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Emerald Cowboy
review by Gregory
Avery, 19 September 2003
Emerald Cowboy purports
to tell the story of Eishy Hayata, born in Tokyo, raised in Los
Angeles, and who went to Colombia in the 1970s, slapped a cowboy hat
on his head, and became an esmeraldero, independently buying
rough emeralds in open-air markets or from miners or anyone who digs
them out of the ground, purchasing them with ready cash. Twenty-five
years later, he is the successful head of a large emerald company in
Bogota, probably one of the most dangerous places in the world to be
living and doing any sort of business in, let alone trading in
precious stones, and Hayata is seen coming and going with no less
than nine bodyguards at a time to prove it.
Hayata, in the flashbacks, is
played by an actor who is much taller than him and looks a lot
different. Hayata plays himself in the scenes set in the present day
and in the 1990s, when an attempt was made to literally force him
out of business because, among other things, he's a
"foreigner" (something that is never mentioned by anyone
until two-thirds of the film is over with). The flashbacks are
filmed in conventional mode (and the film itself was made on
location, in Bogota and in Colombia's mountainous regions), and
none, absolutely none of the actors or persons who appear in these
scenes are credited in the film's end credits. The modern day scenes
are lensed in a wobbly, handheld style, with brackish colors. This
is of no particular help, since Hayata is not an actor and is also
not a particularly pleasant man to look at, having the screen
presence of an unpolished block of granite.
Hayata receives sole credit for the
film's screenplay, and co-directed the picture with Andrew Molina.
Some of the stiffness in the action and dialogue may have been
intentional, to give the picture a "realistic" quality.
However, just showing some people dickering over the price of uncut
stones does not give us a full idea of what the emerald trade is
like or how Hayata became a gem merchant. Nor does showing his
Colombian-born wife, sent to Los Angeles to raise their three
children, calling him long distance to complain ("I don't have
any life here!") give us an idea of what his private life was
like. (He sensitively responds, "I don't have a minute to f**k
around with any whore!" And, besides, there's no P.T.A. or
volunteer services in Los Angeles that she can become involved in?)
And yet, he is shown standing up to people with guns and telling
them that he is the "heart of Colombia" (though he also
wears a bullet-proof vest in to work every morning). Then, before
you can say "vanity production", or anything else for that
matter, an epilogue informs us that, in 2002, Hayata was shot, and
"is in critical condition, fighting to survive a coma at a
hospital in the United States"[sic].
Barbet Schroeder's recent film, Our
Lady of the Assassins, made on digital video in Medellin (where
Schroeder spent part of his youth), showed how harrowing and
hair-trigger (and strangely exhilarating) day-to-day existence in
Colombia could be. There's probably a good story to be told in the
events that make up Emerald Cowboy, but it hasn't been nearly
brought to the fore.
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