Y tu mamá también (Mexico/US 2001)

Luisa, Tenoch and Julio at the big society wedding where the boys meet their travelling companion (having humiliated her husband).

(These notes were first published in 2004)

Introduction

Y tu mamá también is an accessible and enjoyable film from Mexico (providing that viewers have no problems with the graphic presentation of the sex lives of the characters).

On one level, the film is a mix of familiar genres – ‘road movie’, ‘coming of age’/youth movie and melodrama. But on another level it is a social commentary on Mexican culture. Never didactic, the filmmakers manage to subtly introduce this commentary via the development of a set of very specific aesthetic devices.

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, written by Carlos Cuarón and starring Gael García Bernal (as Julio), Diego Luna (as Tenoch) and Maribel Verdú (as Luisa).

Outline synopsis

(These notes assume familiarity with the narrative, so there are SPOILERS embedded.)

Julio and Tenoch are young men in Mexico City who are about to see off their girlfriends who are travelling in Europe. Stuck for something to do for the Summer, they decide on a road trip to find the mythical ‘magic beach’ known as ‘Heaven’s Mouth”. At a family wedding they meet Luisa an older woman from Spain who is married to Tenoch’s cousin – and seemingly unhappy with her lot. To their great surprise, she agrees to accompany them on their trip. The boys compete to seduce Luisa, who is far more experienced than either of them. After a series of adventures, they arrive at the coast and become friendly with a local fisherman and his family. There is a twist at the the end of the tale and an epilogue when the boys meet again after the first year of their degree courses.

Mexican cinema

‘Latin American cinema’ has a long history featuring periods of both commercial and artistic success. Compared to other parts of the world outside Europe and North America, Latin American culture is influenced by three distinctive factors:

• the close proximity of the US to Mexico and the American assumption that all of Central and South America is a ‘US sphere of influence’;
• Spanish as a common language (apart from Portuguese in Brazil and other languages in the Caribbean islands) and the lasting influence of Spanish cultural achievements;
• independence from European colonial powers in the 19th century, but issues about the persecution/assimilation of ‘Native Americans’, still sometimes referred to as ‘Indians’ or in Mexico as Amerindians.

The three largest countries, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, have had the biggest presence in film production (although Cuba ‘punches above its weight’ and Bolivia has produced at least one major filmmaker).

Mexico had a major industry in the 1940s, producing genre films such as family melodramas, musicals and action pictures. At the time of the Hollywood studio system, Mexico produced stars who appeared in both Mexican and Hollywood films – Dolores del Rio, Pedro Armendáriz – and others who were big stars within Mexico. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mexico was recognised internationally, because of the artistic success of the exiled Spanish director Luis Buñuel. Up until the last ten years, only a handful of other Mexican directors have been granted limited distribution in art cinemas in the UK.

Much of the commercial energy and the attention of the popular audience in Mexico has been diverted towards television since the late 1950s. Mexico is a big producer of telenovelas – popular television serials, similar to US/UK soap operas, but with stronger genre links to romance and melodrama. These programmes attract very large and enthusiastic audiences. They are also exported (along with similar series made in Brazil and Columbia), not only to other parts of Latin America, but also to Africa and the Middle East. This is a clear indication of the potential of Mexican production. In cinema, however, Mexican audiences have largely turned to American films which, as in most countries, take 80% or more of local box office.

The recent resurgence of Mexican cinema as ‘global cinema’ – i.e. significant circulation of a film in different markets across the world – centres on the work of three youngish directors, Guillermo del Torro (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth and American films such as Mimic, Blade 2 and Hellboy), Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros (Mex 2000), 21 Grams (US 2003)) and the director of Y tu mamá también, Alfonso Caurón (who also directed the third Harry Potter film). All three now live in the US. Nevertheless, they claim (supported by critics) to have made the most definitively ‘Mexican’ films of recent years. In other words, they make films that are not pale genre copies of Hollywood films, but instead offer representations of life in a Mexico that its inhabitants recognise.

The Spanish connection has been important to Mexico. Spanish has long overtaken French as a major world language (alongside Arabic, Mandarin and English) and this increases the market potential of Spanish language culture. There is the possibility of Spanish co-productions and also the exchange of actors and production crews.

The political context for filmmaking is also important in Mexico. In 2000 the Mexican electorate finally voted to oust the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had held power since 1929. The new president, Vincente Fox, represented a new beginning. Fox may have turned out to be something other than what the voters first thought, but his election couldn’t help but change the outlook of most of the population.

In fact, Fox is a conservative, akin to the Republican Party in the US. He has opened up Mexico to both the US and global capital. A truly radical political force does still exist in Mexico in the form of the Zapatistas, the rebels in the Chiapas region of Mexico, close to the border with Guatemala. Naming themselves after Emiliano Zapata, the leader of the 1911 Revolution, the rebels have proved themselves to be adept at low-key but effective organisation and action in resisting the ‘neo-liberalism’ of the multinational corporations.

Genre and Y tu mamá también

One of the ways in which the film works is to set up expectations based on generic conventions, only to confound and surprise the audience in the final act of the narrative.

The road movie

The basic narrative structure of Y tu mamá también is that of the road movie, one of the prime cinematic genres – i.e. a genre developed within the context of cinema, not borrowed from another media form.

A road movie is based around a journey – in its classical form, a journey by motor vehicle across the continent. The journey will require stopovers in strange, usually small town, communities before ending with an arrival at some kind of defining location. The journey is akin to a form of ‘quest’, with the heroes acting as ‘knights of the road’. The thematic of the road movie tends to be ambiguous in that characters are either running away or searching for something new – often at the same time. The journey means that they will have new experiences and meet new people and both of these will set challenges for the heroes. The new situations will also test the relationship between two characters who might think that they know each other very well. At some point in the journey, the characters will find out something about themselves.

In terms of iconography and style, road movies are characterised by certain restrictions on camerawork – either the camera shows relatively close framings of the characters in the car or it shows long shots of the car travelling across the landscape.

Shots of the road are inevitably accompanied by music. Easy Rider (US 1969) was one of the first successful ‘modern’ road movies. The box office success of this low budget film encouraged producers to produce similar films and also to look for music tie-ins. Easy Rider was one of the first Hollywood films to come with a soundtrack album of rock songs, most of which were not written with the film in mind. Ever since, road trips, especially for younger characters, have been accompanied by ‘driving’ music, often guitar-based with lyrics celebrating the ‘freedom of the open road’.

The youth/‘coming of age’ movie

The emergence of the ‘teenager’ as a new marketing concept in the US in the early 1950s coincided with the decline in Hollywood’s traditional family audience. Young people were the new audience and films were made to target them directly – hence the ‘youth movie’ (often shown in the new drive-in cinemas).

Youth pictures are not just a Hollywood phenomenon. Youth culture is central to the export of American consumerist culture and encompasses music and fashion as well as cinema and videogames, the internet etc. The ‘youth picture’ could be argued as a generic category, but it is a broad category within which there are several distinct groupings. One is the so-called ‘coming of age’ film in which a boy or girl goes through a form of, usually sexual, initiation into adulthood. The road trip provides the perfect opportunity for the staging of this narrative – freedom from parental control and the restrictions of school and the excitement of new places to see, new people to meet etc. There is also a time limit on the story – the trip must end in time for the youths to go on to university – and this provides some of the narrative tension.

Luisa and Tenoch

Social comedy

Another sub-group of the youth movie is the ‘teen comedy’. In the female variant of this narrative, the comedy is ‘romantic’ and centres on the obstacles in the path of true love in the romantic comedy. In the male variant the focus is much more likely to be whether or not the lead characters can find the way to lose their virginity. The young men of Y tu mamá también are certainly not virgins (although they are in some ways still ‘innocent’). However, the narrative they inhabit does at first glance appear to have been plucked from the pages of a lad’s mag – the fantasy of an ‘older woman’ on the road trip and the possibility that she might sleep with one or other, or both, of the youths. The comedy comes from the fact that although the youths can fantasise, they have little idea about how to deal with the reality of the narrative events and inevitably make mistakes in their social behaviour.

Political commentary

The least likely generic reference would seem to be ‘political film’ – but this is precisely what the critical consensus on Y tu mamá también suggests. This is partly down to the director Alfonso Cuarón himself, who has spoken about his own experiences as a teenager in Mexico City in the 1970s (he was born in 1961). Cuarón recalls seeing the films of Jean-Luc Godard in ciné clubs and suggests that this is where the idea of the voiceover commentary comes from. He makes specific reference to Masculin féminin and Bande à part. Godard, one of the most important directors associated with the ‘French New Wave’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s made films that were avant-garde in terms of both aesthetics (how they used sound and image) and, increasingly in the 1960s, revolutionary politics.

The voiceovers in Y tu mamá también, as Edward Lawrenson suggests, tend to give an air of melancholy to the film, often commenting on death – something unconsidered by the teenagers, but an important element of the narrative. But it is another aspect of the voiceovers and the general aesthetic of the film that reveals its political sub-text. Cuarón takes care with his camera to reveal to the audience the ‘other Mexico’ through which the boys travel and which most of the time, they fail to properly see.

Tenoch and Julio are both, by Mexican standards very well off. Mexico has a large population (over 100 million), most of whom live in urban areas. This means that in many parts of what is a large country the rural population is sparse – and poor. The per capita income in Mexico is something like a quarter of that in the UK and Canada and perhaps one fifth of that in the US – one of the reasons why the inclusion of Mexico in the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) with the US and Canada is such a contentious issue. (Economists debate what the effects might be, but clearly these are not ‘equal’ trading partners.) Mexico is characterised by a small wealthy middle class and a large working class, many of whom have moved to Mexico City to look for work. This is the subject of the ‘commentary’ about the worker who is killed crossing the road in order to save time getting to work.

The division by social class is mirrored by the ethnic divisions in the country. The largest ethnic group in Mexico (around 60%) is classified as mestizo or ‘mixed’. These are people who are the descendants of intermarriage between Europeans (predominantly Spanish) and the local Amerindian peoples of Central America. The Amerindians themselves make up some 30% of the Mexican population. ‘Europeans’ make up 9%, leaving 1% to cover all other groups. The 9% of Europeans make up the Mexican middle class. On this basis, the decision by his parents to name ‘Tenoch’ after an Aztec chieftain who founded what is now Mexico City is a calculated attempt to assert ‘Mexican-ness’. The Aztecs were from North Mexico and they dominated the Southern Maya people before the arrival of the Spanish. A name like ‘Tenoch’ could be provocative for the people of Southern Mexico (especially in Chiapas, the state that is home to the Zapatistas).

Julio and Tenoch are themselves separated by a class division. Julio lives with his mother and sister who both work. Tenoch has a father who is an important politician and he lives in a grand house with a maid (who was also Tenoch’s nanny). This rift between the boys is central to the narrative.

The journey undertaken by the boys is from cosmopolitan Mexico City, south west towards the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. This is a movement from urban to rural, from sophisticated to ‘simple’, from rich to poor and from European to Amerindian. The film shows the two boys to be almost oblivious to the changing environment, but the camera and the voiceovers mean that the audience is constantly invited to notice the discrepancy between the rich boys’ internal world and the realities outside.

David Heuser (see website reference) offers a fascinating analysis of the film which he reads as a commentary on the impossibility of Mexico getting the kind of government that he thinks it deserves. In this analysis, Tenoch and Julio are representative of the two main political forces in Mexico (the upper class and the lower middle class – the ‘bourgeoisie’). Their obsession with selfish (sexual) demands prevents them from recognising what they could achieve through co-operation. For Heuser, the car represents Mexico and Luisa represents the possibilities of European-style government. Once she takes over, the goal of the journey, ‘Heaven’s Mouth’, becomes real, not a myth – just as the political goals of the country could become achievable. However, when the boys leave their tent, the pigs (i.e. the peasants) run amok, ‘proving’ to the boys that the peasantry can’t be trusted. When they wake up in bed together, the boys are horrified – they can’t face the prospect of being together. When Luisa dies the experiment has come to an end. This is a detailed and quite convincing reading.

In an interview on the DVD, director Cuarón says the film is about ‘identity’, for Luisa, for the boys and for the country. He says Mexico is a teenage country that still needs to find its identity. He also confirms that the names of the characters refer directly to Mexican history. Luisa is a ‘Cortés’ – the name of the original Spanish conqueror (‘conquistador’) of Mexico. Tenoch is an ‘Iturbide’ – the name of one of the early political leaders of revolutionary Mexico who wanted to become President. Julio is named Zapata – the name of the great revolutionary fighter (from whom the contemporary ‘Zapatistas’ take their name).

The voiceovers in the narrative structure

The narrator’s voice appears roughly twenty times during the film (more frequently in the first half). The function of the voiceover is to do three things. First, it tells us the important information about the backgrounds of Julio and Tenoch, their families and their girlfriends. This enables us to make a ‘reading’ of the characters and place them accurately in the Mexican class structure. Cuarón argues that giving this kind of detail in his Hollywood films proved impossible, but here it adds a great deal to our understanding.

The second purpose is to reveal to the audience things that Julio and Tenoch do not know about each other and also to show aspects of Luisa’s behaviour that the boys don’t notice. A good example of this is when the car breaks down and Luisa buys a doll from a local woman because it has her name. The voiceover tells us that she is thinking about the doll when she passes a funeral procession for a child. This links to later scenes by the beach when she plays with the fisherman’s children. Finally the voiceover tells us that she left the doll to the fisherman’s daughter. Throughout the film Luisa is much more aware of the lives of people around her – in contrast to the boys who are interested only in themselves. Another good example is when the car is stopped by a group from a small village and the boys are asked for money for the village queen. Only Luisa looks at the young woman. (Yet a little while earlier they have passed the village where Tenoch’s nanny was born.)

The third purpose of the voiceover is to tell us about characters who are either peripheral to the story (like Chuy, the fisherman) or completely outside the boys’ story. These are comments on the lives of Mexico’s rural/migrant poor. Further examples include the migrant worker killed crossing the street and the road accident which is marked by a roadside shrine. As well as these incidents, the voiceover reminds us of the political changes in Mexico. This stealthy political comment is also taken up in the cinematography and mise en scène.

Camera and mise en scène

The camerawork is an integral part of the overall ‘feel’ of the film. It is fluid but not overly expressive. Much of the time, scenes are shown in relative long shot, e.g. in the two scenes when Luisa seduces the boys. The central three characters are in the frame together inside the car for long periods. Organising this when they are driving in the car is quite difficult and sometimes requires a distorting wide angle lens. If it is not peering into the car, the camera is often showing the car in long shot, from in front or behind on the road itself or at an angle from the road. Alternatively, the camera looks out of the car windows at the countryside passing by. It is the shifting balance between these kinds of shots which slowly begins to show the audience more about the conditions of the local people.

In the early part of the journey, the camera is mostly focusing on the trio, but there are several instances, often in conjunction with the voiceover, when it manages to capture what is happening at the edges of the frame, or just out of the frame in which the boys are appearing. The best example of this is in the scene when the trio arrive for their first overnight stay in a country hotel. As they are about to order food, the camera leaves the party and follows one of the family in the hotel into a back room and then on into the kitchen where the family are eating and getting on with their busy lives.

A second example comes a little later when a discussion about sex in the car is undercut when the camera peers out of the car window to notice a pick-up truck carrying two armed police overtaking. Further on down the road the camera again peers out of the car, ignoring the trio who are too engrossed to notice a shot of the armed police who seem to be arresting a group of farmers selling their produce at the roadside. There are several other examples of the repression carried out by police at roadblocks etc., all passed without a sideways glance by the boys in the car.

Popular culture

The political commentary in the film is not recognised by every audience (in fact, it is probably recognised by a small minority in audiences outside Mexico). Some critics have lambasted the film because it panders to American teen culture. It has been described as mirroring American Pie or Dude, Where’s My Car? Although there are some obvious similarities with these films, both the tone and the look of the Mexican film are quite different.

The interaction with American culture is also more complicated than simple acceptance of the dominance of American forms. Xan Brooks quotes Paul Julian Smith on the way that the language used by the boys – ‘chilango’ a kind of ‘Mexican youth speak’ – is quite distinctive. As is the music, much of which is a form of ‘Mexican style’ Anglo-American music – made either by Mexican bands or Hispanic bands in the US. Other tracks are European rock or more traditional Mexican music. (A complete soundtrack listing is available on the Internet Movie Database entry for the film.)

An example of how music ‘codes’ the changing world through which the car travels comes at the point where the portable tape player runs down because the batteries are fading. The boys have been playing American or Mexican rock, but now as the political struggles in the world outside the car become more apparent, the music on the soundtrack becomes more ‘local’ or more ‘roots’ as it must be derived from local radio stations. As the soundtrack switches to this rootsier music of accordions, the world outside becomes more alien – the boys’ car is hemmed in by cattle and they react angrily. Later they have to be towed to a garage behind an ox cart.

The stars

The success of the film is partly down to its young stars, especially Gael García Bernal. Bernal (born 1978) had already shot Amores Perros when he began work on Y tu mamá también. He was a child actor in a soap on Mexican TV and came to London to study acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Since Y tu mamá también, he has appeared in other Mexican and Spanish films, but 2004 has seen two major releases which have confirmed his status as perhaps the hottest young star in World Cinema. Bad Education (directed by Pedro Almodóvar) and The Motorcycle Diaries in which Bernal plays a young Che Guevera both offer interesting comparisons to Y tu mamá también, especially Motorcycle Diaries as it is another Latin American road movie with a political sub-text. Screen International (9/9/04) recognised Bernal as one of the few stars who can expect to be successful in Hollywood and in both Spanish and Mexican films (the large and growing Spanish speaking population inside the United States will also help. Diego Luna (born 1979) has a similar background, again starting as a child star on Mexican television. He has also appeared in several Hollywood films, notably in the lead for Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004) and Goal, (2005).

Rudo y cursi (2008) directed by Carlos Cuarón and starring Bernal and Luna is a kind of companion piece to Y tu mamá.

Questions for discussion

1. Find some examples in the film of the youths acting in ways similar to those found in American ‘teen movies’ – how are these scenes ‘undercut’ by local, Mexican cultural differences?

2. Find examples of the ‘voiceover’ technique in the film – including each of the three types discussed in these notes. For each example, analyse what is being shown by the camera and mise en scène during the voiceover. How do sound and image work together?

3. How do the representations of the two boys differ in the film? Is it purely a difference in social class?

4. How do you read Luisa’s role in the narrative? How much is the ending of the film similar to the ‘twist’ in Hollywood films?

References

Jose Arroyo (2002) Review of Y tu mamá también in Sight and Sound, April

A. G. Basoli (2002) ‘Sexual Awakenings and Stark Social Realities: Interview with Alfonso Cuarón on Y tu mamá también’ in Cineaste Vol XXVII No3, June

Xan Brooks (2002) on http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4463899,00.html, accessed 8/8/04

David Heuser on http://music.utsa.edu/electron/YTuMama.htm, accessed 8/8/04

Edward Lawrenson (2002) Interview with Alfonso Cuarón, in Sight and Sound, April

Paul Julian Smith (2002) ‘Heaven’s Mouth’ in Sight and Sound, April

All text in these notes © 2004 Roy Stafford/itp publications unless otherwise indicated. Images from Y tu mamá también © Icon

Rudo y Cursi (Mexico/US 2008)

The wonderful Mexican poster for the film

This film is very much a companion piece to Y tu mamá también (Mexico 2001). Carlos Cuarón wrote the earlier film which is brother Alfonso directed. This time Carlos both writes and directs and Alfonso produces (alongside the two other amigos, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarittu). The same two actors, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna again play the leads and the film is a co-production involving Luna and Bernal’s Canana, the tres amigos Cha Cha Chá and the Hollywood studio Universal/Focus Features.

The earlier film saw Luna and Bernal as middle-class sophisticated Mexico City adolescents on a road trip to a kind of maturity in the Pacific seaboard province of Guerrero. The new film reverses the narrative so Tato (Cursi/Bernal) and Beto (Rudo/Luna) are ‘country hicks’ spotted by a talent scout who stumbles across their performances in a local football team. With the two plunged into Mexico City life as unlikely stars of top teams, a sharp satire of football and Mexican society ensues. If you are a football fan you’ll quickly work out all the likely scenarios, though the ending might throw you a little.

Like many aspects of the film, the ending seems almost devised to alienate an American audience. I presume that most of what happens to the pair as footballers also happens to basketball, baseball and American football players as well, but American audiences may not be familiar with the references that Latin American and European audiences will pick up on. There are also a couple of specific points that I noted thanks to posters on IMDB. The Mexican film poster above shows Diego Luna clutching his genitals – a reference to an incident in the film, but also an iconic image of footballers protecting themselves on the pitch. In the American film poster (look on the IMDB page for the film) Luna’s hand has moved to a pointing finger. The talent scout in the film speaks Argentinian Spanish and the subtitles reflect this by giving him British English words like ‘wanker’ and ‘bugger’ – quite a clever idea, I think, but puzzling for some audiences.

I’m sure that there is a lot of the film that I don’t get. Like Y tu mamá también, I suspect the film offers a discourse on Mexican politics and social issues, though not as directly or as pointedly as the earlier film. Once again, there is a voice-over that comments on events, although this time it is one of the characters in the narrative rather than an anonymous observer. The film seems ‘realist’ rather than escapist (another ‘anti-Hollywood’ trait?). I don’t want to spoil any narrative enjoyment, so I’ll just point out that the inevitable often happens to characters and though the film is clearly a comedy for the most part, it isn’t starry-eyed or overly-optimistic. That was a slight problem for me in that I didn’t laugh all that much because I knew what was coming (i.e. as a football fan). However, I did enjoy the film overall and the twin performances of Luna and Bernal are excellent and worth the price of admission alone.

I recommend the Bulletin Board discussions on IMDB. One board in particular carries a detailed discussion about the ethnic mix in Mexican society and the rights and wrongs of having ‘white’ European Mexicans playing Rudo and Cursi. Unlike the all-to-common slanging matches on IMDB boards, this is an interesting and thought-provoking discussion. Slightly less revealing are the attempts to translate the nicknames ‘Rudo’ and ‘Cursi’ given to the two country hicks by the Mexico City tabloids. I like the ‘rough’ and ‘mushy’ translation best, although ‘corny’ is possibly more correct for Cursi. Like many sporting nicknames, these are both derogatory and affectionate – there is a lovely scene in the film when Cursi meets fans who state their intention to tear him limb from limb if the team doesn’t win and then beg for his autograph.

For Gael García Bernal fans (I know that there are plenty out there), I should also mention that Tato’s dream is not really to play football (which he is very good at) but to sing (which Tato certainly isn’t good at – but Bernal may be, for all that I know). Still you do get to watch him in a nice Western suit and hat combination.

Blue Eyelids, Mexico 2007

Victor and Marina on a muted picnic date.

Nick thought this was one of the worst films he’d ever seen. I’m not sure. I did find some passages excruciating, but then the story involves two socially inept people attempting to create a relationship and their awkwardness is effectively represented. My main difficulty with the film is that I’m not sure exactly what kind of film it is meant to be  – it contains social comedy, romance and drama and has some kind of relationship with melodrama as well as a sense of surrealism and possibly mystery. There is no reason why a classification should be easy to make but here there is an uncomfortable mixture that needs a highly skilled director to keep everything in check. Ernesto Contreras is a first time feature director (of his brother’s script) and I wonder if this is the problem?

The two protagonists are Marina, a 30-something sales assistant in a store selling uniforms for catering staff and Victor, a man of a similar age working as an office assistant in a large insurance company. Their meeting and subsequent conventional dates – a picnic, cinema trip, dancing etc. could have formed the basis for an uneventful courtship drama, but one given an emotional charge by their desperation and the opportunities for a kind of grim comedy. However, the story is framed by another narrative, that of Marina’s elderly employer, a woman who was herself saved from a desperate marriage by her ‘magical’ discovery of sewing skills and an entrepreneurial spirit. The ‘inciting incident’ in the narrative is the employer’s decision to offer a prize draw for all her employees with a two-week beach holiday for two as the prize. Marina wins the draw (made by a pet caged bird) and has to find a partner for the holiday.

As I struggled to read the film, I was troubled by two concerns. The first was the overall filming style. It did look as if director, cinematographer and editor had a specific approach in mind that involved fairly muted colours for the interiors, a play with shallow fields of focus and occasional pull backs to long shots. But quite a lot of the time, this didn’t work. In the picnic scene I waited for some significance to the long shots of traffic, but apart from showing what a poor choice of picnic spot it was, I couldn’t see any reason for the shot selection. In other restaurant scene, I have to agree with Nick that camerawork and editing were simply poorly executed.

My other problem is perhaps tied up with my own perceptions of Mexican cinema – my expectations have been heightened by films that are generally melodramas, political satires or horror/thrillers. The device of bookending the narrative with the employer’s story (heavily dependent on the caged-bird metaphor) meant that I was looking for the slightly surreal/mystery element that you might find in one of Saki’s short stories or in one of Buñuel’s Mexican films. Probably it isn’t there, but I’m still not sure.

Blue Eyelids (Marina wears make-up for the climactic date) won a couple of festival awards and several reviewers have praised the film highly. I’m not sorry I watched it, but I suspect that it wouldn’t stand too much close scrutiny in a second viewing.

¡Viva! 15th Spanish and Latin American Film Festival

If you are interested in Spanish language cinema, there is only one place in the UK to be during the first half of March and that is Manchester, where Cornerhouse Cinema hosts the ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival. But don’t despair, if you can’t get to Manchester you can still see some of the films on tour around the UK (and in Dublin) at various specialised cinemas.

The festival includes screenings (with a mini Cuban festival during this year’s celebration of 50 years since the Revolution), guest appearances, Q&As and special events, education events for Spanish language students and much more (including a salsa demonstration in the bar and Spanish-themed food and drink). Cornerhouse is helped to produce the festival by staff from the two Manchester Universities and the University of Salford plus the Instituto Cervantes.

It’s always difficult for me to get to festivals during term time, but this year I managed a day at ¡Viva! and relished the opportunity to enjoy three films and to feel the buzz of being in such a lively atmosphere. First up was a new documentary about one of my favourite directors, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the best known Cuban filmmaker outside Cuba and arguably one of the two or three most influential figures in the history of Cuban Cinema.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

This 2008 documentary, a Cuban/Spanish co-production titled Titón, de la Habana a Guantanamera and directed by his wife Mirta Ibarra, is a memorial, a love letter and a celebration. It also offers a persuasive argument in favour of one of the great filmmakers of the last century who chose to work in revolutionary Cuba rather than move to North America or Europe – where it would have been easier to make films and to promote himself.

Through a combination of interviews, newsreel and film extracts, ‘home movies’ and photos, Ibarra has concocted an engaging and informative documentary record. I was particularly interested in the early material dealing with Alea’s time at the Cine Centro Experimentale in Rome and his subsequent career in primitive advertising films in Cuba prior to the 1959 Revolution. Most of his earlier films have not, to my knowledge, been available in the UK and it was fascinating to learn more about these. The documentary also provides more contextual material for any analysis of Alea’s better known work such as Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). Alea’s ‘middle period’ features in the 1970s and 1980s are also unfamiliar for most UK audiences and again I found that the documentary whetted my appetite for more.

Perhaps the most important achievement here is the presentation of Alea’s criticism of the Cuban Revolution as the positive supportive action of a man who believed in the true concept of ‘constant revolution’ – the only real way to support struggle is to keep arguing for more and better changes. Any of those puzzled American critics who still persist in seeing Alea’s best-known films like Memories and Strawberries and Chocolate (1993) as somehow subversive of the Revolution would do well to study Ibarra’s film.

The only slight downer in this screening was the poor quality of the archive material on show. It looks to me as if ICAIC, the Cuban film institute, must have transferred its archive of newsreel footage to video. The documentary itself, like many festival screenings these days was projected from Digi-Beta tape.

The Black Virgin (Venezuela 2008)
I don’t think that I’ve seen a Venezuelan film before and I found this one a bit of a struggle to pin down. Cornerhouse had a poster suggesting a romantic comedy. It certainly had its comedy as well as melodrama moments. It was also presented with what I must reluctantly assume was ‘magic realism’ (that term seems now to be so overused). The story is narrated (in an adult voice) by a young boy and he may of course be an ‘unreliable narrator’. He begins by describing his affection for his beautiful teacher and being mildly irritated by the attentions of his precocious classmate who expects to marry him. But the narrative’s main focus is the despair of a woman who thinks her husband is ‘playing away’. We then learn that this community lives in a unique ‘town of black people’ on the coast of Venezuela. In a sequence straight out of a ‘Columbus discovers America’ movie, we see a flashback to a Spanish woman arriving on the coast with her aged husband and the coffins of her three sons all killed in the Spanish Civil war. ‘Senora Isabel’ is played by Almodóvar’s 1980s heroine Carmen Maura on fine form (but in a rather limited role).

Francisco Díaz and Carmen Maura in La virgen negra

Senora Isabel has built the town and is responsible for its people. When the aggrieved woman seeks the help of a local woman with some form of magic power, she learns that the way to get a wish granted is to change the figure of the Virgin in the local church for a ‘Black Virgin’. Senora Isabel grants the woman’s wish. The Black Virgin appears and all kinds of wishes – good and bad – come true.

I’m assuming that many of the allusions and references in the film (e.g. the presence of a Brazilian in the village) have specific meanings in Venezuela. I found myself drawing on my limited knowledge of other Hispanic Caribbean/African communities such as Cuba and Nicaragua to make sense of the cultural mix and especially the use of religious imagery and music. The photography is very stylised with extensive use of filters or digital manipulation to create the magic realist tone. The film ended abruptly after the intrusion of a second narrative associated with an external threat to the town. I think it would be difficult to release this film in the UK, so I was grateful for the chance to see it. We get too few opportunities to see how other cultures attempt to use cinema to tell local stories. 

Luis Fernando Peña as 'Memo' in Sleep Dealer

Sleep Dealer (Mexico/US 2008)

This terrific ’speculative fiction’ movie combines an impressive array of contemporary developments in both technological and political activity to produce a genre picture with real soul.

‘Memo’, the neatly named protagonist, is a youth in a village in Oaxaca in the far south of Mexico. His father has a small agricultural plot – a ‘milpa’ where beans are grown as a combination crop with corn. But life is hard. A US multinational company has damned the river and taken ownership of all the water – the campesinos must pay to irrigate their land and the dam is protected by robot guards with video cameras and machine guns.

Memo is bored and sets up an illegal satellite dish hacking into phone lines around the globe. One night he is listening in on a conversation when he realises hat he has been detected and he immediately shuts down. Shortly after, he and his brother set off on a short trip, but watching TV in a bar they suddenly realise that the reality TV show which shows American security forces blowing up the hideouts of suspected terrorists has detected Memo’s satellite dish and a ‘drone fighter’ piloted by a controller in San Diego is set to demolish their home. They are too late to save the shack and their father who is shot down as he tries to escape.

In despair, Memo heads for the North to become a sleep dealer in Tijuana. The border with the US is closed but Mexicans still do the work for Americans. They go to factories in Tijuana where they jack into a neural system and operate robots carrying out all kinds of tasks in US industry and services. This work eventually makes the worn-out workers blind. The final main narrative idea is that neural bloggers offer ‘memories’ for the nostalgia industry on the neural network and Memo has his own memories ‘uploaded’ without his knowledge. How will he react when he finds out?

All of these ideas leap off the news headlines. Water as a commodity, private security, US drone strikes in Pakistan etc. are ripe for exploitation. There are obvious reference points to Phil K. Dick (he would have loved the neural blogging of memories as an idea) and to films like David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46. This a really clever script with its play on the Mexican-American cultural experience. I was also reminded of the first Robocop movie when seemingly outrageous ideas were delivered in TV broadcasts. It’s a cliche now perhaps, but as in Paul Verhoeven’s later Starship Troopers, there is still mileage in hearing a reality TV announcer warning you that there is extreme violence coming up and then exhorting you to make sure that your youngest kids don’t miss it! This and similar sick jokes got big laughs at the screening.

A Sundance-supported film, this Mexican-US release (largely in Spanish) looks like it has been picked up by Fortissimo and might well get a UK release. Director Alex Rivera is American with Latin-American parentage who decided on a Spanish language production with Hispanic characters (in America and Mexico). I’d urge you not to miss it if it does appear. With the earlier La Zona this is further proof of the strength of popular Mexican cinema and its ideas about speculative fiction.

The screenings of both La virgen negra and Sleep Dealer were close to full houses and this added to the fun of watching the films. ¡Viva! is a festival well worth supporting. See you there next year in March? And don’t forget the tour!

Hasta siempre (UK/Cuba 2005)

   

Shooting on the streets of Havana

Hasta siempre is a 57 mins documentary produced by an independent group in Brixton, South London, that enables ordinary people in Cuba to speak about their lives and their hopes for the future. The format of the film is very simple. After a brief historical background, utilising some newsreel footage, the main body of the film comprises interviews with a variety of Cubans. There is a historian and a psychologist (one of five siblings who have had professional careers in the years since the revolution) but also older people, mothers and children, youths and middle-aged people. Two things are striking about the interviews. Firstly, most of those interviewed are Afro-Cuban. This not surprising given that the filmmakers are (I assume) from Brixton’s African-Caribbean community (or have been chosen by Brixton producers). But it does mean that this documentary corrects the under-representation of Afro-Cubans in Cuban films generally. Secondly, the interviewees are not hand-picked as supporters of the revolution. Some are critical of current conditions – others very pleased for what they have got. The most telling interviews are those in which a youth first tells us all about the problems and just when you think he’s about to say that he wishes he was in America, he asserts that he never wants to be anywhere else but Cuba. Generally, the people interviewed seem very sussed and very aware of what is at stake in Cuba and what they would lose if the current situation changes. Even some of those who are critical recognise the realities of the situation. The main negative comment is that people can’t travel and visit the US, UK, Jamaica etc.

Overall, this is a limited view of aspects of Cuban reality, but I would recommend it as an informative documentary which made me more optimistic than pessimistic about the future for Cuban socialism. The DVD is available from Rice ‘n Peas and sells in the UK for £10 – you can see extracts from the film via the link. It’s available in other currencies as well.

This YouTube clip shows the start of the film (to get a sense of how the interviews work, go to the Rice ‘n Peas page above.

La Muerte de un Burócrata (Death of a Bureaucrat, Cuba 1966)

Dirty work for nephews?

Made in 1966, it took this film until 1980 to be released in America (see below) – as with this post, see the other Cuban films below! Made by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who much later went on to make Fresa y chocolate (1994), the first Cuban film to receive an Oscar nomination for the best foreign film, the film is a fantastic blend of all kinds of influences that reflect Alea’s own career up to that point and post-revolutionary Cuba. As interesting, especially when you read other reviews, is the varied responses to the film that seem to say as much about the culture that people are writing from, as any intended effect or message devised by the filmmaker himself. Alea, himself a supporter of the revolution that brought Castro to power, did not look at his culture from within. Early in his career, he studied film in Italy (in the early 1950s – post the major works of Italian Neo-Realism).

La Muerte concerns the death of a dedicated working man, so dedicated that he has been buried with his working card as a symbolic acknowledgement of his lifetime of service (churning out busts of José Martí, ‘the Apostle of Cuban Independence’). When his wife, accompanied by her nephew, goes to collect her widow’s pension, nothing can be done without the missing card, and the rest of the film is the tale of our hapless hero’s attempts to retrieve it and to rectify the injustice that has been done.

Given the specificity of the film’s time and cultural place, the expectation is that you would need to explore all the references to even begin to fully understand it. Certainly, it’s filled with in-jokes about the regime in Cuba, which is apparently why its release in the US was so substantially delayed (for fear that its Latin-American self criticism would be grist to the US political mill). In fact, it works brilliantly now – perhaps for any of us who have experienced petty bureaucratic frustrations and the apparently wilful misinterpretation made by people with that authority (temporarily) over you. Hang on – something like a universal experience there then!

I won’t pretend to even begin to have understood all the references, but I was struck (as an outsider) by the nephew’s regular use of of the word “Compañero/ Compañera” when addressing (politely) the increasing stream of uncooperative, disinterested bureaucrats he encounters. It implied a shared vision and belief and therefore added to the humour through its increasing dissonance with their behaviour. The whole film begins with the collective version of the noun to address the mourners at the funeral. Reading a variety of reviews, there is a difference in the interpretation of the tone – from interpreting it as being a gentler kind of humour to a subversive critique of the Cuban social structure. The film certainly resonates with British examples, probably more in the former category, which lampoon British rituals and empathising with the common man (of which the nephew is a perfect example). Immediately, I found myself reminded of Joe Orton and Loot – with its ascerbic, farcical treatment of a funeral that’s being used as a cover for a robbery. The black comedy is less severe in Death, although at times no less dark – with the vultures circling over the uncle’s house where the unburied body awaits an exhumation order. Both indulge in that ‘comedy of manners’ where characters are increasingly going through the motions of the behaviour expected of them, while everything unravels underneath. (There is no surprise at the nephew’s final murderous chase through the cemetery).

Rather than ‘Ortonesque’, critics refer to it as ‘Kafkaesque’ – because of its links with the spiral of hopelessness of Joseph K in The Trial within the ‘corridors of power.’ However, this belies the effect of the humour (in both Loot and Death) that casts something like tolerance over the society it represents. It is humour shared by insiders, who have experienced those rituals and problems and continue to do so, without the threat to individual identity and the real hatred of the power of oppression that Kafka shows in his narrative.

Alea had adapted a Kafka short tale early in his filmmaking (Una Confusión cotidiana (1950)). His biography demonstrates the wealth of influences in his work and these are visible even within this one work. Luis Buñuel is referenced and there is a surreal, absurdist sensibility running throughout. However, there is the silent comedy style (Mack Sennett is referred to) – and there is a direct hit on Harold Lloyd as the nephew attempts to escape a building via its high ledge and a large clock. The comedy is played with such sympathy (my limited reference palette wants to suggest ‘Chaplin’) – because of the way we are completely on the side of the little man, whilst laughing at some of his disasters. There is a wonderful moment when he is sent to the back of the queue, only to reach the front as the clock ticks onto five. The current ‘compañero’ dons jacket and disappears, refusing to stamp even one more sheet. I laughed at and with – Salvador Wood’s unassuming underdog was perfect, with all kinds of small nuances of expression and gesture that communicated exactly his response or emotion.

I’ll end with a reference to B. Ruby Rich’s review of the film in Jump Cut (22 May 1980) for a most comprehensive analysis of the film and its cultural context.

Un Paraíso bajo las estrellas (Paradise under the stars, Spain/Cuba 2000)

I thought it was a bit of a gamble buying this Region 1 DVD and I was still not sure after an opening cabaret performance. However, when the narrative got going, I realised that this was quite a find in terms of genre cinema and Cuban representations.

I take the film to be a comedy melodrama related to the television telenovela, so popular across Latin America. Others have compared the film to the similar Spanish comedies of Pedro Almodóvar in the 1980s and I can see this as well. The whole point of the telenovela/melodrama is to offer a complex web of relationships, many of them family relationships that are not known to the family members involved. These relationships are then revealed in scenes that are sometimes farcical. In this film, Sissy is a young woman who wants to become a cabaret dancer – just like her mother before her. But her father, Candido, who was a cabaret singer himself, now drives a truck and is separated from his wife. He doesn’t want his daughter to join the family business. Sissy goes behind his back and impresses Armando, the cabaret owner/impresario. At the same time she meets Sergio (Vladimir Cruz, star of several Cuban films of the period) and immediately falls in love. The other major characters are Sonia (Armando’s young wife who also seems to know Sergio), Mabel (Daisy Granados, grande dame of Cuban Cinema) who is another ex-cabaret performer and a ‘creole’ couple, Promedio and Josefa, close friends of Candido and godparents for Sissy.

This is a standard cast list for the genre. What makes the film particularly interesting is the discourse on race in Cuba. Armando is African-Cuban and all the characters know each other. You can probably guess that it is all a question of who is really the child of who else. The general confusion also raises the possibility of incest and in a sense ‘plays’ one taboo against another. The complex racial composition of the Cuban population is also presented in economic terms when a Spanish impresario says that he’d like to book Sissy, even though the market usually demands black or mulatto stars.

I found the film genuinely funny and quite brave in its discussion of race (which also includes some references to Cuban Catholicism and an African spirit medium). I confess that cabaret dancing doesn’t do anything for me, though it looks well done and there is, I think, a genuine Tropicana club in Havana with a show titled ‘A Paradise Under the Stars’. The film is directed by a veteran producer/director, Gerardo Chijona and is a co-production of the Cuban state film organisation ICAIC and two Spanish companies, Ibermedia and Wanda. It’s not particularly ‘filmic’ and seemed to me to be more ‘televisual’ in aesthetic terms, with the ‘clean’ and ‘cold’ look of a television telenovela. The acting and pacing, however, overcame any of my qualms about the look of the film and I’d recommend this to anyone prepared to enjoy the preposterous narrative events and to engage with Cuban culture. The ’special period’ of economic privation was lifting a little by 2000, but Cuba still has serious problems. This isn’t a ’serious’ film as such, but the discourse about race in Cuba is interestingly presented for a popular audience.

The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin (Cuba 1967)

 

 

Julio Garcia Espinosa and Julio Martinez (Juan)

This extraordinary but enjoyable film was made by one of the leading figures in post-revolutionary Cuban Cinema, Julio García Espinosa (born 1926). He was one of the few Cuban directors in 1960 to have been formally trained and became one of the founding members of ICAIC, the Cuban Film Institute. In 1969 he wrote a famous essay on the concept of ‘imperfect cinema‘. Up until his retirement in 2007 he was the Director of the International Film and Television School in Cuba. There is a useful Jump Cut essay by Anna Marie Taylor that analyses the film in terms of imperfect cinema. This is quite a detailed essay and so here I’ll just try to introduce the film in relatively simple terms. It is now available on both Region 1 and Region 2 DVDs. My comments refer to the Region 2 disc from Network, a company specialising in archive UK TV material, but presumably with a deal covering material from the old East German studio DEFA as well as ICAIC.

The film opens in Black & White CinemaScope and immediately made me think of Sam Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957) with small groups of horsemen riding over rolling hills in long shot. But instead of Barbara Stanwyck in leathers we eventually get introduced to Juan and his sidekick Jachero. With some interesting graphics in the title sequence and a score by the leading Afro-Cuban musician Leo Brouwer, my first guess was that this was some kind of Cuban take on the ’spaghetti western’. It takes a few moments to realise that it is not going to be a linear narrative as we switch between several different ‘adventures’ with the same three or four central characters in each (Juan and Jachero, the heroine Teresa and the moustachioed villain). There are also mismatches between sound and image, jump cuts transforming characters and objects etc.

I watched it with Nick and we were both puzzled for a while until we got into it and began to deconstruct the film. Clearly we have a traditional Spanish hero and his partner – a kind of peasant version of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza or perhaps the Cisco Kid and Pancho. The sequences are shown out of presumed chronological order, but we are offered Juan and Jachero in various situations in which they are forced to challenge an oppressor (the same villain) in the role of police chief/mayor/sugar mill owner etc. as well as stand up to the Church. Eventually they will join the revolutionary guerillas and take part in the capture of a village (in a sequence offered as a training film – even though our heroes are sometimes quite inept). The situations are typical of a colonised culture (staging a bull fight) and the presentation modes act as a critique of conventional genre films (including a kind of spoof James Bond, complete with ‘oriental villain’). But overall the film remains a comedy and we laughed on several occasions. According to some commentators this was the most successful Cuban film of the time attracting 2 million admissions – a very large figure given the population of Cuba (around 10 million) in the 1960s.

The concept of imperfect cinema refers to the need to steer revolutionary film away from the ‘perfection’ of Hollywood cinema and its ‘closed’ narratives with conventional genres and character types. It is better for audiences to have to do some work to ‘finish off’ the story, providing their own insights. This is similar in some ways to the ideas behind Brecht’s approach to theatre. ‘Imperfect’ does not imply, as detractors might claim, an impoverished and amateurish low-budget cinema. ICAIC budgets were not large, but the films were well-made and looked and sounded fine. Taylor’s essay suggests that Juan’s adventures might have proved popular, but that they were unlikely to have had the political impact that Espinosa called for two years later. (She suggests Espinosa’s 1970 film about Vietnam was more successful in these terms – but it is not available on DVD.)

Another Jump Cut resource is this translation of Espinosa’s essay on imperfect cinema by Julianne Burton.

Quite a good overview of different periods of Cuban film is available on FilmReference.com