Mente Revolver is the second piece from Tijuana reviewed this year. A city on the hinges of the multi-fangled global movements of capital, people and political ideologies in the early decades of the twenty first century. One of the things the film does effectively is illustrate the proximity (not merely geographical) between the Californian cities of Los Angeles and San Diego and Mexico. There might be a border, but borders illustrate closeness as much as distance. The differences between the beaches in San Diego and Tijuana are contingent on an accident of history, nothing else. Within this framework, Revolver Mente delivers a slightly predictable narrative, as the lives of three lost souls criss-cross, unable to escape the web of criminality which controls the city. The camera follows them restlessly as they try to find a way to survive. Two are Mexican men and the third is a woman from the USA, who has no more control over her destiny than the pair from South of the border. The director employs a harshness of tone and content in order to emphasise the cruelty of this world where the value of a human life is negligible, but he does so without quite achieving the pathos that Escalante achieved in Heli. There are also hints of Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. This is a world which is short on pity, but the final scene when one of the characters escapes to the relative safety of the San Diego offers some hope. Perhaps the border can be transcended after all.
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