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Monday, June 23, 2008

Mexican cinema: a window into a world

By Jeremy Schwartz | Monday, June 23, 2008, 10:10 AM

We’ve been on a bit of a roll watching Mexican movies lately - about five or six in the last couple months. After stuffing ourselves with so much Hecho en Mexico cinema, it’s hard not to notice some common threads running through the latest crop of movies, some excellent, some hard to sit through for an entire viewing.

Mexican movies are a world away from Hollywood - instead of glitzy soundstages, the gritty, traffic-choked Mexican capital serves as the ultra-realistic setting for most. But Mexican movies also seem to share another trait. Most are unsettling - you don’t leave the theater feeling all is well with the world. There are are no tidy endings. Most are as messy and ambiguous as the city itself.

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This probably stems from the fact that Mexican movies don’t feature heroes in the Hollywood sense. It’s often hard to know who to root for. Take for example Deficit, the directorial debut of Mexican movie star Gael Garcia Bernal (Amores Perros, Y Tu Mama Tambien). Garcia plays a the son of a wealthy, but corrupt, Mexican official, who moves through a world of servants, drug-filled parties and preppy friends applying to Ivy League universities. His character has a sunny disposition and a winning personality (it’s Gael after all), but as the movie develops we learn he is at heart an unrepentant jerk: he leaves his hysterical girlfriend to fend for herself after she gets lost trying to reach his summer home. He calls his servant, a kid he grew up with, an Indio, one of the worst racial/classist slurs you can throw around in modern Mexico. He, and his decadent world, lacks something, as the title suggests.

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El Bufalo de la Noche, featuring Garcia’s buddy and partner Diego Luna (the pair are kind of the Matt Damon and Ben Affleck of Mexico) takes the ambiguity to the extreme. Luna plays another child of privilege who is so morally bankrupt he can’t face his fatal flaw. He steals his best friend’s girlfriend, which would be bad enough if the best friend wasn’t in a mental clinic at the time recuperating from a suicide attempt. But stealing his best friend’s girl isn’t enough for him - he cheats on her with two other girls in the space of about 48 hours. If we expect Luna find some redemption at the end, we are sorely mistaken and the whole drama makes you want to take a shower immediately afterwards.

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Partes Usadas is an excellent, overlooked movie about two pre-teen best friends trying to make it in one of Mexico City’s rougher neighborhoods. One of the boys dreams of going to the U.S. with his uncle and takes to robbing auto parts to pay for the coyote. The uncle soon betrays his nephew who in turn corrupts his best friend, the closest thing to a moral center in the film. The movie shows the difficult choices and the moral relativism spawned by living in the Mexican capital.
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Drama/Mex, another good movie (it’s become a festival darling) features a spectrum of flawed characters: a suicidal bureaucrat, an underage prostitute, and a young couple who can’t help hurting each other between jumps into bed.

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But the best of the lot is probably Parpados Azules, an unusual love story that comes closest to veering into happy ending territory. It features two of the most emotionally stunted characters to ever grace the big screen (the female lead is Cecilia Suarez, perhaps the finest Mexican actress of the moment). Suarez’s character moves through life fleeing from any type of real connection with another human being while her eventual love interest is a bureaucrat stuffed in the basement of one Mexico City’s many faceless government buildings. The last time he felt a spark was in high school, and the 30-something has a hard time talking about anything else. The two inevitably join together, and the result is at times touching, but often painfully empty.

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