Programming Note: Continuing our recap of some of the best films I’ve seen in the past year. Happy viewing!
Country: Mexico
Director: Alonso Ruizpalacios
Time: 1 hour and 51 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Netflix (free w/subscription), Kanopy (free w/library card), GooglePlay ($3.99)
What It Evokes: Mexico City, road trips, coming of age, lazy wanderlust
“Fucking Mexican cinema," says Sombra. “They grab a bunch of beggars, shoot it in black and white and say they are making art films. And the directors, not content with the humiliation of the conquest, go to the Old World and tell French critics that our country is full of pigs, derelicts, diabetics, sellouts, thieves, frauds, traitors, drunks, whoremongers, people with inferiority complexes and the precocious.”
“And it is,” counters his younger brother, Tomás.
“But if they’re going to humiliate us, they should do it with their own money, not the taxpayers’.”
The above scene occurs about two-thirds of the way through Alonso Ruizpalacios’ black and white Güeros, which absolutely received public funding and traveled the international “art film” festival circuit. The film’s characters have recently encountered a pretentious director holding court inside a Mexico City nightclub, catalyzing the remark. But in a work intent upon merging distanced irony and warmth, Sombra’s exasperation constitutes a knowing jab directed inwards.
Set over the course of two days during the 1999 UNAM student strikes, Ruizpalacios’ debut film charts Tomás, his brother Sombra, Ana (who Sombra loves), and Sombra’s roommate as they rather unsystematically travel throughout Mexico City in search of the aged and perhaps dying folk rocker Epigmenio Cruz, whose music “once made Bob Dylan cry." In spite of the protest action at his university, Samba has proclaimed himself “on strike from the strike.” Unfortunately for his romantic life, Ana is one of the strike’s leaders. These two narrative arcs (Sombra and Ana’s romance and the journey to find Epigmenio Cruz) structure the film's vignettes, whose deliberate pacing and varied settings allow its young characters (like all young people) to try out different identities and forge relationships. A recurrent motif in the film surrounds stories being interrupted prior to their resolution, reinforcing each characters’ indeterminate sense of self. In turn, this indeterminacy mirrors our own relationship to them. Upon introduction, no character seems particularly appealing—Tomás’ mother has sent him from their home in Veracruz to Mexico City after he drops a water balloon on a baby; Sombra appears aloof and uninterested when Tomás arrives. As a result, the film gracefully highlights the way (viewers’) perceptions shift after prolonged exposure.
While discussing Carlos Reygadas’ film Japón (2002), I noted some of the directors who, after making excellent and formally sophisticated work in Mexico, have moved to the US to do things like film Leonardo DiCaprio sleeping inside a horse (The Revenant, Iñárritu) or capture Sandra Bullock upgrading hardware in space (Gravity, Cuarón). International audiences and award committees have justly celebrated leading Mexican directors, most prominently the trinity of Cuarón, Del Toro, and Iñárritu, who have tended to work north of the border where bigger production budgets and larger audiences are to be found. (Del Toro and Iñárritu have both won Best Picture at the Oscars; Cuarón, Del Toro, and Iñárritu have all won Best Director at least once.) All the same, it is perhaps telling that Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (2001) and Roma (2018), the best work from the Big Three to my mind, have been made in Mexico.
In interviews, Ruizpalacios has spoken about Mexican filmmakers’ tendency to construct films with international audiences in mind. By contrast, Güeros consciously puts a stake in the ground for Mexican films aimed at domestic audiences. The neighborhoods portrayed in the film, with the exception of Centro, are those less frequented by tourists. There’s no Coyoacán, Roma, or La Condesa. (Güeros does feature some incredible shots of the UNAM campus and, as a result, cameo murals by Siqueiros and Rivera—two of Mexico’s Big Three muralists.) The film most prominently referenced in Güeros is Buñuel’s Los Olvidados—Sombra and Ana re-enact a scene from the film while driving towards their encounter with the movie director—itself a work deeply anchored in peripheral Mexico City life. Throughout, the movie’s visual and verbal lexicon roots itself in a particular place at a particular time, highlighting (among other things) the unbelievable richness of Mexican slang. The work’s title alludes to a colloquial term for “blond” or light-skinned people. As a Mexican friend explained to this gringo, “It’s what people from the barrio bajo call the privileged.” (The film deftly touches on Mexico’s complex class and racial configurations, but the title also reinforces the ways initial perceptions and easy categories mistake complex individuals.) None of these aspects make the film impenetrable to international audiences. Instead, Güeros movingly accentuates the particular in order to locate the universal.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Alonso Ruizpalacios — Museo (2018)
Alonso Ruizpalacios — A Cop Movie (2021)
*special thanks to María Cristina for sharing her expertise on cinema and language with me