant concept, but not one that makes for interesting film.

The problem with En El Hoyo is that we don’t learn enough about any of its characters, either the men or the bridge itself. Time-lapse scenes of construction show the bridge growing rapidly as days (and neverending streams of cars) pass by, but we never know anything substantial about the construction: why are the workers doing what they’re doing? What are the physics involved in creating such a massive structure? Even knowing how many tons of concrete or bars of steel went into the bridge would have added some heft to the film. Part of the point is that the workers themselves don’t necessarily know what they’re doing, but again, a film about the vagueness of knowledge can only be so engaging (i.e., not very).

If En El Hoyo had decided on its focus—the bridge or the workers, which workers, what parts of their lives—and run with that focus, it might have been a more successful film. As it stands, though, we get only minor glimpses into different workers’ lives; the men remain nearly as indistinguishable to viewers of the film as they are to passerby who bemoan the “annoying” inconvenience of the construction work and blocked-off roads. The movie does raise some awareness of the difficulty of life and construction in Mexico (and elsewhere), and the costs of our car-centric culture, but ultimately leaves viewers as empty as the pits dug for the bridge’s pillars. The loss of souls is sad, but still we drive on by.

For a potentially more engaging film experience, check out Inside the Circle, the closing night film for Cine Las Americas.