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. 

la región salvaje (the untamed) (w&d. amat escalante, w. gibrán portela)

I had the good fortune to watch Escalante’s film in Mexico City, with an attentive local audience. I say this because, although cinema is such a private event, there is clearly a communal aspect to the act of attending a film in the company of others, something which lends the viewing another dimension. The only films I watch that I discuss here are ones I have seen in a cinema, or at a public screening. Whilst for many cinema is increasingly something to be experienced at home, there is still a distinction to seeing it in a cinema, and the instance of watching La Región Salvaje only emphasised this.

La Región Salvaje is quite off the wall. In Europe, were it to be released it would probably be marketed as an art film. Escalante’s Cannes hit, Heli, was seen in this light, and well received because, one suspects, it could be treated as such a serious dissertation on the state of narco-Mexico. In spite of the fact that it’s very much a film about real people living real lives. La Región Salvaje might be said to be even more so. Its high concept premise is based around the existence of a creature which landed on the earth, dedicated to pleasure, which is kept by some old hippies in the countryside. However, it needs feeding, (or pleasuring), so the hippies use a beautiful girl, Veronica, as bait to lure a young doctor, who’s bisexual. His experience with the creature proves too much and leaves him in a coma. The doctor had been having an affair with his sister’s husband, something she finds about. Through Veronica, the sister learns about the creature and visits it, which in her case does her no harm at all. But when her estranged husband tries to come back into her life, she offers him up to the creature, which kills him. 

The plot then is complicated, perverse, pretentious, daft. It’s really hard to place La Región Salvaje: is it a horror film? Is it social realism? Is it a sex comedy? Of course, the answer is that it all of these things, as well as being, no doubt, a metaphor for the current state of the nation. (Is the creature that can only deliver pleasure but also kills an analogy for the drugs/ narco world?). At the same time, as the audience reaction made clear, it’s also extremely entertaining. The laughter of the local audience was a corrective to any pretension. And perhaps goes to show, as does Escalante’s film, how cinema has found itself so entrapped in a high/ low culture divide. La Región Salvaje seems to mock the very notion of an “art” film. The director and writer steer a narrative course which belongs to neither camp, or both camps, at the same time. It defies categorisation, something that might be tricky for the marketing men, but is more reflective of cinema’s capacity to tackle issues of import (politically/ aesthetically) whilst at the same time engaging with an audience on a visceral level. 

la jaula de oro (d. diego quemada-díez; w. quemada-díez; gibrán portela; lucia carreras)

A few years ago there was a film called Sin Nombre, which did very well for its director Cary Fukunaga. La Jaula is essentially the same film, following the path of three Guatemalan kids as they try to make their way across Mexico towards the promised land. The difference is that, whereas Sin Nombre offered a sentimental variation on the tale, La Jaula de Oro makes no bones about the cruelty and hardship involved in a journey which ultimately leads not to Los Angeles, as Juan, one of the trio hopes, but a desolate job in a snow-ridden corner of a troubled land. 

Guatemala and Mexico are perhaps even further away from Montevideo than Moscow, (say) might be from London. The barbarity revealed in the story feels as distant here as it would in London. There are those at the Montevideo Film Festival, where Jaula screened, who are perhaps sceptical of its vision of the downtrodden 3rd world being presented yet again for the voyeuristic delights of a 1st world audience. (It’s interesting quite how unpopular Ciudade de Dios is here, in spite of the involvement of Charlone). Nevertheless, Jaula possesses an undeniable integrity, refusing to let its audience off the hook. The three child actors whose journey we follow are as beguiling as we might expect, but their fates are not, and there’s no attempt made to sanitise the story.

In contrast to Sin Nombre, the film has a quasi-documentary feel, with the kids' fellow-travellers feeling like real people rather than extras. In addition Jaula mixes moments of great visual beauty with a roughness around the edges which ensures the viewer doesn’t become seduced by the picturesque nature of the journey across country. A paradox of the “immigrant road movie" (see also Winterbottom’s In This World) is that, in spite of the cinematic joys of witnessing landscapes and vistas we will probably never know, when telling the immigrant’s bleak story there’s little scope for the pleasures of aesthetics. Quemada-Díez treads this fine line with care. His movie might occupy familiar territory, but, as the gruelling last scenes emphasise, this is no fairground ride. Rather, it’s a film which seeks to take its place within the great abattoir of our tiny globe’s modernity.