Traffic by Steven Soderbergh, 2000 (R)

with Michael Douglas (Solitary Man, Haywire, The Game), Don Cheadle (Out of Sight), Benicio Del Toro, Luis Guzmán (Out of Sight), Dennis Quaid (Pandorum), Catherine Zeta-Jones, Steven Bauer, Benjamin Bratt, James Brolin, Erika Christensen, Clifton Collins Jr., Miguel Ferrer (Robocop), Albert Finney (The Bourne Legacy), Topher Grace (Valentine's Day), Amy Irving (Deconstructing Harry)
Duration: 147 minutes

Interlacing three disturbing snapshots of America's drug war, this Oscar-winning saga follows a U.S. drug czar who learns his daughter's an addict, a Mexican cop caught in a corrupt system and a housewife forced to take over the family drug business.

I remember watching it when it came out, going twice to the theater and being so upset for not having understood the movie. I saw it with subtitles, but there is so much going on, so much non-verbal communication, that reading the subtitles was going to make me miss half of the movie. Twelve years later, I finally saw it again, being now fluent in English and Spanish. All I could remember from the movie were the yellow in Juarez and the Blue in Washington DC, the heroine injected in the foot, the general saying "Su puede ser tu pasado" with a theatrical voice, Catherine Zeta Jones bringing refreshments to the undercover cops, and the light in the Baseball fields of Juarez. Now the feeling I have is that it was a risky choice to shoot digitally, Soderbergh has improved a lot since then. Then, what a complicated story, although I can pretend I understand a lot more, such as the complexity of fighting drug traffic, the influence of politicians, to a certain extend, the idea that you may do anything you want as long as you have power a money. And at the same time, wanting to control so much at a national level will not mean to have control under your own roof. Anyway, the layering of the drug traffic system is very intelligent, the movie has a perfect sense of rhythm, the more you engage into the movie, the more it drags you into the darkness of humanity, with a very little light to hold on to, but a light anyway...

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