7 Boxes: The Montage of Dollars and Body Remains

A European asks a Latin American filmmaker: “Why is that searching a Latin American play we don't see any poverty? We don't see any misery?” This line, from the Argentinian film The Gold Bug, reflects the prejudice of audience outside Latin America, that there must be suffering in Latin American films, and the region is defined by it.

In other words, it seems to be a crucial survival strategy for Latin American films to attract the privileged gaze with the spectacle of Latin American suffering to garner awards and funding. If this is true, then the Paraguayan film 7 Boxes (2012) took a different path. Without any bait of suffering or heavy themes, this low-cost, highly-quality crime thriller offers such breathtaking action sequence, suspense, humor and appealing characters that make audience scream out at one moment and crack up the next. It achieved great box office success in Paraguay, surpassing that of the most successful film in the country's history, Titanic (1997) with almost twice the box office gross of the latter.

Paraguay is a silent country. “Its history has certainly been marked by war and poverty… it endured the longest-standing dictatorship in South America, which led to a repression that imposed an atmosphere of silence, fear, and isolation.” [1]7 Boxes (2012), therefore, breaks the silence with screams and laughter.

Meta-cinema of young boy and mobile phone

7 Boxes tells a thrilling story filled with both horror and humor: In 2005, at Market No. 4 in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, 17-year-old Víctor accepts a job to transport seven boxes in order to earn $100 (equivalent to 650,000 Paraguayan Guarani) to buy a second-hand cell phone, only to discovers that the boxes contain the dismembered body of a woman. However, he decides to continue the job to receive his payment. Soon he finds himself being pursued by the police, another group of couriers, and the person who hired him...

Victor first appears in the warm, flaming sunlight of the southern hemisphere’s summer end. Unlike others in his life whose deepest desires is mere survival, Victor’s passion is for screens. Standing at the door of a pirate video store, he is captivated by the American gunfight scenes on TV. Then he leaves and meets his sister, who is capturing him on a mobile phone. Seeing his own image on the phone screen, Victor shifts his attention and desire from TV screens to the mobile phone. The shift in desire carries multiple underlying tones: he yearns not only to observe the outside world through screens, but to see himself on them as well; he hopes to be both a dream chaser and a dream creator; his focus is turning from the past to the future.

If ‘watching screens’ on walls epitomizes the 20th-century lifestyle, then ‘gazing at phones’ defines how people live in the first half of the 20st century. Owning a phone with filming feature means possessing power– you become a filmmaker, a distributor and a projectionist in one. It’s no wonder Victor desperately desires a cell phone, and the body serves as the vehicle for this dream. Boy–body–phone–dream, this chain of causes and effects unfolds. Therefore, this isn’t a film about suffering, but rather a narrative of narcissism, a meta-cinema where a boy obsessed with his own image deciding to film himself. But unlike Narcissus, Victor doesn’t drown; he manages to survive dangers time and again.

Undoubtedly, mobile phone and screens in the film point to the digital time, globalization and consumerism. They also serve as symbols of social class in the film. For Victor, the screens represent not only the American Dream, but a means to escape reality and achieve his dream life. Every time he is going to give up delivering the 7 boxes, the mobile phone or screens will pull him back on track.

For instance, the first time he discovers the secrets of the boxes, he impulsively rushes into the street. Just as he is about to confess to the police, a group of TV screens appear beside him displaying his image- a boy with black hair in a yellow vest. In this scene, Victor is blurred in the foreground and the screens are sharply focused. He stands before the screens, his horrified face turning into joy. Later in the movie, Victor is constantly fascinated by the images on screens, even imagining himself as the happy man who drives a luxurious car and kisses a beautiful woman.

That is, mobile phone/screens are key plot devices in the film, which serves as the motivation, beginning, turning point, and conclusion. By the end, the phone makes Victor a ‘hero’ on screen. That’s how the film parodies Hollywood cinema with a story that closely mirrors the "hero's journey"— the hero receives a call to adventure, embarks on a journey, solves puzzles, uncovers truths, and battles evil. Víctor is a Paraguayan embodiment of this heroic figure and also a representation of his country.

On the other hand, the journey of young Victor mirrors the creation of this film. The movie tells a story of how a hero starts from scratch and survives challenges. Initially, Victor is penniless and can’t afford at all to buy a mobile phone that costs 600,000 guaraníes. The director duo, Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbor was in similar situation when they started to make the film. The national film industry was virtually non-existent, and they had to purchase most of their equipment from Amazon. The country also lacked basic infrastructure, such as film schools and a local market, due to General Alfredo Stroessner's 35-year dictatorship (1954-1989), which suppressed, censored, and stifled any form of cultural expression. Thus, the production process of 7 Boxes was also a journey from nothing to something, with many close calls. Like Víctor, their guerrilla-style filmmaking achieved groundbreaking success.

Montage of Dollar Bill and Body Remains

According to Susan Hayward, the narrative of thrillers is ‘usually a struggle around love and/or money’, and that ‘thrillers are more about fantasy than reality’. 7 Boxes undoubtedly an example of this.

The film at first presents us with a familiar Third World poverty landscape: a father who have no enough money to trick his sick baby; an expecting woman still working in a Korean restaurant while her boyfriend is nowhere to be found; a wealthy retailer’s wife has been kidnapped; two poor delivery men locked in a deadly struggle over seven boxes containing dismembered bodies, etc. As Director Tana Schémbor explains: “We are accustomed to living in crisis, in critical situations, having very little or nothing at all.”

With numerous characters, the film navigates the complexities of integrating them into a plot that shifts naturally between horror and humor. It follows the strategy of classical unities of drama: the unity of time (within 24 hours), place (within the 4th market) and action (delivery of 7 boxes). It presents a cross section of time, an anatomical map of space, as well as a metaphor for the struggles of a Third World country at the turn of the century.

The film is a montage interwoven from five groups with different purposes:

1. Víctor - delivering goods
2. The kidnapping gang - dollars
3. Nelson and his fellows - stealing the goods
4. Tamara (Víctor's sister) – selling a mobile phone
5. The police - searching for the missing woman

Following the main plot of Victor’s delivering journey, the film weaves together 30 diverse characters from the lower echelons of society and 179 different market scenes. As each group of characters tend to their own affairs, new characters join the mix, such as a prostitute arrested by the police, an elderly beggar sleeping on the street, a hippie youth who steals a box, a Korean restaurant owner who doesn't speak Spanish, and a teenage street robber, among others.

It is the shifts between these five groups of characters and the contrasting dynamics within each group that create a montage of thrills and humor that evokes screams and laughter. One of the most significant montages occurs between Víctor and the kidnapping gang. Interestingly, due to the foolish misunderstandings and infighting within the kidnapping group, they often express more humor, while Víctor’s encounters carry more thrills. Among all the roles, the Korean youth is particularly impressive. He serves as a helper, admirer, and documenter. He is the one who captures the pivotal climax with a mobile phone – a scene that pays tribute to Korean filmmakers.

The cast represents a multicultural ethnic mix, including white people, Guarani, Koreans, Arabs, and Mestizos, each with vibrantly alive faces, vivid performances, and distinct linguistic backgrounds. They make the enclosed and backward Paraguayan market a place imbued with cosmopolitan ideals and emotional depth. The interplay of the five groups of people ends outside the Arabian man’s store. With gunfire erupting, Victor’s dreams of a mobile phone, Nelson’s aspirations for money, and the kidnapping gang’s desire of wealth all shatter, like the dissected body and the 1 dollar bill— a hint at the uncanny dark comedy of fate.

Yet Victor and the mobile phone survive all the risks and dangers, and the phone helps him realize his dream of becoming a ‘hero’. The mastermind behind the kidnapping, the deceased woman's husband, also survives. In a deep-focus shot, a box floats on the river, while in the background, the husband escapes by boat, clutching a bag of filthy lucre. This contrast of foreground and background—corpses and dollar bills, terror and humor—highlights the irony of reality: In this ‘body hunt’ sparked by the wealthy retailer trading his wife for money, the rich gain dollars while the poor gain corpses. The rivalry between Victor and another deliveryman also reflects the Paraguayan dilemma: escaping reality through consumerism or facing it represented by a new born infant?

All in all, just as the director duo put it: the film is like a metaphor for victor who wants to see himself on television and Paraguayan cinema that struggles to appear in such a overwhelming industry.

[1] CATHERINE LEEN. The Silenced Screen: Fostering a Film Industry in Paraguay