Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) and Willy (Édgar Flores) on the train.
Here is a dilemma for European cinephiles. Is Sin nombre, a Sundance awards winner, an example of a new kind of committed auteurist film from the Americas or just another slickly-packaged City of God look-alike? Both of those extreme options have been taken up by reviewers.
This is a film written and directed by a young (31) American filmmaker of mixed Japanese and Swedish descent, Cary Fukunaga. It’s a US/Mexico co-production with the involvement of Focus Features as distributors and the ‘dos amigos’, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna as executive producers. So, it has muscle behind it. On the other hand, it’s the product of extensive primary research in Central America by Fukunaga and it’s presented in Spanish with subtitles.
The narrative involves two separate strands which come together. ‘Casper’ is a member of the MS 13 gang (see the IMDB bulletin board for explanations of this infamous gang which now operates across Central America and the US). He recruits a 12 year-old, ‘Smiley’, into the gang, but also foolishly consorts with a girlfriend without telling his local gangleader. Meanwhile Sayra, a young woman in Honduras, is persuaded to join her estranged father, who has been deported from the US, and her young uncle in an attempt to get back into the US via a long train ride through Mexico. She hits the border between Guatemala and Mexico, just as Casper and Smiley are ordered to rob the train. We aren’t surprised that Casper (under his other name of ‘Willy’) and Sayra get together on the train – what will happen next?
This is a very professionally-mounted film. The ‘Scope cinematography looks great (on a good transfer from a 35 neg to a digital print) and I also enjoyed the music soundtrack (which probably means a lot more to those who know the tracks/artistes). The performances are very good and overall it is a solid genre film – a mixing of the social commentary migration film and the youth/gang picture. There is an obvious authenticity about many of the migration scenes and there is also pleasure on offer in a look at Mexico from the top of a freight car. Whether this is as exciting or as innovative a film as the hype suggests is more open to doubt. All I can say is that I was gripped for 96 minutes and never bored. On that basis it’s good to see American-based directors reaching out to embrace Central American stories.
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
This 61 minute docu-drama has been restored by The World Cinema Foundation and was screened at the 2009 Il Cinema Ritrovato.
Directors: Fred Zinnemann, Emilio Gómez Muriel. Scenario: Augustin Velázquez Chávez, Paul Strand, Emilio Gómez Muriel, Fred Zinnemann, Henwar Rodakiewicz. Photography Paul Strand. Editing Emilio Gómez Muriel, Gunther von Fritsch. Sound Roberto, Joselito Rodriguez. Music Silvestre Revueltas.
Cast: Miro – Silvio Hernández. Entrepreneur – David Valle Gonzalez. Politician – Rafael Hinojosa. El Zurdo – Antonio Lara. With a supporting cast local fisherman.
The film was made by Mexican and US filmmakers for the Secretaría de Educación Pública of the Mexican Government. The story is set amongst a small fishing community and shot on location in Mexico at a river mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. The film is in black and white, with Spanish dialogue and English sub-titles. The film was among the early credits of Paul Strand and Fred Zinnemann.
Strand was a photographer who had worked in the National Film and Photo League. He had also worked on two silent experimental films. He was to become the central figure in a group of progressive filmmakers in the USA committed to politically informed documentaries. His later work included the photography for The Plow That Broke the Plain [1936] and the radical Native Land [1942].
Zinnemann had migrated to the USA from Germany where he had worked as an assistant cameraman, and was part of the team that produced Menschen en Sontag [1929]. Redes was his first directing credit and he later achieved success in this role in Hollywood. The two Mexicans who were important in setting up the project were Carlos Chavez, who was a noted composer, and Narciso Bassols, the Secretary of Educación Pública.
The simple story follows a fisherman, Miro, who is exploited by a local entrepreneur. The latter controls the fishing boats and access to markets. Miro becomes more radical when his son dies because he cannot afford medical care. He leads the fisherman in a revolt. But he becomes a martyr when his death is organised by a politician in the pay of the entrepreneur. The end of the film suggests the fisherman will fight on.
Visually the film is in a style that will become familiar in Mexican cinema: using the landscape to create a sense of belonging. The figures are frequently posed against water, clouds, their thatched huts and the implement of fishing. The use of camera angles suggests the influence of Sergei Eisenstein, who had worked in Mexico on the unfinished Que Viva Mexico between 1931 and 1932. This is also true of the editing which cuts between characters and actions to create meanings after the style of Soviet montage.
The film’s social consciousness is presented in a narrative that follows many conventions of the Hollywood model. We have an individual hero, and a linear plot, with clearly delineated morals. From that point-of-view the film seems to look forward to another set of filmmakers, Herbert Biberman and Paul Jarrico. Their Salt of the Earth, [1953] was set in New Mexico and dramatised a strike by Mexican migrants working in the mines. The pair of films would make an excellent double bill.
The World Cinema Foundation is dedicated the ‘preservation and restoration of neglected films from around the world’. The moving spirit in the Foundation is Martin Scorsese. Other noted filmmakers on the Board include Souleymane Cissé, Abbas Kiarostami and Wong Kar-Wai. www.worldcinemafoundation.net
The restored films are premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and they are also screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato. The latter is an archive festival held annually in the city of Bologna. The festival covers world cinema from the early silents up until recent productions. http://www.cinetecadibologna.it/cinemaritrovato.htm
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.
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.
La Zona is the real deal – a straight genre movie that delivers the anti-fascist message more effectively than The Wave. There is nothing desperately original here, but the mixture is new and it’s done with flair. At 97 mins it’s just about the right length, though I’m not totally happy with the ending (which may be my problem rather than the film’s).
I don’t want to reveal the plot twists, although this is the kind of genre film that tired fans will probably criticise for being ‘formulaic’ and they’ll guess what happens. But, I don’t think this is the point.
So, here’s the skinny. ‘La Zona’ is what is now often termed a ‘gated community’ – a global phenomenon just as possible in India or China as well as Rio, any major city in the US and no doubt parts of Europe. La Zona is well protected with a wall and surveillance to keep out Mexico City’s teeming millions of shanty-town and inner city block inhabitants. As one commentator points out, from the verdant golf course of La Zona, you can see the slums beyond the barbed wire. (I’m conscious of this because from the golf course near my house you can see the tower blocks of the local town – we don’t have gates, but we are cut off by a limited number of bridges over the canal.)
The innovation here is that the wealthy residents of La Zona have been granted certain legal immunities – as long as they don’t use violence to protect their property. But one night, when a storm causes an advertising hoarding to fall down and penetrate La Zona’s defences, three youths break in with disastrous consequences.
Early in the film a number of different genre repertoires are raided for familiar elements – a young couple are interrupted in their clumsy lovemaking – the perfect victims for a horror film catastrophe. Power cuts out and a surveillance system goes down. The outcome of these two events is bloody and then the other repertoires kick in. There is a central family of misguided father, liberal mother and confused teen and the dysfunctional nature of this grouping will provide the narrative imperative. Parents/elders meet in the school gym to co-ordinate their response – cue 12 Angry Men and the intimations of a fascist community response being established. Shock, horror – the local police captain is neither stupid or bribable. This presents the potential narrative conflict. From here on in, the narrative builds in a predictable manner, but it is well-handled, exciting and intriguing. There are hints of American style science fiction/speculative fiction. La Zona is almost a Ballardian creation. The creepiest character is a young businesswoman who seems completely without emotion. I hate to admit it, but Peter Bradshaw actually gets this one right and his suggestion that it might have been written by Ira Levin and adapted by Michael Crichton is a good observation. You do feel that some of these people could be androids straight out of Westworld. The opening shot of the film (don’t miss it – because it proves important later) also reminded me of a host of images selected to portray a seemingly peaceful suburbia and although it’s very different, I couldn’t help thinking of the opening of Blue Velvet. I was also reminded of some of those 1960s movies that worried about youth culture and totalitarianism. I’m thinking of Peter Watkins’ films, but a more literary reference would be to Lord of the Flies. La Zona flirts with a narrative strand in which the youths of the gated community turn to vigilantism. This is more terrifying because they are dressed in a uniform very similar to that of grammar school boys in the UK (see the image above). I was also reminded of one of the most radical of Hollywood teen movies, Over the Edge, in which middle-class kids bored on a new housing estate turn on their parents through boredom. So, here you have a thriller which draws on SF, youth pictures, legal dramas and policiers – amongst others. It’s perfect for a genre study day.
However, this is a popular Mexican film and carries the kind of political charge we’ve come to expect from recent Mexican movies. If you’ve seen Y tu mamá también and remembered its discourse about the inequalities in Mexican society, you’ll soon pick up the threads here. The climactic scenes have a real power to portray a near future which takes us straight back to the terrors of fascist rule. There is also a narrative strand that to some extent provides hope and therefore dissipates the sense of shock and outrage and this is what I’m struggling to come to terms with. In some ways I wish the film had ended earlier with a jolt. Still, this is something to argue about and I hope the film finds an audience in the UK. Apart from Gomorra, there isn’t much competition around, so discerning audiences should really look out for La Zona.
I was intrigued by the number of faces I recognised. The hospital doctor from KM 31turns up as a politician, the very wonderful Maribel Verdú (from Y tu mamá también and Pan’s Labyrinth) is rather wasted as the liberal mother. But the star turn as the father figure is by Daniel Giménez Cacho. I thought he looked familiar, but couldn’t place the actor at first – he was the creepy priest in Bad Education, another priest in Innocent Voices and the narrator on Y tu mamá también. In his early career he also appeared in Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos. There is clearly a growing pool of actors and crew members available for these Mexican-Spanish co-productions. (IMDB lists the film as Mexican, but there are credits for the Spanish funding agencies on the film print.)
This is a first time feature film direction job by Rodrigo Plá, whose second feature, Desierto adentro (2008) won prizes at the Guadalajara Film Festival. Scriptwriter Laura Santullo worked with Plá on both films. The UK distributor of La Zona is Soda Pictures which usually produces a good DVD.
Earlier this week, I went to Cineworld to see the Mexican horror movie, Kilómetro 31, with Nick. This was the third time we have been in the ‘De Luxe’ screen with the reclining seats as the only patrons. The previous occasions were also for subtitled films (the first Grudge film and Denys Arcand’s Oscar winner, The Barbararian Invasions). Each of these three films represented a chance taken by a distributor in opening subtitled prints in a multiplex. All clearly failed in Bradford (although to be fair, it was the early evening show). What to make of this? I checked the UK Film Council’s box office chart at the end of the week and Kilómetro 31 recorded one of the lowest screen averages of any film on a release of more than a few prints in my memory — an average of £187 for 27 prints giving a weekly box office of not much more than £5,ooo. That’s a pretty poor return for Yume Pictures who must have spent £25,000 getting the prints out. Unfortunately there was little if any promotion and only limited support from the specialised press. Yume have done some good work in getting cult films out there, but they boobed this time.
One question is whether the film would have done better showing a few weeks later at the National Media Museum — i.e. on a ’specialised screen’. It might, but I also remember that The Host struggled last year at this time in both multiplexes and on specialised screens. Like The Host, Kilómetro 31 is not a ’specialised’ film. It’s a popular genre movie that in its domestic market did sensational business and ended up as one of Mexico’s top box office films of recent years with 3.6 million admissions. The real problem is that UK audiences are not prepared to go for subtitled popular films. The arthouse audience seems to think that such films will be trashy and offensive and the popular audience perhaps thinks that they can’t enjoy a film with subtitles. This last doesn’t seem to be the case with the subtitled films I have shown to large student groups.
But is it any good you ask? We both thought that there were problems of pacing and plotting, but that overall it worked well and would certainly be worth showing to a student audience. For slightly older audiences (i.e. early 20s) it may be that the film suffers from coming at the tail end of the Ring Cycle and its American remakes. The ingredients are all familiar in the watery environments, young women with long black hair and a ghost child straight of The Grudge. Younger audiences might find these elements slightly less familiar. Of course, these generic tropes make the film much easier for critics to dismiss — stand up Xan Brooks in the Grauniad with a fairly sloppy mini-review. Once again, the venerable Philip French in the Observer shows a more measured approach, recognising what Kilómetro 31 actually is and granting that it does its job pretty well.
The story is based on a ‘local myth’ which is a familiar narrative in other horror movies. In this case it is La Llorona or the ‘Crying Woman’ who appears to motorists on the highway and who in her way is just as dangerous as the mad hitchhiker of urban myths (or indeed as the old women who seduce and murder passing samurai in Japanese horror). Director Rigoberto Castañeda has claimed that the script took a long time to develop and that he was not directly influenced by The Grudge which appeared during the shoot. Hmm, perhaps! But The Ring was certainly out earlier. Does it matter? Not really, what is interesting is how the familiar elements are used and what they mean in a Mexican setting.
One interesting link is to Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también in which the three central characters — from Mexico City — tour rural areas and Cuarón uses a voiceover to tell the audience something about the lives of the people by the roadside and how they have been overlooked, oppressed by the urban ‘neo-colonialists’. The four central characters here are urban motorists driving through a suburb where, at the time of colonisation, an Indian mother lost her child because of maltreatment by the Spanish (or as the subtitles intriguingly put it ‘a Spaniard man’). Like Y tu mamá también, Kilómetro 31 has a Spanish character as one of the protagonists. The film is a Mexican-Spanish co-production, but the inclusion of the Spanish character is also an important narrative element.
A second link is to other US horror narratives such as the Poltergeist films, in which a modern town/suburb is built over traditional burial grounds, allowing both a thematic of colonialism/materialism and the narrative promise of the ‘return’ of a ghost, who cannot sleep until injustice has been put right. This focus on the ‘phantasm’ is something which Guillermo del Toro has spoken about at length, especially in relation to his ghost creation in The Devil’s Backbone. I wonder what del Toro thinks of Kilómetro 31? The Mexican reviewers have generally claimed that Kilometro 31 is a ‘return’ for Mexican horror after a 20 year absence. They tend not to count del Toro’s Cronos (which I would certainly call horror), so I’m not sure what was the last Mexican horror film to be seen outside the country.
Finally, it’s worth saying that the film looks good in ‘Scope with a familiar (from The Ring) blue-green palette. Perhaps the most striking visual aspect is the director’s penchant for extreme close-ups. One kiss in particular sees two noses in profile edging towards each other from either side of the ‘Scope screen. Very disturbing!
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