Event

UN TIGRE DE PAPEL

aka A Paper Tiger
Dir Luis Ospina, 2008
Colombia. 112 mins.

UN TIGRE DE PAPEL follows the trajectory of Pedro Manrique Figueroa, an author and nadaisto who becomes a phantom fixture of Ospinas 20th century, guided by his pacifist conscience across cultural sluices of the left. Not unlike Leonard Zelig, Figueroa (or PMF as termed by the film) manages to vanish and reappear at exactly the right time - a perfect ideological foot soldier with nothing to lose, losing and gaining identity wherever he goes. Nevertheless, PMF is as memorable a shaggy dog protagonist as they come; one interviewee claims that anywhere, he went he was noticed because of his verbal diarrhea.

PMFs artistic career comes under the microscope of Ospinas film, much of the work crude but nonetheless potent collage-work - for example, campesinos emasculating a wailing Captain America with a manic-panic red hammer and sickle. After relocating to Jackson Heights to work as a line cook (quoting Jose Martis dictum that youve got to live inside the monster to know its entrails), Figueroa comes under the thumb of FBI investigators, following an ill-fated campaign to stamp fake on all valid U.S. currency. Like Ospinas film, PMF output works as a hypothetical salve on real-life irreconcilables like Trotskyism and Leninism, Communism and the Catholic Church, indeed democracy and U.S. influence in Latin America at large.