Though war movies and novels are overwhelmingly about large nation-state wars occasionally one breaks through about the smaller scale national –not state– wars,  rebellions, anti-colonial risings, revolutions, states-in-the-making.  The one that may have set the template was Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers.  He also made a far less known, and less universal  Ogro (1979) about the Basque separatist assassination of the Francoist Admiral Carrero Blanco.

Recently I ran across a deeply puzzling, often hard to follow documentary disguised as fiction, from Middle Europe, or as the director Ibolya Fekete of Hungary puts it, “central eastern Europe.” As she sees it Chico is about one man’s search for identity — through war.  It turns out, on further reading, that not only are many of the scenes documentary footage events and locations –from the 1963 bombing of Moncadam the Chilean capitol, with President Allende preparing to die,  to recent savage fighting in Vuckovar, Croatia but the story and the man himself, presented as fiction, are real.  Eduardo Rózsa Flores [Chico] was born in Bolivia to a Hungarian-Jewish father and a Spanish-Catalan mother.  They moved to Chile when he was a young teen.  It is essentially his story we see in the film –traveling from middle school in Santiago, Chile, to Hungary in the 1990s as the Soviet Union was disassembling,  to leading an ‘international’ squad fighting with the Croats against the Serbs, to a re-immersion in his long discarded split religious roots — Catholicism and Judaism.

It is a hard story to follow, and seems improbable even as we watch, but Flores was an actual man, who stared in an earlier Fekete movie, Bolshe Vita, 1996.  As she got to know him she was intrigued by his ‘rootless’ background and decided to make a movie, with Chico himself.  With some fictional elements, this is his story.

It’s hard to follow in part because she seems to have stitched together film footage of varying quality.  Some of it is rough and blurry.  It’s also hard because we ordinary film-buffs will not know the national flags being flown: we are not sure who Chico is fighting with, either in Hungary or later in shattering Yugoslavia. [Hint: he’s with the Croatians against the Serbs and Chetniks.]  There were also Hungarians in Croatia in a part of the film.  Chico, in the movie as in real life, had Hungarian roots.  The connections got lost in the telling.  The flashbacks from Chico — at a time not exactly clear– become confused unless we have a very sharp sense of history.  If he is telling from near the Vukovar (August-Sept 1991) fighting then the Hungarian experience is how many years earlier?  Was his time in the Soviet army and then the intelligence service before or after? Perhaps for a Central European audience, for whom this is intended, this is all clear.  For we provincial Americans, not so.

The war -fighting scenes are what first grabbed my attention, not his search for identity.  With the help of rough, documentary footage, the mud, the burned homes, the bodies in the ditches, the exhaustion in the faces, is much more authentic than in almost all cast and scripted movies.  It raises the question immediately –why if there are any options at all, would people choose this? The nationalist bombast and revenge fantasies are there to tell us why,  as is the sheer ‘need to fight’ expressed by Flores and some of his companions.  This caught my attention.  These were not draftees, or peace-time enlisted soldiers sent to a war by a large imperial power.  These were guys who wanted to fight and belonged to each other and a small but strongly felt community.   I’ve begun to think there is a constellation of emotions, mostly in men,  that can be considered a fighting drive, if not fully a war drive, and which like the sexual drive (and possibly connected to it) waxes stronger in some and diminishes to opportunity and acquiescence in others.

There is something of the Max Stirner’s ego-anarchism in this — cloaked occasionally in larger movements and ideas but at base a drive for self realization through fighting — and not the clean-cut fights of legendary heroes, but the cage-fighting, no holds barred, ultimate proof of an imagined manhood.

It turns out Flores, not his representation in the film, was not such a nice fellow.  In the movie his uncle warns him about fighting for the Croatians.  As a leftist he well knew the Croatian Ustashe had joined with Nazi fascism during WW II.  Chico dismisses him.  Chico, the actual man, 9 years after the film was made, was shot dead in Bolivia, heading an international assassination team, with left-wing President Evo Morales in their sights.  Some of their team were Croatian with roots to the still existing remnants of the WW II Ustashe. In fact, according to an interviewer in 2009, 

After his Croatian exploits, where he had dubbed himself a “conservative, anarchist world revolutionary” and earned the rank of major from President Franjo Tudjman, he returned to Budapest where he wrote books, poems and established close ties with the country’s far-Right.

Yet at some stage, he had also converted to Islam and in 2003 emerged as a spokesman for an Iraqi splinter group calling itself the Iraqi Independent Government and also became deputy-president of the Hungarian Islamic Community.

For more on Flores and his wild ideological swings, see this 2009 piece in the Hungarian Spectrum.

The movie, Chico, stops short of his later life and is neither admiring nor condemning of its subject.  Perhaps, in its distance, it becomes flavored with a sense that Chico is ‘cool,’ ‘daring,’ ‘following his own star,’ and so is more in praise of, than observing with absolute neutrality.  The war scenes, however, are unflinching and honest.  Not too much ‘cool’ here except for the most sociopathic or most committed to a cause. 

Not a film for everyone.  For those who dig at the roots of human conflict or who want some short primers on a back-corner part of the world, your time won’t be wasted.