499 movie review & film summary (2021)

Portrayed with a quiet force by actor Eduardo San Juan, the conqueror travels from the east coast to the central region, retracing his own steps but sans his voracious compatriots. "499" offers a one-of-a-kind meditation on the effect of colonialism, a nightmare and a dream wrapped into one. The film roams harsh topics through this narrative device of a time traveler, one who is foreign to the state of this nation but responsible for it.

Now, exactly 500 years since Spanish colonizers imposed their religion and planted the seeds for the myth of mestizaje (the notion that their appropriation of the territory and enslavement of its people resulted in a mixed-raced identity), Mexico is finally reckoning with the racism that was previously not named as such but always upheld whiteness and Eurocentric knowledge above Indigenous features, language, and culture.

But the current public repudiation of that ingrained and corrosive ideology remains symbolic, as the country continues to function through a system where race and class are intertwined in a pervasive cycle. Those most vulnerable to poverty and violence today rarely look like the oppressor, but closer to those that centuries ago were also victimized. Throughout the journey, Reyes only confronts this figure with working class people, poor people, dark-skinned people; the faces of Mexico that tourists turned away from and that the local film productions and television stations don’t depict.  

Without a voice, the arrogant conquistador is forced to listen to their plights. His internal monologue comes via voiceover, musing about the places he once knew, bragging about the barbaric acts he committed, or judging the Aztecs for their practices. He deems everyone he comes in contact with a savage, and mocks Moctezuma’s friendliness as an invitation for the Spaniards’ appetite for gold.

By including such disturbing dialogue, fitting for the character, Reyes isn’t solely denouncing him and those like him, but persuading us into introspection, to investigate why we may have harbored similar biases as part of our Western indoctrination. In brief moments of more human clarity, the unwanted visitor expresses his affinity for certain aspects of the people and terrain he destroyed, and even regrets his cold-bloodedness. The more he realizes that the glory he thought he achieved has vanished, the more pathetic he becomes. Reyes writes him, it seems, as the embodiment of a worldview that is, hopefully, dying as we question it more fervently.

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