ajuste de pérdidas (w&d miguel calderon, w. guillermo fadanelli)

The Loss Adjuster would be the English title. It’s a bracing little mockumentary, made by the artist who features within his own film as himself. It follows Pedro, a Loss Adjuster, a disillusioned, charismatic bon viveur and art collector who, spoiler, we are informed at the end of the film is a real character being played by someone else. It’s hard to know who in the film is real and who is played by an actor, something that retrospectively colours the viewing. Pedro visits sites of tragedies to ascertain what was responsible. He buys art. He’s filmed smoking cigars and drinking whisky. He has a louche, hyper Mexican approach to life. The film took, for me, an even more surreal turn, when Pedro, on a boat going through some everglades, starts explaining how he’s met an actress who wants him to participate in a play by a female English writer, none over than Sarah K. Pedro, who is not an actor, accepts, because he fancies the actress. The play is Blasted, even if the title is never stated. There is a coherence to performing Sarah’s play, a meditation on violence and the effects of misogyny, in Mexico. There are scenes where Pedro argues with the director, who also happens to be the actress’ partner, about how to represent Ian, holed up in a Leeds hotel room. Pedro, searching for someone’s grave for reasons I couldn’t entirely understand, eulogises the work of the young English writer. It’s not entirely clear if he realises she is no longer alive. For obvious reasons this was the point in the film when it went from being quite entertaining to downright fascinating. Even if the angle the film is seeking to explore never seemed entirely clear, it is never less than intriguing. One suspects that the young English writer would have appreciated it.  

el desfile del amor/ the love parade (sergio pitol, tr. george henson)

Pitol’s rangy whodunit offers a vivid portrait of DF from both 1942 and twenty years later. The narrative is constructed around the enquiries of a historian into a murder at a house split into apartments in a fashionable barrio, during the war. The historian was a child living in the house at the time. Now married with two children, he has been living in the UK, but plans to return to his roots. The premise allows the writer to introduce a medley of colourful characters from the Mexican capital’s arts and social scene, highlighting its cosmopolitan nature. The narrative is slightly stop-start, and something of a shaggy dog story, but it gives an insight into the feverish atmosphere of wartime Mexico City.

güeros. (w&d. alonso ruizpalacios, w. gibrán portela, alan page)

In some corner somewhere I had been advised that Güeros was one of the top films of the 21st c so I went on an expedition to the underbelly of cinema, the Sala Chaplin, which is a story in itself, and caught it, running into Felix, both of us noting that the Cinemateca was un poco flojo in its programación this week. If this is an anecdotal, cotidiano entrance to this review, then that feels just right. Güeros is more or less a 24 hour trip through a day in the life of Mexico City (DF), from the badlands to the occupied university to a posh restaurant to the out of town high rise estate. And much more beside. Ruizpalacios endows the film with a visual poetic which means a cabbage can have as much weight as a brick. There’s the best of the  film school aesthetic at work, a joy in detail and the close-up, all lovingly framed in black and white. The narrative feels like it owes a debt to Los Detectives Salvajes, as Tomás, his older brother, Sombra, their friend Santos and finally the charismatic student leader, Ana, go on a mission to find a lost singer with a stylised name, a man who made Dylan cry. The story goes round bends and down dales (with the use of a beaten up car fundamental in the sprawl of DF) and the film retains a lyrical, affectionate feel. There are some very simple get-outs - ie at once point to escape from danger the crew just run away and get in a car and drive off, which reminds us screenwriters that sometimes you don’t need to overthink the narrative: if the film has engaging characters, visual flair and the sense of an ending, you can cut the odd corner. Ruizpalacios, I note, went on to make the arthouse hit, The Kitchen, co-written by none other than Arnold Wesker, so he’s a shrewd customer, and a great addition to the amazing Mexican canon of the 21st century. 

you dreamed of empires (alvaro enrigue, tr natasha wimmer)

Enrigue’s pandemic text is a playful dissertation on the arrival of Cortes at the court of Moctezuma. This is the ur story for the founding of modern Mexico - Iñaritu also incorporated it in his ‘Mexican’ film, Bardo. That first clash of kingdoms, civilisations, ways of thinking, that would shape the geographical territory now known as Mexico, from whence cometh Enrigue himself. The author chooses to engage with the narrative in a playful, self-acknowledged Borgesian form. Using well-known accounts from the time, and great big ice cream cones of his own imagination, he takes the reader back to those days which can only be described as fateful, letting them unravel like the skin of a dead warrior left too long in the sun.

For those who are not familiar with the more Latino account of the tale, the Mexica and their glorious city of Tenochtitlan, were not brought down by the Spaniard’s superior military skill or technology, but by the conflicts endemic to the territory, which Cortes skilfully turned against the Aztecs, and the decadence of their own empire. Enrigue’s Moctezuma is a mushroom junkie. He has the mental confusion and lucidity of a Burroughs, which is exciting but hardly suitable for maintaining an empire against multiple threats. His court is riven with paranoia, given its ruthless martial politic. A warrior culture ensures rigid discipline and clean streets but when the leader goes rogue, more Kurtz than Genghis, the whole edifice topples and it only takes one jumped up conquistador to bring it down.

Enrigue details all of this with playful charm. He takes us through the long-lost streets of the Aztec capital, one of the lost wonders of the world. His cast of characters are all possessed of a glorious, doleful humanity which goes above and beyond cultural origins. If you want a cracking read about the end of the world, and one can imagine why the author chose to address this subject during the pandemic, this is it. 

the fugitive (d. john ford & emilio fernández, w. dudley nichols, graham greene)

Ford’s Mexican movie is a curious, beautifully lit creature. Loosely adapted from the Graham Greene novel, The Power and the Glory, it tells the tale of a priest being pursued by the Mexican army during the religious persecutions following the Mexican revolution. Henry Fonda plays the priest with a deadpan solemnity. The whole movie feels as though it has been mounted and framed, which is gloriously effective during many of the beautifully shot action sequences, or the impeccably lit interiors, but makes for a slightly stiff human narrative. Ford seems to relish the visual possibilities of filming in Mexico, but his actors aren’t given scope to do much more than look the part. 

nb - curious to think of Ford and Buñuel filming in Mexico at more or less the same time.

the houseguest (amparo dávila, tr. matthew gleeson)

Dávila’s collection of short stories tend to feature the incursion of a bizarre, threatening element into the life of the protagonist. In the titular story, this is the houseguest, whose menacing presence ruins the narrator’s life. In other stories it might even be a Dostoyevskian version of the narrator him or her self. The stories possess a crisp economy, a sly window into the neuroses of mid twentieth century Mexico. 

the transmigration of bodies (w. yuri herrera, tr. lisa dillman)

Herrera’s novela was originally published in 2013, something that is surprising given that it seems to belong to that nascent genre, the covid novel. It’s a short, elliptical tale, featuring characters with symbolic names (The Unruly, Romeo, The Redeemer, who is the narrator).The Redeemer is a form of fixer stroke PI, who is charged with recovering the bodies of the son and daughter of two rival families who had fallen in love, each dying in strange circumstances. One of the most notable elements of the book is the way it is set within a world where some kind of contagion is rife and people are supposed to use facemasks. It reads now like a quasi biblical parable from the parallel world we recently inhabited. Perhaps it is also kin of Escalante’s second film, the sci-fi thriller La Región Salvage. Mexico being a country which exists on a parallel hyper-symbolic plane, one which the rest of the world shared for a few brief years. 

perdita durango (w&d álex de la Iglesia, w. jorge guerricaechevarría, david trueba, barry gifford)

Emerging from de la Iglesia’s bombastic movie, I was told that it went down a storm in Mexico when it came out, back in the twentieth century. It would be worth analysing why that would be, given that the Mexican lead, Romeo, played by an over-the-top Javier Bardem (is it cosplaying when a Spaniard plays a Mexican bandido as a psychotic?) fits a stereotype of the kind of deranged, amoral killer which US governments warn are exactly the type of people they need to keep out. Much of the action takes place on or near the border itself, which Flavio Martínez Labiano’s flamboyant camera work depicts with swooping helicopter shots, pre-drone. As Romeo and Rosie Perez’ Perdita criss-cross across this border, wreaking havoc, they tread a fine line between charismatic anti-heroes and sadistic monsters. I guess if one identifies as an anti-hero, something which the us-and-them of the border encourages, then it’s not that hard a leap to identify with Perdita and Romeo. It’s an interesting contrast with other border fictions. In McCarthy, the gringos are the good guys, crossing into a biblical world whose protean mores they grapple with. In Villeneuve’s lurid Sicario, the Mexicans are just as amoral and sadistic as Romeo and Perdita, but with none of the charm. So in a sense, de la Iglesia’s operatic tale can be seen as a vindication of those who are usually vilified, and their arbitrary vengeful abuse of two young kids is a turning of the tables. On the other hand, a film which glorifies a rapist, (or rapists, because Rosie also gets in on the act), is perhaps harder to like in this day and age, even if this might be termed a film which clearly comes from another era and the kids seem to get off on it.

In many ways Perdita Durango feels like one of those macho films with a female lead that got given budgets back in the day. Perdita is second cousin to Betty Blue or Thelma and Louise or La Femme Nikita, even Run Lola Run, eponymous avatars of a kind of kick-ass femininity which still feels a long way from feminism. 

drug cartels do not exist: narcotrafficking in US and mexican culture. (w. oswaldo zavala, tr. william savinar)

Zavala’s book is fascinating for two main reasons. The first lies in the title, as the author analyses the way in which the concept of the “cartel” has been propagated and manipulated as a mediatic narrative device to mislead. Zavala’s thesis is that the cartels, as they have been termed, are in fact disposable front organisations which are placed in the limelight in order that we don’t look at who’s really controlling the global narcotics trade. The more that they are glamourised and fetishised, the more effective this strategy is in masking the true players. There is an impeccable logic to this, even if Zavala’s investigation into who is really controlling the trade, and why, is somewhat cursory. He notes that in many cases, the violence of the cartel wars serves as a useful pretext for the seizure of land which is rich in mineral or mining rights by the forces of neoliberalsm, displacing whole communities in the process. The narcos act like a forest fire, stripping the land for subsequent appropriation.

The second fascinating aspect of the book is the way in which it then traces the role that literature and culture play in this process. Referencing Mexican and other writers, including Bolaño’s 2666, Zavala interrogates the mythic construction of the cartel narrative, noting how many writers, even when seeking to construct a critical analysis of the concept, only serve to reinforce it. There are others he quotes who situate the narco-narrative within a framework which is more in line with his theory that the cartel is no more than a convenient construction. Much of the book is dedicated to Zavala’s analysis of the role culture plays in the construction of a mythic paradigm that plays into the hands of forces who seek to use this paradigm to conceal their own actions. It’s a great thesis, which ties in with Shelley’s unacknowledged legislators, and shows a level of understanding of the power of story in socio-political discourse that is rarely acknowledged.

(It would be interesting to do a similar analysis, for example of the way in which culture, both high and low, has played into the myth of British exceptionalism, whose effects have been so harmful in recent decades.)

cuaderno ideal / loop (brenda lozano, tr annie mcdermott)

I slightly regretted looking up the author and discovering that far from being the quiet marginal figure that this novel suggests, she is in fact a player in the Mexican literary scene, who was immersed in controversy when AMLO chose her to be cultural attache to Madrid, an offer that was subsequently rescinded. Loop, or to translate its Spanish title more accurately The Ideal Notebook, a pun on a brand which is also the book’s quest, to find or perhaps create an ideal notebook, is a short, discursive text which feels as though it has been cobbled together with bits of string. It transpires during the time that the narrator’s partner, Jonas, has left her to go to Spain to mourn the death of her mother. Whilst he is gone, the narrator pines for him, sees friends, hangs out, cogitates about Proust or Bolaño or Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, among others, and goes on a couple of trips herself. It’s a deliberately lightweight floaty book. The swallow is a recurring image, and like a swallow, Lozano’s writing seems to glide on her thought processes, sometimes darting, at others giving the impression that the text is scarcely moving at all. Lozano’s text belongs to a school of writing, of which Luiselli is perhaps the most celebrated exponent, the novel as literary journal, and in spite of the limitations of this format, Lozano pulls it off with a marginal charm. 

bardo (w&d iñárittu, w nicolás giacobone)

Iñárittu is a showman and Bardo is nothing if not a show. From the opening, a delirious, icarus-esque swooping over the desert, segueing to an underwater sequence on the LA subway, to a bravura non-interview in a Mexican TV studio, to the close, the film is composed of vivid, sometimes delirious sequences where the camera jockeys for position with text and actors. Once again Iñárittu frequently uses a fish-eye lens, as though he is trying to cram as much information into the screen as it can take. The nods to other filmmakers, in particular Tarkovsky, are explicit. Like many a gaudy show, it is in danger of outstaying its welcome once the bells and whistles become predictable, even repetitive. We know when we enter the gents in a vast Mexican club that we’re not going to go out the same way we came in, that this is just a portal to another cine-set which is waiting behind the next door.

This is undeniably an imperfect film, but perhaps all the better for being warts and all. The themes the filmmaker addresses are interlocking: family, fame and Mexico. It probably helps to know something about Mexico and its relationship with the USA to get the most of the film, which opens with the conceit that Amazon is going to buy Baja California and a vast set-piece sequence about the Mexican-USA war of 1845. The protagonist, Silverio is a Mexican filmmaker caught between two worlds, just like Iñárittu, struggling to retain his Mexican identity when he has made his career in Hollywood. The typography of the credits alludes to the Mexican flag, and the times when the film becomes most discursive is when characters address the dichotomy between being Mexican and remaining in Mexico, or leaving it. It should be remembered that it’s not just the director who heads North. In large swathes of Mexico much of the population has crossed the border to find work. In this sense, the Silverio/ Iñárittu journey reflects that of much of the nation, even if the majority of those exiles’ arguments about their reasons for having left might be less recondite.

At the same time, the film is a telling celebration of the capital, DF. Most of the film takes place in its streets and there are times when Bardo captures the glorious dissonant energy of Mexico DF with real aplomb. This is a very different DF to Cuarón’s ode to the city in Roma. (In Bardo the indigenous maid is refused entry to the beach, so she wouldn’t be able to save the children if they were in danger of drowning, a telling indictment of the country’s classist society). Iñárittu’s Mexico is wild, sweaty, drunken, consumed by family and friends, petty jealousies and deep loyalties. The very messiness of Bardo, its incompleteness, feels completely authentic to the culture it is seeking to portray. Down to the complexity of Mexican identity, as noted by a scene where Cortes claims to be the first Mexican on top of a pile of indigenous bodies in the Zocalo (another ‘spectacle’), or when Silverio is mocked in a fictitious interview for his ethnicity. Mexico is a melting pot and has been for thousands of years, the Spanish just added more blood to the mix. Bardo grapples with the multiple contradictions of Mexico and being Mexican with more than enough vigour to compensate for the director’s self-indulgence. 

hurricane season (w. melchor tr. hughes)

Having read Paradais , it made sense to get to grips with Hurricane Season, which some have compared to Marquez. If this is correct, (and in this translation it doesn’t feel like it is), then it is a frightening reflection of what has happened to the Latin American literary world, and perhaps Latin America itself. In her machine gun prose, Melchor takes the killing of a trans and spins it into a golgothic voyage through a dead end Mexican pueblo. In this place, everyone is desperate, everyone is driven by venal desire, everyone will meet a cruel fate. Teenagers have miscarriages, other teenagers fantasise about fucking and killing their best friends, the elders have had all hope extinguished. There is no magic in this realism, the magic has been expunged, even the black magic has had its throat cut and died in a ditch. It’s not an easy read and there is no redemption to be found. The only thing that the characters know is that it will rain one day and they are likely to die sooner rather than later.

Although the scale of Hurricane Season is grander that of Paradais, the novel feels less nuanced. There is a reliance on the flair of the prose over and above the development of character. It is, one imagines from an editorial perspective, seductive. Long sweeping tracts of text, stepsisters to Bernhard, trampling over the Mexican littoral, delivering adrenaline shots of brutality and sexual violence. It is a representation of Mexico which mirrors one reality, whilst at the same time annulling all the others. The novel has much in common in with the section in 2666, the Part about the Crimes, without any of the framing contextualisation of Bolaño’s novel. The horror is overwhelming and restrictive, the novel peering through the narrowest of lenses at a world no-one would ever want to visit IRL. 

nazarín (w&d buñuel, w julio alejandro)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 5/6

Nazarín tells the story of a priest who is too virtuous for his own good. Adapted from a Galdós story, it’s a lumpy film, opening with a long sequence in the small community where the priest is based, before expanding in the second half into rural Mexico, as the priest is compelled to flee, followed by two devoted women who revere him. The opening half hour feels dialogue heavy and theatrical. The film struggles to catch fire, (until it does), and it’s only when the priest sets out on his odyssey that the film and the narrative gather pace. There is an obvious critique of the Catholic church, with the priest’s goodness proving to be his undoing (perhaps reminiscent of Greene’s The Power and the Glory), but more than anything the film offers Buñuel a chance to explore and reveal a deeper Mexico, a Mexico far from the big cities. His depiction of the campesinos and the pueblos is impressively filmed by DP Gabriel Figueroa, and this world, with its rogues and dwarfs is beautifully brought to life. The paradoxical majesty of the Hispanic architecture juxtaposed with poverty and struggle and the smallness of man in the face of the epic countryside, is captured as the priest’s calvary leads him and his followers towards a bitter end. The films of Reygadas are second cousins to Buñuel’s vision in Nazarín. 

robinson crusoe (w&d buñuel, w hugo butler)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 4/6

Since I read Robinson Crusoe a few years ago it has always intrigued me that Buñuel should have chosen to direct a version of Defoe’s novel. What Defoe’s tale depicts is, in so many ways, the antithesis of the classical Buñuel text. Buñuel is fascinated by society and the way in which the human vices and passions run beneath a veneer of civilisation. On a desert island with no-one for company, the only society Crusoe has is his pets. It’s perhaps indicative to see what Buñuel kept in from a novel which has to be cut to ribbons to fit the 90 minute format. One thing he retains is Crusoe, when leaving the mutineers behind on the island, telling them that they have one thing he lacked: human company and someone to talk to. The true challenge for the filmmaker is to make a film which doesn’t permit him to use his most effective skills: the dissection of human society. Instead, Buñuel pursues a study of loneliness and isolation, until the arrival of Friday. Crusoe goes through the wringer of existential despair, human activities which keep him distracted, self-pity, and optimism. This sequence, before Friday appears, is perhaps the more complex and intriguing part of the film, although it is slightly disturbing to see the way in which representation of native peoples, to use a phrase, does not appear to have developed greatly in the course of 250 years since Defoe. 

el (w&d buñuel, w luis alcoriza)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 3/6

El is the first of the Mexican films from this season which starts to feel like “Buñuel”. The dialogue-free opening five minutes set the scene. A priest washes the feet of a young member of the congregation. Francisco, a vigorous and wealthy middle aged man, surveys more feet, finally landing on those of the fetching Gloria and from that moment on it is amor fou, with Francisco determined to woo and steal Gloria from under the nose of his friend, which he does. What we don’t realise, and what seems in many ways a most modern approach, is that Francisco is an abuser, perpetrating both psychological and physical abuse on his new wife. The trajectory of this abuse is traced with subtlety, starting out as petty jealousy and then leading to violence and madness. The film is careful not to show Gloria as a victim; as is so often the case in abusive relationships, she is both hopeful that things will get better, and ground down, bit by bit, as they don’t. Buñuel and Alcoriza’s denouement doesn’t occur between Francisco and Gloria. Francisco follows a woman into a church, where he goes completely mad, with the madness conveyed from his point of view as he views the congregation mocking him, in his mind. This set piece scene is edited with comic glee. Other moments, such as when Francisco sits alone on his elaborate stairwell, contemplating killing Gloria with a stair rod, have real menace. There’s a wonderful final touch, when we revisit a supposedly cured Francisco in a monastery. Only the lie of the cure is given by the zig zag walk he adopts, which echoes the walk he made up the stairs when he set off to kill his wife. It’s one of those small details which give the film an added weight, and cleverly undercuts any pretence of a ‘happy ending.’

On imdb, someone claims that the cowled actor in this final sequence is actually Buñuel. It’s also worth noting that there are echoes of Vertigo in the bell tower scene, although this should be the other way round, as Vertigo was made in 5 years after El, and some claim Hitchcock stole/ was inspired by El. 

susana (d. buñuel, w. manuel reachi, jaime salvador, rodolfo usigli)

 Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 2/6

There were mild guffaws in the audience as Buñuel’s overripe plot reached its melodramatic denouement. The narrative revolves around the tempestuous titular character, who escapes from the reformatory and is then taken in by a wealthy, kindly family on their estancia. The fetching Susana proceeds to cause havoc, as the master, played again by Fernando Soler, his son, and the head of the estancia all fall for her charms, with predictably chaotic results. The ending is so banal it’s positively subversive, as Susana is rearrested and everything returns to an idealised normal. However, in Susana one can begin to trace elements of Buñuel’s later work. The examination of the way in which a seemingly stable and righteous social order is vulnerable to Dionysian attack. The subversive power of sexuality. The fragility of civilisation. All these elements are at play within the film, which Buñuel again directed from someone else’s script. 

el gran calavera (d. buñuel, w. janet alcoriza, luis alcoriza, adolfo torrado)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 1/6

Buñuel had to leave Spain after Franco’s defeat of the Republican forces. He went to Los Angeles for a bit, then headed to Mexico to direct Gran Casino, which was a flop. According to Wikipedia, he then spent three years surviving on money his mother sent him and was contemplating giving up filmmaking, before he got given a break when he was drafted in to direct El Gran Calavera, featuring the Mexican actor Fernando Soler. There’s nothing particularly surreal or Buñuelesque about El Gran Calavera, a moral comedy about a lazy, wealthy family whose paterfamilias, Ramiro, played by Soler, has turned into a drunk following the death of his wife. His family sponge off him, until he gets so drunk he nearly dies, and as a cure he is tricked into believing that he has lost his fortune and the family has been compelled to move into a poor neighbourhood. The moral fable is given a twist when he learns about the deceit and turns the tables on his family. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this film, over 70 years old, is how funny and engaging it is. The narration is taut, the storytelling is lean and the script is endowed with humour and moral complexity. These are comic characters, but they are also three dimensional. The vision of Mexican society is curious with the class divisions noted, but, the film contends, far from insuperable. It would be interesting to see if a contemporary remake would have any chance of being in any way plausible. 

nightmare alley (w&d guillermo del toro, w. kim morgan)

Nightmare Alley starts somewhat clunkily, with a lot of awkward edits as the plot sets itself up and introduces the world of the circus which Bradley Cooper’s Stan is about to become a part of. In this sense it feels like the adaptation of a novel to the screen, where the novel has limitless time to build its rhythm, whereas film, in particular narrative driven film, needs to hit the ground running. Stan’s journey towards becoming a key part of the circus company seems to happen almost overnight. The mystery of his past is left hanging (and never really resolved). At first it looks as though he’s on a mission of revenge, or seeking out a lost lover, but this turns out not to be the case and the film never makes any real attempt to justify why the good-looking protagonist needs to inhabit this world, rather than any other. It will turn out that much of this set-up is required to deliver the punch-line (or remate) with which the film concludes. It’s a pretty good punchline, so it’s just about worth it. As the would-be love story emerges, the film seems to settle down. The thematic of ambition and greed starts to take over, with the protagonist’s journey becoming more clear cut.

It feels worth dwelling on the plot to such an extent, because the most intriguing element of the film might be the tension between the requirements of story and the director’s desire to paint big set piece scenes. This is why we spend so much time in the circus, getting acquainted with a whole raft of characters who will be ditched at the halfway point. The circus, as many a director will attest, is a visual treat, a through-the-mirror wonderland. There are echoes of Pan’s Labyrinth in this fantastical world, but the demands of the narrative mean that the film has to move on and leave this spirit world behind. The film recreates this to an extent with the Mentalist scenes, but by now the issues of character and plot predominate.

The issue of the mentalist comes to the fore in the film’s second half. It’s a fascinating trope and the scenes where Stan manipulates his marks felt like they could almost come out of a PT Anderson film (specifically The Master). The issues of wartime loss and human susceptibly give Nightmare Abbey a weight, albeit a kind of unbalanced weight. The mentalist operating in high society represents a similar exploration of the sub-conscious to the world of the circus. The film isn’t lacking for ideas, and it feels as though one of Del Toro’s strengths is his ability to take the Hollywood world and give it a distorted Latino twist. (There were times when Nightmare Alley reminded me of the work of Juan José Saer.) It’s an unbalanced, contrived vision, which teeters on the edge of self-parody, but just about dragged this viewer with it to the film’s coda, a bathetic sucker punch. 

paradais (fernanda melchor, tr sophie hughes)

Fernanda Melchor’s short novel is another to add to the compendium of contemporary visions of a Mexico which has been scarred by violent crime. Reviewer notes at the front of the book mention 2666, but this novel feels closer to Escalante’s Heli, as a touchstone. Melchor interrogates the crudeness of a macho violent culture through two characters, Polo and Franco. Franco is the wealthy Fatboy loser who lives with his grandparents in a gated community. Polo is the young odd-job-man who Franco befriends with free alcohol. Polo despises Franco, who lusts foolishly over a middle aged neighbour, but his own desperation means he allows himself to get sucked in to Franco’s plan to rape her whilst Polo plunders. This frightful and foolish mission is described at the end of the book in pages of machine gun prose. Behind Polo’s desperation there lurks the presence of his cousin, Milton, who has been coerced by the narcos into working for them, something which has obviously destroyed Milton but which Polo envies. For Polo, Milton’s new status means money and power, whereas for Milton it clearly means moral degradation and hopelessness. This is a short, brutal novel, steeped in the evil of men and the things men do. Mexico bleeds through its pages, a Mexico where no-one is safe, even those living on a gated community, seemingly immune to the violence of the world that prowls beyond the confines of the perfect lawns and swimming pools. But most of all, Melchor represents the violence through the hopeless cynicism of Polo and Franco, two characters who are devoid of moral compass, having no need of this in a world which has no respect for morality. 

el otro tom (w&d rodrigo plá & laura santullo)

The title of the film is derived from the eponymous protagonist’s dual personality. Tom is a nine year old with ADHD. His Mexican mum, Elena, is raising him on her own in a small town in the USA, where she has to work long hours in order to pay the bills. Tom is an impossible child. Restless, destructive, getting into fights at school. Elena, at her wits’ end, seeks medical help and Tom is given a whole array of pills to control his behaviour. But the pills seem, if anything, to be counter productive. Tom doesn’t get any better, he actually gets worse and ends up making a suicide attempt. Elena is informed by a kindly neighbour that this is a possible side effect of the medication Tom is taking. Together, she and Tom decide to stop him taking the pills, but when this gets out to the school, she is told that this is abusive behaviour and could lead to Tom being taken out of her custody.

The film ends with a trip to Mexico, as Elena comes to the conclusion that what her son needs, more than anything else, is a reunion with his father, the kindly but feckless Julian, and his patria. As this narrative development unfolds, we realise that the Other Tom also refers to the bipolar experience of being a Latino/a in the USA. Tom seems like another person in Mexico, as indeed does his mother. The film concludes with a dreamy, hypnotic shot as Elena’s cares seem to be literally washed away. Tom’s ADHD, which never quite takes centre stage, ends up feeling like a metaphor for the immigrant experience. Switching constantly between Spanish and English and highly reminiscent of Samuel Kishi’s Los Lobos, El Otro Tom is one of those films that speak to the little known other in the USA, the barely visible Latino diaspora.