LAS ELIGIDAS/ THE CHOSEN ONES
Go, 2015, 105 minutes, Colour.
Nancy Telemantes, Oscar Torres, Leidi Guttierez.
Directed by David Pablos.
This is a rather sombre Mexican film, winner of many awards, especially in Mexico itself.
The subject is sexual slavery, Mexican-style.
The film opens with an adolescent with his girlfriend, a sexual encounter, possibilities for love.However, this is his first attempt to recruit a young girl, this time 14 years old, for his older brother, a family man with wife and children, and his father who pimp the young girls in a brothel. The older brother has been recruiting from some years and expects his younger brother to do the same.
The film focuses on the routine, the young girl invited to the family, celebrating the father’s birthday, lulling her into false security – and she has a working mother with younger brother whom she cares for. And she finds herself trapped, completely inexperienced in the life of a brothel, living in a house with many other young girls, some of whom help her with make up, with psychological advice, with the use of condoms. The film shows a collage of older, completely unattractive men, who are her clients – and she must have at least six each day for her payments.
The young man is in love with her and offers to go away with her but they are pursued and caught. The older brother then tells him that he can actually have the young girl if he recruits another one for the brothel – and we see him scouting possibilities, encountering a young girl, buying her an ice cream, getting her phone number, a sexual encounter with her – and the same routine of the birthday party and giving her a false sense of security.
While the two do get together at the end, the young girl is completely scarred by her experience and her suspicions of the young man, and her incredulity that he could do this to get another young girl.
The film is not prurient but rather more realistic in showing the harsh and abusive realities of the pimping of teenage girls and their life in sexual slavery in Mexico.
