IRRESISTIBLE FORCE

The long-in-development, long-delayed seventh film by director Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity, already had a massive amount of hype to live up to even before it opened to just silly good reviews out of the Venice film festival, and of course it doesn't live up to it. It comes, however, about as close to living up to it as a movie possibly could: not nearly as succulent and all-encompassing in its awesomeness as the director's last film, the dystopian religious allegory Children of Men, because how could anyone possibly have expected something like that? It has less to "say", and though it says it very well, there's just not the same sense of having been unscrewed and filled with all kind of complicated, burning feelings about humanity. It's a magnificent, magnificent thriller, though, and one of the most dumbfoundingly impressive technological feats in the 20 years since Jurassic Park put the world on notice about CGI: comparatively, Avatar resembles James Cameron scribbling speech balloons on a prog-rock album cover, and Life of Pi is a crude doodle with a big orange cat no more impressive than your average Garfield strip.

Before I say a word about anything else, though, the sound mix: the very first thing that happens in the movie is a medium close-up of Earth, with an infinitely tiny speck of the space shuttle in the distance, and the very first thing we hear is someone talking, indistinctly, in the far back right. Then it slowly crawls around to the left and then center, getting consistently louder. We are being gradually dropped into the setting as the space shuttle moves closer, being pulled into the only audio possible in a rigorously silent space movie. It's the first time in years that a sound mix was so boldly foregrounded and conceptually perfect that I wanted to start crying and cheering at the same time. From the sound mix. Which continues to be absolute perfection throughout, but nobody wants to read the review that focuses on sound mixing, so I'll shut up about it.

The film takes place in an unspecified year that cannot exist: the U.S. space shuttle program, ended in 2011, is still up and running, while the first Chinese space station, launched later that year and still not permanently manned as of 2013, is in full swing. Here we find mission STS-157 (the actual shuttle program ended at STS-135), led by Commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), adding a new program to the Hubble telescope; this installation is headed by the civilian Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a biomedical engineer. An accident involving a Russian satellite has triggered a cloud of metallic debris directly on the same orbital path as the Space Explorer (fictional), and before Kowalski, Stone, or the rest of the unseen crew have a chance to react, their rig and vessel have been torn apart, and Stone is flung into the vastness of space, spinning around madly.

That all happens in the opening shot, by the way. For all that Children of Men boasts some of the most stupefying long takes in the history of the artform, it's banal and unsophisticated compared to Gravity, which includes several different sequences in which a single take proceeds for minutes at a time, and never in simple, clean set-ups, but always with flying, balletic abandon, gliding in towards characters and back away, around objects, through tiny spaces. If I persist in finding Children of Men to have the more impressive and important cinematography, it's because that film had to do everything practically, minus some digital stitching; Gravity's most amazing shots are almost entirely CGI, absent the faces of the actors, and we're basically watching an incredibly realistic, thoughtfully-constructed cartoon for a great deal of the time (though not as much as I'd expected beforehand (in fact, fully half of the movie has a completely physical Bullock on what I imagine are largely physical sets). You can simply do more that way; it's not as ballsy and live-wire as having to do things constrained by real-life physics.

That being said, Gravity doesn't use "you can do anything in CGI" as a crutch, but as a challenge and a dare, and when Cuarón and director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki set themselves to doing anything, they end up doing everything: their virtual camera is employed in unbelievably complex movements that shift through varying perspectives in subtle but profoundly effective ways. They mimic traditional effects of editing through the abruptness with which the camera that was moving that way is now moving this way, and in so doing say more with that shift than an edit (which we would expect, and therefore be anesthetised to) could. They evoke with indescribable success the sense of being in the zero-G environment being depicted, all the more so when the film is filling your field of vision on the biggest screen possible in the most vivid 3-D of any mainstream movie since the contemporary 3-D boom began in 2007 (the only movie I can think of that uses the technology to better effect is the German dance documentary Pina), and the sensory overload is complete - I should mention, I didn't have the film filling my field of vision, and it wasn't the biggest screen possible, and I still got totally sucked in by Gravity, ho ho, a pun.

Nothing I've said probably indicates why this isn't all so much film nerd candy - achingly long takes being the kind of thing that normals don't even notice until they are pointed out (and I have firsthand evidence of a normal not realising that the opening shot of Gravity is 17 minutes long), and when they are noticed, being the kind of thing that is held to be "cool" more than anything - but much as it was in Y tu mamá también, the unedited moving camera serves as a way of taking us into the characters (or character, really, this is pretty much entirely the Sandra Bullock Show), situating them in their physical environment, tightening our identification to them and the world as they experience it (this is not as much the case in Children of Men, where the tracking shots tend to serve a narrative rather than a character function). Literally: at a certain point, the camera moves right inside Stone's helmet, and we see things literally from her very eyes, nor is this the only time that the image is occupying something only millimeters away from her exact point of view. We could also argue that creating a completely plausible reality is key for the film's later effectiveness, and that uninterrupted stream of visual information is a way of establishing that reality and playing sleight of hand with the glut of CGI: "no, see, it has to be real, look at how we just shot it from 83 different angles!"

All of these things - the deepened reality of the film plane, the attachment we form to Stone (helped out by Bullock's innate likability, though I don't quite understand why she's being touted as having given such a phenomenal performance - a lovely movie star turn, absolutely, and impressively difficult technically, but I doubt she gave the best performance possible even among the names approached for the part. I am, however, very happy that Blake Lively said no), the tangibility of non-real sets and locations - go a long way to explaining why Gravity works so fucking well as a thriller, so infinitely better than its most obvious forerunners in the "isolated person in an extreme survival situation" genre like Open Water and Frozen. Actually, the mere fact of not having characters so awful that I was rooting for wolves to eat them by the five-minute mark would be enough to make Gravity better than Frozen, but it's much, much deeper than that. It is a visceral movie: the genuine feeling of weightlessness in the visuals makes sure of that, as does the way that our disorientation and Stone's are so nimbly tied together, so that we really feel her situation even if we haven't yet made up our minds if she's sympathetic or not. And the 3-D helps a great deal: when that 17-minute opening shot ends with her being flung into a star-speckled void, she is the lone point of dimension against an impossibly distant backdrop of space and the invisible but tangible plane of the screen, and it feels unbelievable isolated and suffocating; it is almost certainly the single best use of 3-D I have seen in a movie.

Where the film does go a little bit awry is in its attempts to be a rich, tearjerking character drama on top of a survival thriller about being stuck in the unfathomably inhospitable void of space, done mostly through the artless application of a backstory involving a tragically dead daughter, injected just at the right moment to feel tacky (the screenplay, which Cuarón wrote with his son Jonás, is the weakest part of the project - not the story and scenario, mind you, just the screenplay). That being said, a scene were Stone cries and her tears immediately ball up and float off her face - one "hits" the camera lens, in a wonderfully nice touch - is genuinely moving. And Steven Price's generally quite good score, which runs the gamut for horror movie stings to a goopy, soaring anthem to human durability, does a fine job of giving you an emotional workout, making the end in particular seem much more awesome and grave than Lubezki's incredibly dramatic camera already did. Still, the thing it does best is to create an immediate series of strong feelings, not to explore more airy concepts of spirituality and fear of death, which feel a little phoned-in, honestly. The visceral impact is already more than enough to make Gravity a thoroughly involving piece of experiential cinema, and that provides all the human interest necessary. The only places the film bogs down at all are in its most nakedly "watch Sandra feel sad" moments, though something with these kinetic visuals can never be said to "bog down" at all, really.

In short (the time for which was 800 words ago): this is the most engrossing film I've seen in ages. It's more about being intense than about being deep, but that is the privilege of a great thriller, and Gravity is more than a great thriller; it is the greatest thriller made in years and years, a movie using all the finest tools of modern filmmaking at their best advantage to tap into the most primal kind of cinematic emotion-making. It's gorgeously complex and deliciously simple in one and the same breath.

9/10

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)

An earlier version of this review can be found here.

A couple of years ago, I encountered the argument somewhere on the internet - I cannot find it again, alack, for it is a difficult thing to search for and not encounter porn - that long tracking shots are an inherently masculine act of cinematography. Essentially, that the complexity involved, and the invariably showy results, are nothing so much as dick-measuring by male directors and male cinematographers who want to prove how tough and awesome they are to other males. And certainly, if you look at the many epic-length shots in the career of that great chronicler of American maledom, Martin Scorsese, or the works of such male-centered directors as Brian De Palma and Paul Thomas Anderson, there's something to it..

If this theory holds any water at all - and I think it does, though not in the necessarily reductive form in which I've just presented it - then Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 message thriller Children of Men is the thickest, veiniest, most throbbing erect cock in the history of cinema. Its greatest takes are not merely long, they are marathons; they do not merely track, but go in and out and around structures and vehicles like they were made of rice paper. I have at multiple times, and in complete earnestness, described it as a movie primarily about camera movement, production design, and the relationship between the two. Which has not been very helpful to the people asking me what the film's plot contained, but that's just how I see it: any ol' movie can be a "what if?" investigation into an especially original post-apocalyptic scenario, but only Children of Men is about the physical world where that scenario plays out, as depicted by the single best act of cinematography of the 21st Century. And not just because of the long takes, though one in particular is potentially the most technically sophisticated shot of the decade. As is is wont, Emmanuel Lubezki does good things with the lighting and color palette creating an overall tone of "decaying yellow" that suits the film just fine.

Adapted by Cuarón and a small army of screenwriters from P.D. James's novel, the film takes place in 2027, in London, 18 years after the last human was born. With human fertility having mysteriously blinked out of existence, the species has been plunged into a world-wide depression that served to intensify all the worst tendencies of life at the time the Bad Thing happened, which primarily means for our purposes that Great Britain has turned into an all-out police state, and on the lifeless November day that it opens, the government's plan to remove all foreign-born refugees is in its last stages. This has met with some pushback from the handful of people with enough optimism left to give a shit about maintaining human dignity and freedom, with the biggest anti-government group in the country going under the name of "Fish", and perpetrating - so the government claims - a series of terrorist bombings. One of these occurs in the movie's opening scene, minutes after the announcement comes along that the 18-year-old youngest human being alive was stabbed to death, and seconds after a particularly given-up sad-sack named Theo Faron (Clive Owen) exited the coffee shop where the bomb exploded.

I'm disinclined to go any deeper than that, because if you've seen it, it would be redundant, and if you haven't, A) fucking go do it, and B) there are fun surprises in store. Also, I will be littering this review with spoilers. Let us be content to suggest that the film is about the restoration of hope and faith in a world where those things are in short supply, and in the particular figure of a man who especially doesn't have either of those things. In 2006, it was an outright commentary on the encroaching authoritarianism being felt in America and Britain in the middle of that decade, but as time has gone by, far enough that the movie's biggest single prediction has obviously failed to come true, a lot of what comes out most strongly is the film's impossibly rich emotional landscape; as a friend of mine recently suggested (and this is a PARTICULARLY HEFTY SPOILER, BUT WHY HAVEN'T YOU SEEN THIS MOVIE YET? GAWD), it's the happiest ending any film could have in which you can see the protagonist's corpse in the final shot.

Incredibly, I find that familiarity and some time away (this was, in fact, the first time I'd watched the movie since its 2009 deadline passed) have convinced me that Children of Men is even deeper and more complex and vividly humanistic than I'd given it credit for when it was new, and that was a hell of a lot of credit. The reveal of the pregnant Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), executed with a long hold on Theo's dumbfounded face as non-diegetic symphonic music flows up and down the soundtrack, is an overt heartstring-puller, but it works, dear Christ, it works so well. And of course the ending, with its sad and hopeful gestures pulsing in tandem, and that wonderful little snippet of children laughing over black; it leaves me a wreck. It has always left me a wreck.

Also it reminds me that this most profoundly visual of movies both opens and closes with audio over a black screen, and this is particularly cunning in the beginning, as the film unrolls its cavalcade of the very best world-building in the last 15 years of cinema. Children of Men takes place in an incredibly specific reality, and one that could trigger a lot of bullshit alarms, what Cuarón and company do to usher us past the suspension of disbelief traps is to show us the world working, and pitching information at as from the side, frequently not commenting on some very important details and trusting that because those details are in frame or on the soundtrack, we will become aware of them. Even the central idea of infertility is played off this way: first we learn that Baby Diego was the world's youngest person. Then we learn that he was 18 years old. The script lets us put two and two together, not explicitly stating "people can't have babies" until a crackpot old hippie played by Michael Caine says it in the context of a joke. It does this visually, too: the incredibly precise production design is full of rich details that are right there for the picking, piles of dead cattle, worn-out technology, a lack of new artwork, and signs of barely visible police surveillance all around.

And so we come back to the camera movement, and to my notion that Children of Men is chiefly about marrying that movement to production design; and saying it that way makes it sound shallow and spectacular, like a downer Avatar, and that's not so at all. For one thing, the physical space, the story, and the themes are all inseparable: in order to make a film about the triumph of hope, it is necessary to establish hopelessness, and this is something that Cuarón, Lubezki, and designers Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland do incredibly well. Any given set in Children of Men, worn-out, jerry-rigged, and crumbling, instantly communicates the idea that the people living in it have completely given up hope.

To fully communicate what they want to, the filmmakers have to immerse us deep into their film, and that's what makes this such a tremenous achievement: the way that the constantly moving camera, crossing through doors and gazing out car windows, creates a sense of total spatial unity, emphasising how all of the elements of the mise en scène exist in a connected, organic way (oddly, it's the exact opposite of what the car window shots did in the director's previous Y tu mamá también, where the point was to stress the characters' isolation from the world around them). This is the main purpose of the first of the film's three most showy tracking shots, the one that opens the film and goes inside, around, from close-up to wide, and all in a way that tells us so much about the tenor of this society just by the way it's laid out. There's also plenty of clever storytelling done with the camera movement: a woman in a black hood is carried off screen left by the tracking movement, which proceeds to cross over several dead bodies laid neatly in a line, a sickening but hugely successful visual punchline.

I mentioned three great showy tracking shots; the other two are a bit more well-known and frequently-discussed, but let's just touch on them. To end with, there's the legendary 6-minute "shot" (stitched together digitally; you can tell when because drops of stage blood on the lens disappear), which carries us into the depths of a collapsing slum during a firefight, in which the constant movement and our awareness of it plays into the sense of chaos and danger, making for one of the most breathlessly exciting action sequences of the last ten years (so it's not all brainy shit). The middle one, and my favorite, starts inside a car and ends up outside of it, with quite a lot of ridiculously specific choreography dribbled in, and what I love about this is that unlike the other camera movements in the film, this isn't about unity of space, but unity of time; we're seeing, without the cushion of editing, how a situation can turn from neutral to warm to panicked to tragic in just a handful of seconds, and it is, if anything, even more tense and heightened than the six-minute tracking shot through a gun battle.

The brilliance of Children of Men isn't its technical accomplishment, though. Nor is it the way that the scenario tells a richly involving emotional story, nor the cutting political commentary and demand that the audience seriously considers what kind of world we want to live in. It is the way that it cannot be anything of these things without being the others as well, and how the piercing emotional highs of the film could only be created by this cut to that beat of acting, which is captured by this close in on that part of the scene. It's a perfect movie. There. Done.

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (2004)

The question I would ask, for a start, is whether Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is chiefly a Harry Potter movie, or chiefly an Alfonso Cuarón movie. This is, of course, dumb as fuck: there are people who have seen and worshiped and idolised Prisoner of Azkaban who probably haven't even heard the titles of the director's other six features, and would possibly drop dead of mortification if they ever accidentally stumbled upon the sex-soaked Y tu mamá también. That being said, it's awfully easy and darn near obligatory to suggest that the eight-film franchise stretching from 2001 to 2011 breaks into two very different phases: the first two films, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, are fundamentally different than the six movies that followed them. And this shift, which I think unambiguously favors the latter six, can be attributed to Cuarón as readily as to any other individual. So perhaps the trick isn't think of Prisoner of Azkaban as the one impersonal film that Cuarón made, but to think of the latter Potter movies as Cuarón films that happen to have been directed by other people.

In at least one respect (besides the fact that it's his only mega-budget studio film), it is a clear outlier: it is the only feature in the director's career not shot by the great Emmuanuel Lubezki, replaced for reasons unknown to me by Michael Seresin (who would later shoot Cuarón's segment in the omnibus Paris, je t'aime). And Seresin is not at all without talent, and Prisoner of Azkaban is gorgeous and deeply characteristic in its visuals, but it's not, like, Lubezki-gorgeous. That's still enough for it to have ended up directly influencing the visual style of every one of the subsequent Potter films: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, directed by Mike Newell and shot by Roger Pratt, copies it almost exactly, and while the four films directed by David Yates have three unbelievably talented men shooting them (Sławomir Idziak, Bruno Delbonnel, and Eduardo Serra), using three distinctly different and personalised aesthetic appraoches, all of them are largely within the wheelhouse that Cuarón and Seresin piloted in this movie, viz. sparkly black children's fantasy that has one foot in a ghost story and one foot in a beloved childhood picture book of fairy stories. Compared to the blandly over-lit and vigorously unmagical approach that director Chris Columbus and cinematographers John Seale and Pratt used in the first two movies, this isn't just a revelation; it's more than that. Prisoner of Azkaban had to prove that a decade-spanning franchise guaranteed to be a gigantic hit because of the brand name could be more than financially successful; it had to prove that there could be thoughtfulness and artistry applied to the material, that it would actually be possible for these movies to be nice to look at and fun to watch, two phrases which apply in no degree to either Sorcerer's Stone or Chamber of Secrets.

Nearly ten years past the commanding success of Cuarón's rather drastic re-conceiving of the material, it's hard to remember how bold this was at the time: the director of a wildly well-received travelogue about sex and politics in Mexico (though it's a matter of record that the reason he got the job was his sparkling A Little Princess) being given the keys to the biggest moneymaking machine in the world, what with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy having wrapped up the prior year, and instead of copying the model of his predecessor, pulling at damn near everything and starting from scratch with all of it. The quantum leap in the lighting, and the encroaching gloom of the atmosphere thus generated, are one obvious example. The fact that he freed up his young trio of stars to wear street clothes almost the whole time instead of their twiddly school uniforms from the first movie is another one, that frankly has just as much impact: instead of seeming like kids playing dress-up on great big sets, the movie is suddenly about actual young people. The full-on embrace of horror is another: J.K. Rowling's source novels are chock full of the normal fantasy monsters and things going bump, but the movies as a rule have edged back from that, and only Deathly Hallows: Part 1 can be compared at all to the gleeful embrace of genre technique that Cuarón explores here - it's also worth pointing out that nothing in his career before or since much resembles this, either. The results pay off splendidly: an early sequence set in a park in the dead of night, with little beads of dew backlit like the teeth of some unseen demon, and a somewhat later scene of a wraith-like Dementor reaching its skeletal hands at the heroes, are still among the very best moments of the entire franchise, and the latter might still be the best.

It all goes to prove that you can do visual and tonal darkness, mixed with gobsmacked fantasy (something else Cuarón and Seresin achieve that the previous films did not: make the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry actually look like the splendid carousel of wonders that the scripts insist on it being), and make a film that's tremendously appealing and fun and not at all too scary or glum, and the fact that any adult has ever once had something kindly to say about the Harry Potter film franchise can ultimately trace back to that incredibly important achievement.

Thank God for it, too, because outside of Cuarón's incredible accomplishment, Prisoner of Azkaban has some severe problems, starting with its script, which I genuinely believe to be the worst of all eight films. Other than Chamber of Secrets (which paid for it by being the most protracted and deathly dull of them all), each of the Potter films suffers from too much compression and rushing, mercilessly sloughing off incidents, subplots, and even entire characters, in the interest of making Rowling's doorstops reasonably contained in a running time that anybody would be willing to sit through; not a damn one of them actually manages, after all that, to tell a completely functional story. Prisoner of Azkaban, I am convinced, is the least-functional of them all: in the first hour and a half, it achieves some measure of coherence but not momentum, clanking through the worst kind of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened" anti-narrative, consisting of nothing but a long chain of scenes that are connected solely because they all involve Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), Chosen One of the British wizard world. In the remaining 50 minutes (resulting in the series' first entry to make it in south of two and a half hours), momentum is achieved at the cost of sense; from the very moment that the first of many Big Reveals takes place, the film descends into a maelstrom of tossed-off developments and undernourished backstories, hitting the bare minimum of plot points required to have the semblance of form at all (it doesn't help that, even as a novel, Prisoner of Azkaban is unique in not really possessing a "confilict" as such). The only thing that compares is the failure of Half-Blood Prince to satisfactorily clarify who the half-blood prince, in point of fact, is; and that's just one minor plot point. Prisoner of Azkaban doesn't really clarify two entire acts.

The other big issue is the acting: over the course of the franchise, Radcliffe generally got better, while Emma Watson (as the smug intellectual Hermione Granger) and Rupert Grint (as lovable schmuck Ron Weasley) both got worse, and it's in this film and the very next one that they averaged out to the lowest overall capability: a lot of super intense staring and shouting from Radcliffe, a lot of pedantically over-delivered lines from Watson, and I don't know what the hell Grint was doing in this movie. Moving on to the huge panoply of British character actors filling in the corners, some are good (David Thewlis as a Big Secret-keeping professor), some are amazingly good (Gary Oldman as a Big Secret-keeping escaped convict; Emma Thompson as a nutty, pretentious clairvoyant with, alas, no secrets of any size). As is common with these films, several are given hardly anything to do - the descent of Maggie Smith into overqualified set-dressing began in earnest here - and Michael Gambon, stepping into the shoes of the late Richard Harris, was at his very worst as the kindly, mysterious Dumbledore, trying much too hard to evoke something of Harris's characterisation in his own performance and missing by quite a lot.

That being said, the film's chief failures are dramatic, not cinematic, and as escapist fantasy spectacle, there's much to love: John Williams's final score for the series is his best, much deeper and more interlocked than the auto-pilot collection of Spielbergisms he'd used twice before, the new sets (especially the quirky little town of Hogsmeade) designed by the inexhaustible Stuart Craig are more playful than before, the CGI is pretty great across the board. Except for the werewolf, because for whatever reason, CGI werewolves never work.

And it's all shown off to beautiful effect by Cuarón, employing his trademark tracking shots (though none of them very long) to dance around the sets and explore them (the opening shot, a grand track in and then track back, gets us off on the right foot: the camera is there to sweep us into and around the movie), relying on a motif of silent-movie irises to give the film a much-welcome sense of wide-eyed storytelling, incorporating a few pitch-black jokes about harmlessly flying creatures being violently killed, and even given the three-way hug that was so crucial in Y tu mamá también a cameo. It is closer to his least complicated and rewarding filmmaking than otherwise, and like many gifted filmmakers who primarily work with humans, he seems to have been unsure what to do with CGI beasts that weren't there yet. But all in all, the filmmaker who made A Little Princess such a playful bit of fantasy and deeply respectful depiction of children is unmistakably the filmmaker behind Prisoner of Azkaban, even with all the pressures and studio tinkering that comes with making a massive-budget adaptation of a fiercely protected brand name. Whatever failures it has, it's arguably the most fun Harry Potter film to watch: inventive, quick-moving, playful, beautiful.

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN (2001)

It is not an unnoticed fact, but one still worth mentioning, because it is fun, that the career of Alfonso Cuarón repeated itself in a weirdly specific way. First, in 1991, he made Soló con tu pareja, a Mexican film with political overtones, that features a lot of sex. Then he went to America and made A Little Princess, a kids' movie based on a well-liked work of children's literature. He then made Great Expectations, a film for adults adapted, very loosely, from a novel.

In 2001, he made another Mexican film with political overtones, that features a lot of hugely explicit sex. Then he went back to America and made a kid's movie based on the most popular work of children's literature in the world. He then made a film for adults adapted from a novel so loosely that it barely counts any more.

The moral of the story: fuck you, Gravity.

So let's now turn to that Mexican film with political overtones and sex. The second one, I mean. It is a certain Y tu mamá también, and it's the film where Cuarón first gained acclaim in and of himself, rather than as the very sincere and talented journeyman director of A Little Princess (Soló con tu pareja not being widely available outside of Mexico until deep into the 2000s, and Great Expectations being largely disliked). Not coincidentally, it's also the film where Cuarón really turned into the specific auteur that we are inclined to describe him as in a post-Children of Men world, which was a deliberate act of will. The filmmaker hasn't exactly trumpeted the story, but he's not ashamed to tell of it either (the timing's too perfect not to share this recent interview), that making Great Expectations was not a good experience: he was not terribly enthusiastic about the results, and for his return to the mother country, made a conscious choice to open up his aesthetic and make things in a way that the Hollywood apparatus would have made difficult.

The results are revelatory. Let's not mince words - revelafuckingtory. In all the ways I can think of, Y tu mamá también is a monumental, transformational motion picture, challenging the viewer and changing the way you think of movies being put together, the stories they can tell, and the ramifications of those stories. To begin with, it has what might well be the single best depiction of adolescent sexuality in any film of the 21st Century, treating with candid humor and perfect seriousness one of the subjects that is quintessentially Off Limits. For all that sexed-up teenagers being horny is a commonplace occurrence to the point that it's just wallpaper now, grappling with teens as psychological actors ho have sexual urges and needs, rather than wacky boner jokes. It even depicts, with jaw-dropping plainness and documentarylike accuracy, the physicality of teen sex, requiring the viewer to consider with non-prurient interest the fact that 18-year-olds (the actors, of course, were all legal adults) do in fact do these things: they perform and receive oral sex, they ejaculate. Oh, how they ejaculate, in what is unquestionably the most shocking scene of the film, all the more so because the film itself isn't looking to shock us, but simply present the characters' reality.

While we're still on sex: Y tu mamá también is, if anything, even more transgressive and shocking for the way that it discusses and analyses gendered approaches to sexual pleasure. The very first line of the film finds an 18-year-old boy in the midst of sex staking a claim on his girlfriend's body, and viewed from the right angle, the conflict for the rest of the film is predicted on unconscious male privilege in a macho society finding itself at odds with strong, self-directed female self will; after the legendary masturbating-into-a-pool scene,the most commanding and sexually blunt scenes in the film involve a 30-ish woman giving instructions to teen boys ten years her junior as to how to best please a woman sexually, finding their clumsiness charming right up until she abruptly and angrily finds it selfish and cold.

That is, mind you, the conflict viewed from the right angle. From a slightly different one... oh, let me just write a damn plot synopsis already, so I can start using specifics. Best friends Julio Zapata (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch Iturbide (Diego Luna) have just barely graduated from high school in Mexico City, and their respective girlfriends, Cecilia (María Aura) and Ana (Ana López Mercado), are traveling to Europe for the summer to celebrate, leaving the boys to do absolutely nothing. Just hang around, jerking off, smoking pot, eschewing responsibility. It comes to pass that at a wedding in which all the important members of Tenoch's father's political party are in attendance (the elder Iturbide is a high-ranking politician), they meet Luisa Cortés (Maribel Verdú), the Spanish-born wife of Tenoch's writer cousin. With the horny certitude of 18-year-olds, the boys try to flirt with her by inventing a fantastic, pristine beach far away from the city, though the woman very coolly and wittily shuts them both down.

A little while later, her husband confesses that he's been having an affair, begging forgiveness. Stunned and mad, Luisa immediately contacts the boys and agrees to go on their trip. The facts that the Boca de Cielo beach doesn't exist, and that neither of them knows much about the world outside of Mexico City, are of minimal concern to either of the young men, what with a smoking hot older woman willing to spend five days alone in a car with them, and so, with the world's shittiest route planned out, the three plunge in to the Mexican countryside, and it's here that Cuarón and his screenwriter brother Carlos get to explore all kinds of fraught interpersonal relationships and sociopolitical concerns, in ways that never stop seeming supple, complex, and sophisticated, no matter how many times you see it.

Broadly, Y tu mamá también is about class and gender, both of them awfully large terms, which makes it all the more impressive how very much the film is able to get to in its jam-packed 106-minutes. There are all sorts of nifty divisions between the characters: Luisa is European, where Julio and Tenoch are Mexican; Tenoch is upper-class, Julio is lower-middle-class, Luisa has risen steadily from isolated poverty to something that can easily inhabit the upper class without being part of it. With the film depicting a specific, greatly significant moment in Mexican political history, it's this latter division that especially drives the movie, which, viewed from the other best angle, is about how class divisions that seem totally frivolous in adolescence start to fester and become big and nasty the more of an adult you become. It's not prescriptive: though there seems little reason to doubt that the filmmakers are sympathetic to the underclasses and the leftists (there's a haunting little aside involving a fisherman stripped of his livelihood that's one of the best criticisms of capitalist progress ever filmed), but that's not really the focus. Instead, it's on how class represents not just having and not-having, but an entire code of thinking about the world, and one's place in it. The jealousy and self-abnegation on Julio's side, and the superior contempt on Tenoch's, are very slowly teased out across the movie, in any number of ways, from screaming match where both boys use class-loaded words, to the narrator's blithe comparison of how the two boys use the toilet at each other's house: Julio lights a match to make sure that his stink doesn't hang around, while Tenoch raises the seat with his foot, to avoid touching it with his skin. It's a brilliant line: entirely illustrative of the exact point the Cuaróns want to put across, while feeling quite authentic to the experience of the two scatologically-obsessed characters.

Oh, and the narrator: mustn't forget to mention him. Voiced by Daniel Giménez Cacho in the crisp, impersonal tones of a newscaster, the narration in the film is its quintessential formal element, offering up a thick slice of ironic distance between us and the action (every time the narrator speaks, the ambient noise cuts out completely; frequently, this is as jarring to the film's created reality and narrative momentum as '60s-era Jean-Luc Godard at his most caustically formalist), dashing the idea of the film's realism even as it incalculably deepens its world. Frequently, the narrator has nothing to say about the plot at all, but to call our attention to some aspect of life, or some political event, that the main characters do not notice or care about, creating the sense that there is a bigger world than what is depicted in the film and emphasising the small, trivial focus of the protagonists on nothing bigger than their own impulses and urges.

Still, artificial or not, trivial or not, the three leads of Y tu mamá también are an especially rewarding set of characters to spend time with. They're not always likable; they're typically not likable, in the case of the boys. But they are powerfully authentic, they exude vitality, they have the ability to think, even when they're thinking about how to justify not thinking. Their behaviors are both heavily laden with symbolism about age, gender roles, and the political history of Mexico (the character names are pointedly metaphorical: Tenoch, a 14th Century Aztec ruler - ancient tradition, conservatism. Zapata, the 20th Century revolutionary - class awareness, radical leftism. Cortés, the Spanish explore - the European who vitalises the Mexicans at the cost of destroying them), and the filmmakers are overt in linking the boys' coming-of-age to the 2000 elections that radically shifted Mexico's political fortunes, but they also seem like exactly who they are: two cocksure teen boys and one increasingly regretful adult woman, playing each other against one another, so wrapped up in their little drama that a transforming Mexico passes them without their noticing. The performances are so complete and natural and lived-in that it hardly seems possible to talk about them using the vocabulary of acting. Luna, García Bernal, and particularly Verdú are so confident in their bodies, clothed and unclothed, active and passive, that even while they've all become much more famous in the years since the film was new, there's literally not a single scene where I'm thinking about the construction of characters, just the characters themselves.

The film is about the characters and the world and the way they interact with it and each other; and so it is right and good that it should boast such keen visual depiction of that flow between person and space, in the most stylistically radical by far of all the movies that Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki had made to that point. Look at the handheld camera and graininess, and you would say that they were going for a kind of documentaryrealism; you would be right. Look at the way that Lubezki films landscapes and cityscapes (and there are many of both in this film) with a bleeding-out mistiness, and you would say that they were going for romanticism or impressionism; you would also be right. Look at the frequent long takes, particularly the ones that glide along invisibly as the car drives endlessly down the highway, or the fantastic one near the film's end where Luisa steps over to a jukebox and the camera follows her, at which point Verdú looks straight into the lens and walks the camera back, and you would say a lot of things, maybe; "what sort of eldritch geniuses came up with that shot, culminating in the jackhammer-like impact of that three-way hug?" is one of the things I said, the first time I saw it. Oh, I'm lying, every time I've seen it. But the long tracking shots that only now firmly assert themselves in Cuarón and Lubezki's shared toolkit are absolutely essential to Y tu mamá también; they create its sense of flow, of forward momentum, of a continuous space (call it the world, call it Mexico, or just call it the the unified space between these characters), and of a passionate, probing desire to explore that space. It's positively Renoirvian (Renoiresque?) how the filmmakers use the camera to not depict the characters, but to wander around their homes and the places they find themselves, telling us so much more about how the world works and how people live by soaking in details indiscriminately than could ever happen with just another conversation in two-shot.

Basically, this film is a masterpiece: a sexual masterpiece, a social masterpiece, an aesthetic masterpiece, a psychological masterpiece. And yet it's not, because "masterpiece" implies that it wasn't ever topped, which totally happened, when next Cuarón and Lubezki trained their camera on a world of people in transition and turmoil; but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Y tu mamá también is flawless if that word applies to anything in art, and just because the director made another flawless film, that takes away nothing of the achievement of this one, his coming-out party as one of the most interesting and vital international filmmakers of the brand new century.

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1998)

At the time it was happening, the brief but showy run of modern-day literary adaptations of the late '90s (bracketed approximately by Clueless in 1995 and O in 2001) was immensely annoying, at least to me; too much enthusiastic cribbing from the flash-and-dazzle teen culture of the day, far too many shrill attempts to find modern analogues to pre-industrial concepts in ways that are meant to be clever and virtually never are. But a certain creeping nostalgia over the intervening decade has left the things feeling charmingly kitschy and delightful, the way that so many pop culture curios seem more tolerable the further you're removed from their cultural moment (I am particularly thinking of the AIP beach movies, but maybe I'm the only one who kind of loves them). Still, outside of Clueless itself, most of them aren't actually "good" in most of the usefully quantifiable ways (though I would go to the mat for the irredeemably trashy, insanely fun Cruel Intentions).

In most ways, the 1998 Great Expectations isn't a particularly noteworthy representative of this trend, except in one immensely important though easily-ignored way: it is far and away one of the most aggressively stylised, second only to Baz Luhrmann's phantasmagoric William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. This, of course, is what happens when you throw director Alfonso Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki at a project, and to a lesser degree, editor Steven Weisberg: the only man to cut the three films where Cuarón did not serve as editor himself, which also happen to be the three least-interestingly-edited films of the director's career, though Great Expectations is itself the best of those.

Before we get too far into that, there's a huge caveat. The style is great; the style is beautiful; the style is radical. All of that. Tragically, the style is empty. In every other one of Cuarón's features, including his immediately preceding collaborations with Lubezki and Weisberg, A Little Princess, the succulent lighting and meandering camera and formal gamesmanship and all other joyful things are almost always used to establish or reinforce character, to draw our attention to physical space, to throw the viewer bodily into an emotional reaction, or (particularly in Y tu mamá también, his next film), the opposite of all that, to create an abstract separation between us and the onscreen material, that we might intellectually reflect on it. The point is, it always serves one of four masters: character, story, emotion, theme.

With Great Expectations, we arrive at what I believe to be the only "style for style's sake" movie in Cuarón's career, which is actually kind of impressive, given how much style there is in his cinema. There are many ideas thrown at the screen, and many of them make damn little sense at all, and the feeling of it is somewhat unfortunately that the director was trying as hard as he could to compensate for a pretty crappy screenplay, adapted from Charles Dickens's novel by Mitch Glazer, whose bona fides for this project consist in his having written another modern Dickens film ten years prior, Scrooged. Which is a good film, and conceptually delicious. But making the 600th filmed A Christmas Carol as a late-'80s Bill Murray vehicle, and making the first big-screen adaptation of the author's most pitiless drama in more than half a century require different skill sets. Points for trying - even a short Dickens novel is oozing with subplots and melodramatic hairpin turns - but the condensation that Glazer ended up producing isn't a terribly effective piece of drama in its own right, and it's certainly not an effective adaptation of the book in any way (and I should perhaps disclose around this point that Great Expectations is my favorite English-language novel. Not the one I think is the best; just my favorite).

The latter part of that equation isn't worth bothering about (but really, "Finnegan 'Finn' Bell" is a more reasonable and modern-sounding name than "Philip 'Pip' Pirrip"? In what fucking universe?), but the former part clearly is, because it's one of the chief reasons that Great Expectations is the worst movie of Cuarón's career. In taking this story of how Finn Bell rises from childhood (Jeremy James Kissner) into young adulthood (Ethan Hawke), from grinding poverty to the wonderfully free life of an artist with a wealthy patron, from innocence to wizened knowledge, and stuffing it into 111 minutes, Glazer did what was, in 1998, the most obvious thing possible: he focused on the love story. Which is fine, but Great Expectations isn't a love story at all, it's a bildungsroman that uses a chronologically splintered love story as its structuring element, and the bulk of the plot is in all the things that aren't the history of romantic tension between Finn and Estella (Raquel Beaudine as a kid, growing up to be Gwyneth Paltrow). So in order to be absolutely anything as far as a story goes, the script has to cram plot in wherever there's room, which results in a final 30 minutes that feel like a madcap race involving Craaazy Robert De Niro and CRAAAAAAAZIER Anne Bancroft, and no room for modulating anything.

The whole movie is a disaster of pacing, really. The best part is the frequently terrific opening quarter, in which Little Finn, living with his loving brother-in-law Joe (Chris Cooper) and not very loving sister Maggie (Kim Dickens) on the Gulf Coast of Florida, crosses paths with an ex-convict (De Niro), and later, becomes the human plaything of a bizarre wealthy old spinster, Ms. Dinsmoor (Bancroft), who, as we ken to before the rest of the characters do, is grooming him to be the object of her revenge against the male gender. It's slow, it explores characters expansively and at depth, it builds place beautifully - Lubezki's camera makes Florida look as good as it ever, ever has on film - and Bancroft's camp-addled turn as Dinsmoor, under several inches, it seems, of makeup, is a perfect disorienting force for the rest of the movie to hang on.

But once Finn grows up, it's scattershot and arrhythmic, jogging through days of plot in seconds, and then lingering out on scenes that don't seem to matter more than any other scenes, and then indulging in a maddening "make a painting of the hot naked chick" montage that makes one cry out in pain for Titanic. When David Lean and a squadron of writers made their Great Expectations in 1946, they encountered none of these problems: that film is smoothly told, eminently clear, richly suffused with character. And it's almost certainly the best cinematic Dickens adaptation ever. The '98 Great Expectations is total Amateur Hour in comparison, fumbling major plot reveals and character arcs in its fevered pursuit of The Fucking Love Story.

Which would have even worked, if the love story had been anything worth a damn. The reason that it's not is partially due to a script that is more interested in what people do than who they are, more to Hawke and Paltrow's deadly, hopeless performances. I'm generally someone willing to defend the wildly over-maligned Paltrow, but she's a parody of her worst habits in this one: too much archness, too much irony, and the film treats her like a blonde hairdo and calculating eyes and nothing else, anyway. Hawke is far more damaging: maybe the very worst thing he's ever done, in fact (he'd do better in the modern literary game with 2000's Hamlet), defensible only in that the bratty '90s alpha male shtick that he resists not at all is a good way of expressing the fallen, selfish Pip of the novel, though not really the Finn in the screenplay. The rest of the cast fares well - Cooper is the easy best in show, and Bancroft is on some other planet where "good" and "bad" judgments of acting don't apply - but Finn is the thing holding the movie together, and if he's a flat, insipid douchebag, well...

All of which is a ridiculously long-winded way of saying that, if Cuarón and company end up throwing all the style they've got at the film, that's less because it feels like they're bringing it to life, than because they're trying, desperately, to compensate for a perpetually stalled drama. Even then, the aesthetic choices are odd as often as they're exciting: the odd habit of using dissolves, rather than straight cuts, in the scenes with Estella as a child might have worked if they paid off (you can explain the dissolves as a gesture towards Finn's hazy, dreamy relationship to Estella, or some bullshit like that), but once Paltrow takes over the role, the technique is stopped. And in the film's numerous, vigorously Expressionistic canted angles, we finally run across something I had thought did not exist: a choice made by Emmanuel Lubezki that absolutely does not work out.

Even the parts that work best, aren't entirely great. Like the color palette, bringing back the green from A Little Princess and marrying it to a few key explosions of red, green's opposite; the red works incredibly well (particularly in a pair of shots at the very beginning and the very end, both involving De Niro), but where A Little Princess had a specific and clear purpose in using the director's favorite color, this movie pretty much just has green.

There are a few genuinely, unimpeachable artistic touches: the editing frequently uses quick repetitions of a single beat to emphasis Finn's moments of strong emotion, and the accretion of bombastic and showy images, particularly those anchored by the unhinged Dinsmoor, ends up giving the film a sense of abstraction that legitimately does distract from how the plot never works. And it's deliriously pretty: pretty Florida exteriors, pretty Florida interiors, thrilling use of the Z-axis in compositions (though outside of a couple tracking shots - one where young Finn runs home after his run-in with the convict made me literally gasp - the camera is mostly strapped-down, a real disappointment for this director and cinematographer). But pretty isn't enough to save the movie; it's what encourages me to say, "this is not very good" instead "man, fuck this thing". It's tremendously well-made. But seriously, fuck it.

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: A LITTLE PRINCESS (1995)

A Little Princess is, I guess, significant in that it ushered hot new Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón into Hollywood filmmaking out of nowhere, in 1995 (Sólo con tu pareja, his only previous feature, had screened at Toronto and made a splash, but never received U.S. distribution until 2006). But to me it is far more significant in that it was the first time that Emmanuel Lubezki lost a Best Cinematography Oscar, and it's one of only two times that's happened that it can be even plausibly argued that justice was served (John Toll won for Braveheart).* The film still looks like everything good and holy and right, you understand; the Lubezki of big ideas and dramatically unsound execution who shot Sólo con tu pareja - I have seen nothing else that he shot prior to 1995 - is replaced as though by a fairy changeling with the Lubezki who can crap out delicate shadows and dreamscape sunbeams for Terrence Malick as easily as you or I could take an out-of-focus, mis-framed selfie. I do not know what A Little Princess without Lubezki would be like, but I can guarantee that I don't want it, any more than I want a version The Tree of Life without the cinematographer's psychologically indicative natural lighting and shallow focus.

But there will be time enough to praise Lubezki later on, and I'd really hate to bury the important part; aye, even more important than being drop-dead gorgeous. There are many gorgeous films. What sets A Little Princess apart isn't that it's gorgeous, but that it's one of the very best children's movies of the past quarter-century, during which time that genre has become especially endangered by a noxious cloud of fart jokes and pop culture parody. A brilliant year for children's movies, '95 was, seeing the release of Babe and Toy Story as well, though it's worth pointing out that A Little Princess, uniquely among the three, is centered on the person of a child, and largely takes place within the world as it is seen and understood by children.† It takes this mission with uncompromising gravity, and I think you'd have to go all the way back to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial before you hit a movie that was so unyieldingly told through an entirely child-oriented aesthetic, even in the scenes where no children are present.

The main child of the film is one Sara Crewe (Liesel Matthews), around ten years old in 1914, when her father (Liam Cunningham) joins the British Army to fight the good fight and, in the process, must leave behind his land in India for the moment. As he heads off to fight in the blood-soaked mud of Europe, he leaves Sara behind at the girls' school in New York where her late mother was taught, in the one completely unnecessary shift out of many largely invisible changes screenwriters Richard LaGravenese and Elizabeth Chandler make to Frances Hodgson Burnett's screenplay, which more sensibly set the action in London (and during the Boer War, a change that seems much more appropriate for several reasons, beginning with the "so, you wanna teach your kids all about the Boer War?" one).

At Miss Minchin's Seminary for Girls, Sara immediately gets on the bad side of the thoroughly unpleasant Miss Minchin the Elder (Eleanor Bron, unimprovably mixing icy cruelty with a softer, family-friendly lack of fangs), who smiles her insincere smile and treats the girl with saccharine pleasantness on account of Captain Crewe's considerable reservoir of money. The one primary point of conflict between the two lies in Sara's love of storytelling, gathering all the girls around her at night to tell snippets of the Ramayana and thoroughly offending Miss Minchin's starchy belief that young girls of proper society should only be exposed to bland stories that will teach them useful facts about daily life, not messy fantasies of monsters and god-warriors.

The situation breaks when Captain Crewe is mistakenly reported dead, his considerable assets seized on the spot by the British government. Just like that, Sara's only remaining value to Miss Minchin is as a vehicle for demonstrating her exhaustive sense of charity, which includes dumping the girl in a bare attic room next to the school's other lost soul, African-American servant girl Becky (Vanessa Lee Chester), and threatening to throw the girl out on the street the very instant that she opens her mouth about the fantastic nonsense that has been such a constant source of delight to all the school's other inhabitants, except for the jealous bully Lavinia (Taylor Fry).

I am told that this story takes most of its cues from the 1939 adaptation of the novel starring Shirley Temple, which I have not seen, though it doesn't take much imagination to guess what this material might play like as a Temple vehicle, and I am thoroughly overjoyed to say that the Cuarón film is not that. There's no way to completely exorcise corny sentimentality from material like this, especially with a second half as lustfully attached to melodramatic contrivances involving amnesia and conveniently-situated neighbors, but with Cuarón guiding Matthews to a performance that isn't really "cute" as such, and even has just a tinge of shrill stubbornness that can become just marginally annoying, this film's Sara has texture and solidity that a more unthinking embrace of the film's "every girl is a princess" message would have lost track of; as a result, that same exact message feels earned instead of trite, particularly when Matthews's invocation of it during a climactic rant feels more like a desperate girl trying to cling to something true and meaningful, instead of an adorable child offering up a life lesson to a cartoonishly grumpy old grown-up. Not every moment of child acting lands: frequently, Matthews allows giant-eyed breathiness to stand in for sincerity, and she's very much the best of young cast. But often enough, and always at the right moments, the director and the actor find a way to evoke enthusiasm and passion in a way that reads honestly, and we get utterly wonderful moments of emotional purity like the scene where Sara (not yet a pariah) offers up to one of the other girls a parable about how mothers go to heaven to become angels.

Having thus avoided the most obvious trap of just being preciously glib, A Little Princess ends up being a surprisingly rich and mature exploration of how the act of storytelling can be used as both a means of self-expression and a tool for survival; it is about considering one's own life as an act of narrative in a manner suggestive of Neil Gaiman (whose epic treatise on the subject, The Sandman, was in the last year of its 75-issue run at this time), though in a much friendlier and less esoteric register. In order to comprehend her frequently miserable experience, Sara is impelled to cast her own existence in literary terms, and to use the knowledge of what a storybook character would do to inform what she herself does in "reality". Thus we arrive at a film celebrating ingenuity and self-reliance while opening itself up to a meta-reading: as Sara, thinking of herself as a real person, looks to fiction for guidance and insight, so the film's ideal audience (certainly young, probably female) is invited to look to the fictional Sara for the same reasons.

Complex and wonderful stuff, and Cuarón and a terrific team of collaborators brought it all to life in profoundly inviting way, making a thoroughly fictitious 1914 (you can almost see the soundstage walls) that feels like the perfect place for a nice, never-too-dangerous bedtime story to take place. Production designer Bo Welch and costume designer Judianna Makovsky contribute an obvious backdrop of fairytale-realist period trappings done up in the director's chosen palette of varying greens (he noted, astutely, that it's the most emotionally variable color: comforting, natural, wild, nauseous, sterile, all as needed, and all found somewhere in the film's palette), and the hair and make-up team responsible for making Miss Minchin and her sister Amelia (Rusty Schwimmer) look like comic book echoes of each other, with the same little Bride of Frankenstein hair streak and all, deserves all the praise we can shovel their way for creating a pair of antagonists who set off the vaguely surreal settings just so.

Lubezki himself is limited mostly to glossing over all this with a patina of golden-green lighting that gives it all a slightly aged, otherworldly feel; the freewheeling camera movements of his very best work with Cuarón is found only in a smattering of tracking shots (though one - a lateral track along the dinner table where all the girls are gathered - is a perfect little gesture of scene-setting that unites the characters invisibly but firmly), and the whole thing is very much the work of a great talent doing things that any great talent could have. That's not quite as true of Cuarón's direction; if every random great director could do this kind of work imbuing the lives of children with gravity without wearily solemnizing them, there wouldn't be such a dearth of truly masterful children's cinema, and A Little Princess might not seem like such a singular achievement. Might. The fact remains, despite a cluster of odd adaptation choices and clumsy moments of acting, this is a hugely rewarding fable for young people and their attendant grown-ups, and while "a great family filmmaker" is a phrase used by absolutely no-one to describe the creator of Y tu mamá también, that doesn't mean it doesn't apply.

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: SÓLO CON TU PAREJA (1991)

It is a greatly satisfying thing that the first shot of Sólo con tu pareja, the first feature directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is a tracking shot towards an exquisitely-lit man and a woman having sex. That's as close a one-image summary of the director's subsequent career as you're likely to run into, particularly when that director has worked in so many genres aimed at such wildly divergent audiences as Cuarón.

Would that I could go right from there to assuredly declaring that the film thus represents a fully-formed birth for the director, and that everything which makes the best of his later films so damn great is to be readily found in Sólo con tu pareja; but no, this is very much the work of a young filmmaker of obvious talent in need of just a smidgen more discipline, training, and experience. This mostly shows up in his management of the film's comedy - for this is an outright farce, and it's probably telling that nothing he directed ever again more than intermittently cracks a smile - which is scattershot: for every scene that ends up flawlessly balancing on a tightrope for the whole run of absurd moments and huge character reactions, there's another one that drags out and feels flaccidly redundant, or one that just feels like a pointless aside designed to desperately lunge for just one joke, to hell with character or story logic. It's also a bit deflating to note how little Cuarón is able to extract from virtually his entire female cast, given the prominence of women in his later work (and especially in Y tu mamá también, the film most directly descended from this one), in what is effective a male-driven satire of male sexuality and male privilege. But since I mostly liked the film, and occasionally loved it, I would prefer to at least initially accentuate the positive.

The male who chiefly occupies our attention is Tomás Tomás (Daniel Giménez Cacho), the first of many characters in the film with doubled or nearly-doubled names, the first indication that Sólo con tu pareja is eager to align itself with the wacky, borderline-cartoon tradition of humor exemplified by American screwball comedies, though present in the cinema of other countries as well; I am told, for example, that Mexico itself had a robust genre of wacky satires a generation prior to this film's 1991 premiere, though I myself have no firsthand knowledge of them, and that's as good a cue as any to admit that the viewer who comes to Sólo con tu pareja without a fairly strong knowledge of Mexican culture in the early 1990s and Mexican film history up to that point - subjects on which I am almost wholly ignorant - is not in a position to give the movie its full due.

Anyway, back to Tomás. He's a lothario of the worst sort, plowing through women at a fevered clip, and treating them, literally, as cum dumpsters; he has an intense aversion to condoms, and to acknowledging the existence of a sexual partner that might not, for whatever reason, want to have unprotected sex with him (the film's title, in fact, translates as "Only with your partner", the slogan of a contemporaneous campaign to encourage safe sex in Mexico, one of the exact sort of important cultural references that make the film richer, and that I would absolutely never have picked up on). This probably results in a lot of broken hearts, but Tomás certainly doesn't know a goddamn thing about that, never paying any attention to his conquests ever after.

You can't build a narrative out of that, and the situations that force Tomás life into a new direction are two: first, he starts to fall for his next-door neighbor, flight attendant Clarisa (Claudia Ramírez), despite her handsome pilot boyfriend Carlos (Ricardo Dalmacci). The second is that he arranges a "date" - that is, a quick fuck without so much as dinner beforehand - with Silvia Silva (Dobrina Liubomirova), the openly antagonistic nurse who works for his doctor, Mateo Mateos (Luis de Icaza), who's also his across-the-hall neighbor. And this date happens at the same time that his boss, Gloria Gold (Isabel Benet), stops by to demand that he deliver the ad copy she's been patiently waiting on for days. And also to deliver his penis into her vagina. Thus it is that Tomás has Silvia in his apartment, and Gloria in the Mateos' apartment (he's watering their plants while they're at a convention), and to sneak between the two, he has to cross on the ledge outside, wearing nothing but a towel, stopping every time he passes Clarisa's window to admiringly gaze at her screwing Carlos. It is the classic old "man with two women at the same restaurant" sketch, only it's about casual sex and the dangers of leaving women carnally unsatisfied. Because Silvia, who receives far less attention and finds out bout Tomás's game, decided to get him back: when she mails him the results of a complete blood test, she falsely informs him that he has AIDS.

Lord knows that's dangerous ground for the movie to wander into, and accusing Sólo con tu pareja of gross tasteleness is absolutely fair game. But I think the movie mostly avoids the trap it sets for itself, first by delaying this plot development as long as possible (it's over halfway through the 94-minute film that Tomás gets the news), filling up the time with every drop of character development that can be squeezed out of its protagonist, and throwing in a subplot with a pair of Japanese businessmen that Tomás has to entertain for a night, for no obvious reason other than to jack up the comic stakes. Second, it's actually a fairly sharp way to criticise a society in which fuck-crazy men like Tomás are free to run wild, and the collage of STDs that result, and the way that his fake diagnosis punctures the self-aggrandizement that defines his life is used strictly as character material. AIDS itself is never the joke; only Tomás is.

Regardless, the result is astonishingly subversive, even two decades on. At its best, Sólo con tu pareja has a take-no-prisoners approach to depicting its characters and society, the mark of punk kids rather than sophisticated satirists, perhaps, but the film's attitude and its busy comedy mesh well, for the most part.

It's funny stuff, all in all, though it often feels like it could be funnier: the handful of top-shelf physical comedy scenes (the back-and-forth on the ledge including a running gag with a cat; an inspired slapstick bit involving a microwave oven used as a suicide device), and the way that Cuarón and Luis Patlán edit the film so that cutaway jokes and reaction shots shoot by the viewer with almost metronomic precision, call attention to the various places where things fall flat, almost always because the timing is off and gags go on far longer than their expiration. It also hurts that Giménez Cacho and de Icaza are mostly alone in giving a generally loose, fun performance; Liubomirova has some tart line readings, but that's about it. Often as not, even the good performances drift a little to far on the side of being shrill.

And while I greatly admire Cuarón's visuals, which pair him up with his totally essential collaborator, the great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, there are points where the images threaten to drown the movie. Some of the sweeping, probing camera movements for which the Cuarón/Lubezki partnership would become justly beloved are perfectly-suited to giving the comedy a big boost of energy and flow (particularly in the "two apartments" setpiece, which really is the highlight of the film in every way), Lubezki's lighting can err on the side of being too pretty: as the Pedro Almodóvar films of the same period prove, creative farce thrives on poppy colors and brightness, not the graceful shading that Lubezki brings to the table, which is glamorous as all hell, but just not fun.

Still, the movie's got spunk, and the way that it mines jokes from a cruel place without ever turning into a black comedy is impressive; screenwriter Carlos Cuarón, the director's brother and infrequent collaborator, had some problems structuring scenes, but the madcap plotting that yokes them all together gives the film a bounciness that keeps it from being as nasty as the satiric edge, and the concept, could easily fall into. All in all, the film is not chiefly interesting for any reason other than the career it kicked off, and I don't suppose it would deserve to be widely remembered on its own merits, but its frankness, its high spirit, and its excellent craftsmanship make it a perfectly worthy launching pad for bigger and better things.

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