Small-Town Star Fades From the Limelight

USPALLATA, Argentina — The Tibet Cafe appears like a mirage on the mountain road.

It is a long and lonely road that climbs into the Argentine Andes past red rock formations, an abandoned cliff-side railway, sprawling shrub lands. Uspallata, a wind-swept outpost near the Chilean border, offers little to distinguish it from any other half-asleep South American town. Except the Tibet Cafe.

Buddha statuettes, Tibetan prayer drums, bows and arrows, photos and paintings of Tibetan scenes fill the cafe--all scavenged from the set of the movie “Seven Days in Tibet,” which was partly filmed here in late 1996.

The cafe is a shrine to two far-off places: Tibet and Hollywood. The 5,000 residents of Uspallata recall the three-month occupation by actor Brad Pitt and the rest of the cast and crew like an invasion of benevolent extraterrestrials.

For a moment, Uspallata awoke. There were jobs, money, excitement. There was the outlandish and startlingly realistic spectacle of bona fide Tibetan holy men in the miniature Tibet that the filmmakers painstakingly re-created in the desert valley outside town.

“When the lamas saw the set, they broke down and cried,” recalls a wistful Rosanna Gonzalez, the cafe’s owner. “They said it was so similar to the real Tibet. It was beautiful.”

To the chagrin of Gonzalez and others, the cafe is one of the few tangible mementos of the biggest event in the town’s history. The experience brought short-term benefits, but the aftermath has been more bitter than sweet. The brush with Hollywood created hopes and expectations that were mostly too high to be fulfilled. The good times evaporated like the dust clouds blown down unpaved side streets by the Andean wind.

“Life here is still very difficult,” says Gonzalez, adding that her cafe, like the rest of the community, scrapes by.

The countryside of South America is full of hamlets like Uspallata. These remote and fragile places recall a phrase in “The Honorary Consul,” a novel by Graham Greene that takes place in a northern Argentine province: “This land . . . is really too vast for human beings.”

In Argentina in particular, many towns once enjoyed artificial booms as a result of government paternalism. Today they long for a providential spark of rejuvenation connected to tourism, which, along with prisons, is a rare growth sector.

In the southern Argentine region of Patagonia, for example, the privatization of the state oil company in the early 1990s almost shut down the town of Plaza Huincul. Leaders recently tried to capitalize on the discovery of dinosaur fossils in the area by building a dinosaur sculpture out of rusty oil-drilling materials in hopes of attracting tourists.

Uspallata does not have dinosaurs. But its location on the road between Mendoza, one of Argentina’s biggest cities, and the Chilean border makes it a rest stop for truckers and other travelers. The proximity of the border, once a potential flash point of armed conflict with Chile, also brought the two military bases that supply the bulk of the population.

The wilderness around Uspallata supposedly exudes a spiritual aura, an energy that explains occasional UFO sightings, natives say. Perhaps that played a role in the choice by the makers of “Seven Days in Tibet.” They were barred from shooting in the real Tibet by the Chinese government, which took over the remote Buddhist land in 1951 and has been widely criticized for suppressing Tibetan culture.

The film recounted the adventures of Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountain climber who escaped from a British POW camp in India in World War II and made his way to Tibet, where he became the tutor of the Dalai Lama. The $65-million production spared no effort or expense, as evidenced by the research notebooks obtained by the cafe containing photos of clothing, architecture and other scenes that inspired the costumes and sets.

In addition to priests and other Tibetan exiles from locales such as India, Brazil and the United States, the filmmakers hired Korean immigrants living in Argentina and Asian-looking members of Bolivian indigenous tribes to populate sets that re-created the holy city of Lhasa with the Andes doubling as the Himalayas.

It was a windfall for Uspallata. Families rented out their houses at exorbitant rates and slept in garages. Gonzalez’s catering business served as many as 1,000 people a day. Townspeople got jobs building sets, driving vehicles and providing security to ward off the mobs of photographers and teenage fans who pursued Pitt across Argentina. “It was madness,” Gonzalez says.

The most remarkable story was Fernando Martin, now 22. He showed up at the production’s headquarters in the once-grand Hotel Uspallata hoping to find work related to electronics, his area of expertise. Instead, he was discovered. Makeup artists dyed his hair and beard blond and transformed him into Pitt’s stand-in. The small-town youth shared photo spreads in gossip magazines with the Hollywood legend.

Although the young man had never shown interest in acting, he shook the dust of Uspallata off his boots soon after the shoot was over. He dropped out of college and landed a series of jobs in soap operas and advertisements in Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital.

When the opportunities dried up, he took off for a long trip through Europe. The expert diver recently called to tell his parents that he plans to settle in the Canary Islands, where he has found his niche in show business: working as a trainer of marine life in a Sea World-type park in Tenerife.

Reeling at the rush of opportunities and attention, natives became convinced that Uspallata’s renaissance had begun. They envisioned an influx of new camera crews. They wanted to preserve the elaborate sets in the desert to entice tourism, which has thrived in more populated areas of the state of Mendoza, thanks to well-promoted wineries.

“This could have been a wonderful tourist attraction, but the people in power have the brains of mosquitoes,” says Martin’s father, Jose.

The government nixed the proposal, citing ecological factors. The faux Tibet was dismantled. A few costumes are now exhibited in a museum in Mendoza.

And Gonzalez and her husband came up with the idea of a Tibet-themed cafe. They bought props and other scraps: dragon figurines, dark wood used for the film’s interiors and parasols that were converted into overhead lamps. A local painter who worked on the set designed and painted the cafe, which emphasizes Eastern religions and Tibetan imagery rather than exploiting the film itself, Planet Hollywood-style. Rather than Asian cuisine, the menu offers the standard Argentine fare of steak and pizza.

Business is not exactly brisk, Gonzalez says. Occasionally travelers and natives drop in, order a soft drink and sift through the photos, press clippings and memorabilia the owners keep in large binders scavenged from the crew.

“Some people,” she says, sighing, “come just to look and remember.”