Daniel

A government official in Ecuador has accused protesters of attempting to attack President Daniel Noboa, alleging that a group of approximately 500 people surrounded his vehicle and threw rocks.

The attack, which unfolded in the south-central province of Canar, took place as Noboa arrived in the canton of El Tambo for an event about water treatment and sewage.

Environment and Energy Minister Ines Manzano said Noboa’s car showed “signs of bullet damage”. In a statement to the press, she explained that she filed a report alleging an assassination attempt had taken place.

“Shooting at the president’s car, throwing stones, damaging state property — that’s just criminal,” Manzano said. “We will not allow this.”

The president’s office also issued a statement after the attack on Tuesday, pledging to pursue accountability against those involved.

“Obeying orders to radicalise, they attacked a presidential motorcade carrying civilians. They attempted to forcibly prevent the delivery of a project intended to improve the lives of a community,” the statement, published on social media, said.

“All those arrested will be prosecuted for terrorism and attempted murder,” it added.

Five people, according to Manzano, have been detained following the incident. Noboa was not injured.

Video published by the president’s office online shows Noboa’s motorcade navigating a roadway lined with protesters, some of whom picked up rocks and threw them at the vehicles, causing fractures to form on the glass.

A separate image showed a silver SUV with a shattered passenger window and a shattered windscreen. It is not clear from the images whether a bullet had been fired.

Noboa, Ecuador’s youngest-ever president, was re-elected in April after a heated run-off election against left-wing rival Luisa Gonzalez.

May marked the start of his first full term in office. Previously, Noboa, a conservative candidate who had only served a single term in the National Assembly, had been elected to serve the remainder of Guillermo Lasso’s term — a period of around 18 months — after the former president dissolved his government.

Combatting crime has been a centrepiece of Noboa’s pitch for the presidency. Ecuador, formerly considered an “island of peace” in South America, has seen a spike in homicide rates as criminal organisations seek to expand their drug trafficking routes through the country.

Ecuador’s economy has also struggled to recover following the COVID-19 pandemic.

But Noboa has faced multiple protests since taking office.

In recent weeks, for example, he has faced outcry over his decision to end a fuel subsidy that critics say helps lower-income families.

Noboa’s government, however, has argued that the subsidy drove up government costs without reaching those who need it. In a presidential statement on September 12, officials accused the subsidy of being “diverted to smuggling, illegal mining and undue benefits”.

The statement also said that the subsidies represented $1.1bn that could instead be used to compensate small farmers and transportation workers directly.

But the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), the country’s most powerful Indigenous advocacy organisation, launched a strike in response to the news of the subsidy’s end.

It called upon its supporters to lead protests and block roadways as a way of expressing their outrage.

Nevertheless, on Tuesday, the group denied that there had been an organised attack on Noboa’s motorcade. Instead, CONAIE argued that government violence had been “orchestrated” against the people who had gathered to protest Noboa.

“We denounce that at least five comrades have been arbitrarily detained,” CONAIE posted on X. “Among the attacked are elderly women.”

It noted that Tuesday marked the 16th day of protest. “The people are not the enemy,” it added.

CONAIE had largely backed Noboa’s rival Gonzalez in the April election, though some of its affiliate groups splintered in favour of Noboa.

This is not the first time that Noboa’s government has claimed the president was the target of an assassination attempt.

In April, shortly after the run-off vote, it issued a “maximum alert” claiming that assassins had entered the country from Mexico to destabilise his administration.

At the time, the administration blamed “sore losers” from the election for fomenting the alleged plot.

When we first encounter Daniel Day-Lewis in “Anemone,” we only see him from the back, but there’s no mistaking him. Chopping wood outside his character’s rustic cabin in the middle of nowhere, he drives the ax down again and again, ferociously focused on the task at hand. At his best, which was often, Day-Lewis pursued acting with a primal clarity. Fittingly, his return to the big screen after announcing a retirement in 2017 is in a movie that exudes the same stark, elemental quality. He didn’t just co-write this tale of two estranged brothers excavating their complicated history — he imbues it with his essence, its reason for being.

“Anemone” isn’t just a film about family but one made by a father and his son. It’s the feature directorial debut of Ronan Day-Lewis, who collaborated with his Oscar-winning dad on the screenplay. Ronan, better known as a painter in New York’s contemporary art world, chronicles a collection of still lives who jostle themselves out of an emotional stupor.

Set in England some time during the mid-1990s, the movie opens as Jem (Sean Bean) says goodbye to his melancholy partner Nessa (Samantha Morton) and troubled son Brian (Samuel Bottomley) to venture out into the forest to reconnect with his younger brother Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis), whom he hasn’t spoken to in 20 years. A deeply religious man — he has “Only God Can Judge Me” sternly tattooed across his back — Jem is on a mission whose purpose will only slowly be revealed. When he arrives at Ray’s cabin, Ray knows it’s him before he even sets eyes on his brother. For several agonizing minutes, they sit together saying nothing, as Black Sabbath’s mystical ballad “Solitude” plays softly on the stereo. The tense silence will be the first of several battles of will between the two men, neither willing to yield.

Day-Lewis, now 68 and whose last film was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” seems carved out of stone as Ray, his close-cropped hair and imposing gray goatee suggesting a man who doesn’t just live off the grid but thrives there. Lean and athletic, with a wildness in his eyes, Ray displays the same antagonism as Day-Lewis’ Bill the Butcher from “Gangs of New York” or Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood.” Ray’s mysterious and fraught history as a member of the British military during the Troubles is a festering boil this film will eventually lance. His brother, who also served in the military, has come to speak to Ray about something more personal, but the hells they experienced in that conflict are the larger issue they must confront.

Shot by cinematographer Ben Fordesman in the Welsh countryside, “Anemone” takes place largely in a sprawling woods, Ronan Day-Lewis lending the flinty drama a mythic grandeur. Bobby Krlic’s mournful score is alternately dreamy and eerie, the instrumental music abruptly cutting out in the middle of a hypnotic passage. Wordless interludes find Jem and Ray dancing to music or sparring as boxers, their simmering feud reduced to its core elements of rugged masculinity and sibling rivalry. The artist-turned-filmmaker even incorporates a striking image from one of his oils — that of a translucent horselike creature — as an enigmatic visual motif that proves more ponderous than poetic.

This is not the first time Daniel Day-Lewis has worked closely with family. Twenty years ago, he starred in his wife Rebecca Miller’s father-daughter fable “The Ballad of Jack and Rose.” Both that film and “Anemone” concern solitary men who opted out of society, only to discover that such a plan is difficult to sustain. But they also both suffer from what might be described as an excess of dramatic seriousness, which is especially true of “Anemone.” Whether it’s Morton’s perpetually scowling expression in the infrequent cutaways to Brian’s life back home or the on-the-nose emphasis on looming gray clouds, there’s no question a storm is coming. Even “Anemone’s” rare moments of levity feel drained of color, the weight of this family’s Dark Past so severe that not an ounce of light (or lightness) can be permitted to escape.

Not surprisingly, the star almost makes the movie’s suffocating gloom resonate. “Anemone” allows Day-Lewis to be volcanic when Ray launches into a disturbing, ultimately revolting monologue about a recent run-in with a pedophiliac priest from childhood. Later, when the film finally explains why Ray abandoned the world, Day-Lewis delivers a teary confession that doesn’t have much fresh to say about the insanity of war but is nonetheless ennobled by how he unburdens his stoic character through cascading waves of anger and shame.

Even when he’s been fiery, nearly frothing at the mouth, Day-Lewis has always been a master of stillness, relying on his tall, taut frame to hint at the formidable power or menace underneath. (When his characters explode, it’s shocking, and yet we somehow knew the blast was imminent.) For Ray, a man full of rage who has no patience for religion, sentimentality or forgiveness, his brother’s arrival is an unwelcome event, and even when a slight thawing occurs between them, Day-Lewis remains coiled, ready to strike, their fragile truce constantly in danger of being upended.

But because Jem, like so many of these characters, is underwritten, Bean has to fall back on generalized manly intensity, which turns their showdowns into actorly exercises. The interactions are bracing but also a bit studied — the performers’ technique is more impressive than the story, which too often is merely a delivery device for misery disguised as searing truth.

There’s reason to celebrate that Daniel Day-Lewis has chosen, at least temporarily, to cancel his retirement, but “Anemone” as a whole strains for a greatness that its star effortlessly conveys. Amid the film’s self-conscious depiction of a brewing tempest, he remains a true force of nature.