MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: AFTER DARKNESS, LIGHT

There is a certain type of film, destined to never move beyond the art house, so challenging and unconventional in its storytelling and visual vocabulary that it needs to train the adventuresome viewer how to watch it, in the act of watching it. Carlos Reygadas's fourth feature, Post Tenebras Lux, is not that kind of film. It's at the next level: it's so challenging and unconventional that it doesn't even train us how to watch itself, but simply blasts forward and doesn't care whether or not we're hanging on. It's the sort of thing that, though it looks like a narrative film in many particulars, probably doesn't actually qualify as one, working rather as an abstraction.

Indeed, watching it, one doesn't first think of how it relates to other movies (not even to Reygadas's own, though it spends a lot of time in the middle in a similar register to Battle in Heaven and especially Silent Light), but of how it relates to other visual art forms: in particular, the film resembles Impressionist painting in a lot of ways, mostly to do with it bends and warps the image to create a certain emotional mood not from anything to do with what is being depicted, but entirely because of how it is being depicted. Most of the exteriors are shot with a wider-than-usual lens, that has had a kind of distorting filter applied to the edges, all in a circle, and this makes anything on the edge of the frame (a frame in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, I might add, which already puts the film comfortably on my good side) split and refract, so that it looks like any moving object is followed by its own ghost. Reygadas has suggested the intent was to make the images look as they might if you were watching them through an old windowpane, and I can definitely see what he's getting at there.

But it doesn't take something as specific as that image to understand what the images are attempting to convey: a certain separation from the material born of nostalgia (the film acts as a slantwise autobiography, but I think that any attempt to chase it down that way is doomed to severely misrepresenting what the film is), and mired in a perspective that doesn't quite understand what's going on literally, nor in a strictly chronological fashion, but is certainly capable of following along with the ebb and flow of mood. The movie opens with a barnburner of a shot in which a little girl, Rut (Rut Reygadas, the director's child) is hastening around a rural yard, chatting enthusiastically with the animals around her, as the sky grows positively apocalypstic in its overcast gloom, and the shot is incredibly anxious for us to occupy the perspective of a very small child, looking right at her (or even up a tiny bit), and to spend a good long time wrapped up in her headspace. Is Post Tenebras Lux meant to be understood as a film from a child's perspective, with its ellipses standing in for the ways that a child fails to understand everything that happens around her? It's hard to say - that's certainly one of many readings available to us.

But even asking the question assumes that there's a way to "solve" Post Tenebras Lux, and one of the things that I think we need to accept about the film is that there simply isn't such a thing as a "solution". This is a movie of impressions and attitudes; it is an emphatically and specifically religious film as well, in which the Devil or something like it is an active figure, personal failures are specifically considered to be sins, in an acutely spiritual (though not specifically Catholic) sense, and an evocative sense of mysticism is laid over the film's very best moments, including the plunge into flickering blackness that follows Rut's merry run around the yard. I think it's absolutely fair to say, in fact, that the biggest problem with Post Tenebras Lux is that it spends far too much time outside of the explicitly spiritual and mystical register established in its opening 20 minutes, with the most literal interpretation of the title, and a utterly breathtaking scene of the Devil, a featureless red space in human form, deliberately stalking through a family's home.

The film actually spends most of its time in a wholly different mode, functioning variably as a study of one family: Juan (Adolfo Jiménez Castro), Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo), and their children, Rut and Eleazar (Eleazar Reygadas), with frequent layovers in scenes that don't have anything to do with any of them. At its worse, the film basically retreads the aesthetic of Silent Light, letting the domestic drama play out in mercilessly long, still moments where the camera soaks up action in something that we might call a naturalistic mode if there was anything even marginally naturalistic about the staging or performances in the film. At its best, it is a phenomenally effective tone poem about good and evil, though I think it should be said that Reygadas's apparent definition of "evil" is more reactionary and unforgiving than mine is; in addition to the film's almost melodramatic fear of sex, there's a repeated motif about addiction and recovery that suggests that human weakness is evil, or at least symptomatic of it, which is a bit harsher and less forgiving than I care for my spiritual allegories to be (I'd contrast the film to The Tree of Life, just about the only thematic mate I can think of in recent cinema, where human weakness is treated with love and understanding and overcome with joy, not with moralising).

That's nitpicking though, and of a particularly weird sort. Frankly, being in a position where I feel like I'm debating religion with a filmmaker because of his movie is so exciting that I don't know what to do with it, and that's enough to make Post Tenebras Lux a completely essential piece of film art. Talking about it in terms of artistic effectiveness is simply bizarre, because the film is far enough away from anything covered by rules that it can't rightly be said to break them or not; I wish mightily that middle was as good as the opening 20 minutes and the beautifully out-of-nowhere but thematically ripe final scene, but that's sort of immaterial. Post Tenebras Lux is an experiment in expressing a religious feeling through cinema, and though the experiment could have been more successful, who else would think to make it? It's not enough to clearly mark Reygadas as one of our best filmmakers in the world right now, but he's easily one of the most essential, and I can think of no reason not to assume that's just as good

[X]/10, though if you made me put a number on it, that number would probably be 8

Read More

CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: PURGATORIO (RODRIGO REYES, MEXICO-USA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/22 & 10/23
World premiere: 1 March, 2013, Guadalajara International Film Festival

The longer I think about Rodrigo Reyes's documentary Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border, ostensibly about life along the border between Mexico and the United States, the more I am convinced that the best way to approach it is to take the title literally. This is a film about Purgatory, the state of waiting in a hell-like place for the promise of something good to come at an uncertain point in the future; the Mexico/U.S. border is merely the physical location that the movie uses to explore that concept.

And if that's a little to abstract and arty (if it is, by the way, stay the hell away from Purgatorio; it delights in the abstract and the arty), we could also trust Reyes himself, who claims in a very reflective and impressionistic opening monologue that he is less concerned with the border than The Border, the tendency of humans to look at the continuous flow of land and water in one steady object that is the surface of the planet and say, "Yeah, I think we should totally chop that into parcels". Maybe even something more metaphorical than that: The Border that says because I am one thing and you are a thing that we both agree is different, we shall also agree that we cannot have things in common. Reyes himself states, less in the spirit of confession than clarification, that the primary motivation for making this film about the boundary line between those two countries is because it is the border which he has spent the most time near, and thus is the one he knows best. The mind boggles to think of the movie that he'd have made if he was a native Canadian; at any rate, it would surely be a damn sight less depressing.

Solidifying the idea that this is about the concept of Borders rather than the specific border, Reyes does not ever once identify a speaker or a location as he interviews many people, more Mexican than American, but several of both nationalities, to find out what it is that they do in their lives on the border. Despite acerbically noting that the Mexican border towns aren't the black holes of violence they're made out to be in the media of both countries (the director claims that after three weeks of searching, he only found one dead body, an argument that would maybe be better served if he did not speak these lines over the dead body in question), it's clear from what we see onscreen that they're not tremendously happy places, either; there is much misery and no small amount of death (one of the most haunting moments in the film is an interview with a U.S. morgue doctor who describes in steady, clinical tones the kind of work he does identifying bodies found in the desert scrub, and then shares with us a body back full of sun-bleached dry bones).

Death is not the only thing to be found on the border - it doesn't suit Reyes rhetoric and perhaps not the reality to find hope and joy (the closest we come is an addict-turned-evangelist operating a home for the developmentally disabled who would otherwise be left to starve like animals on the streets, and even that has the distinct feel of being as much prison as anything), but there is a clear difference struck between "this is how we die miserably", and "this is how we struggle to live as best we can", and most of the film is more concerned with the latter than the former. There's quite a rainbow of humanity displayed throughout, always treated fairly by the director even when he immediately uses an ironic juxtaposition to knock the wind out of his subjects (something he does a little bit too readily), as when a tearful police funeral is followed immediately by a weeping woman bemoaning the cruelty of the police, brutal for the sake of it, or when two Americans are presented in immediate contrast, one who leaves care packages in backpacks along known immigration routes, the other collecting trash that he believes has been left as a breadcrumb trail for illegals to follow (the only open anti-immigration voice in the film, though Reyes does not mock him, and even concedes one of his points, that fixing Mexico matters more than escaping to the U.S.).

All those different people showing up means that the film sometimes wanders in its focus, often being less about "The Border" and more about the political problems facing a Mexico where corruption makes it virtually impossible to make anyone's life better, but the core of the film always remains that where people try to enforce separation between things rather than embrace unity, there is suffering. At times, this suffering is indulged in a bit too enthusiastically (a visit to a animal shelter where the terrified dogs are killed by the very empathetic and sad attendants rather than set loose to wear themselves to rags on the street is fair game; spending quite that much screentime watching a dog twitch after being euthanised is probably not), and the poetically obscure structure, married to Reyes's literary narration and some astoundingly beautiful shots of nature and city alike (the film leaves itself wide open to complaints that it visually glamorises poverty, though I won't be the one to make that complaint), mean that Purgatorio is not by any means a film for all tastes: it is awfully artistic and vague in places for a supposed documentary. But it's powerful regardless, putting its ideas across with force and passion, and depicting the world with tenderness and compassion and fury that we can't be better at humanity than we are. It's hard not to concur with that, and hard for me, for one, not to respond enthusiastically to the way that Reyes makes his feelings known.

8/10

Read More

CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: HELI (AMAT ESCALANTE, MEXICO)

Screens at CIFF: 10/19 & 10/21
World premiere: 16 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival

A third of the way through Heli, one might almost inevitably find it a purposeless noodle through the Mexican countryside with scenes that clearly have no connection to each other and random insert shots of things we'll never need to think about again, and that it's shapeless and undisciplined. One would be wrong to think this.

There comes a point where the film very abruptly shifts gears, and from that point the seemingly arbitrary material that has preceded it takes on a very clear meaning, one that you'd really never be able to predict in advance, since the whole point of the shift is to be shocking and arbitrary. I will try not to be coy, without spoiling anything: we spend nearly half of the movie watching a largely aimless slice-of-life drama that soaks in the comings and goings of one family and the people attached to them in a rundown town in the middle of God knows where. The central character is Heli (Armando Espitia), who lives with his father (I'm having a hard time scrounging up the actor's name), his teenage sister, Estela (Andrea Vergara), his wife, Sabrina (Linda González), and their baby. All of which is bluntly communicated in an early scene where Heli chats with a census worker, a sequence that would be kind of hilarious if it wasn't so ballsy of writer-director Amat Escalante and his co-writer Gabriel Reyes) to lay it out there like that. There's a mechanical crudeness to the moment that ends up feeding right into the film's minimalist intensity, and I like that about it.

Estela has a boyfriend, Alberto (Juan Eduardo Palacios) several years older than she is, and he is eager to an unsightly degree to get into her pants. To meet this end, he's used every technique from begging to bragging about his incredible masculinity as a member of the military's training program for young soldiers, where he's exposed to the desperate drug-capturing missions that the government uses to pretend in front of the media that it has some measure of control over the cartels. In the last, he's offered to take her away from all the dusty drudgery of life and bring her to a faraway paradise where they will marry; he does not mention that the money from this will come from the sale of a kilo of uncut cocaine that he stole away from the last drug bust he saw.

To this point, Heli has been so fixedly unfocused that it seems like an accident it was made at all: no scene seems to connect meaningfully to the scenes on either side of it, there are shots and sequences which focus on people or objects that have no bearing on anything else in the rest of the film, nothing that resembles "conflict" or even a "story" that attaches itself to Heli himself, belying the title. Then Alberto hides the drugs in Heli's water tank, and when Heli finds it, investigating a stoppage, he freaks out and destroys it, dumping it in a sinkhole miles away. Problem solved - except that the drugs were stolen by an idiot teenager who didn't bother hiding his tracks, and now a couple of thugs have been sent to teach an object lesson.

The second portion of Heli is so driven and focused and hellbent on depicting the horrific ramifications of Alberto's theft, and then the ramifications of the ramifications, that it's genuinely scary. Also, it becomes impossible to regard the first sequence as being sloppy in any way, because the iron fist that Escalante wields doesn't suggest a director inclined towards idle choices (and does hugely justify his Best Director win at Cannes). The first half of the film, I think, is a Life in the Round sort of deal, creating a grand panorama of organic lives and grace notes, so that when the second half comes along and horribly violates it, the violation hits us, like the best kind of horror (and that's really what's happening here: this is a horror film, all the worse because the horror happens every single day in a large country adjoining the most industrialised nation in the world): the movie itself changes shape to adjust for the brutality that comes along, and that's as upsetting as the actual brutality itself, including one scene that, even were I to describe it, would have all my male readers shift and cross their legs and possible give their crotch a reassuring patch. It involves lighter fluid. And a lighter. And no editing.

If Heli were only a catalogue of violence - and for a solid 20 minutes, it seems like it will be - there'd be no justifying it as more than exceptionally polished and tony torture porn. Eventually, it does turn into something more meaningful and narrative, involving a human anchor to all the misery, and it's that moment where the film turns into great cinema: having dragged us through hell with its characters, it finds some way to declare that there's still life, though it's not really inclined to say that there's "hope", not in the face of all that. The chilly final shot suggests that its characters survive more than find joy and meaning in anything, but that's the bastardly reality of it. And Heli, as dark a movie as you'll find, is a magnificent attempt to throw the audience around like a ragdoll, confront us with that reality that so many people try to ignore (the film doesn't feel pitched to a non-Mexican audience specifically, but certainly to an audience that isn't dealing with the lives of people like its characters daily, or ever), and dare us not to feel shaken by it. A visceral thriller that doubles as a harsh and angry civics lesson, this is pretty terrific stuff, even if it's one of the most unpleasant things I've seen in 2013.

9/10

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

THERE COULD NEVER BE A FATHER WHO LOVED HIS DAUGHTER MORE THAN I LOVE YOU

The shockingly - one might fairly say unprecedentedly - successful Mexican import Instructions Not Included possesses a title and the skeleton of a plot (womanizer has an illegitimate child dropped on his doorstep, must take care of her) that makes it absolutely obvious what kind of film it is: a warm and cuddly two hours in which a shitty, self-absorbed bachelor learns to love other beings because of his darling infant daughter. Spoiler alert: it's not that movie. Also, the Spanish title, No se Aceptan Devoluciones, translates (saith Google) as "No Refunds", which is a whole hell of a lot better and more craftily suggestive of the plot.

To be sure, the film includes that movie, but it includes a great many movies, and by the 20 minute mark, it's already on the third one. Prior to that, we have experienced a wacky slapstick prologue in which robust Acapulco father Juan "Johnny" Bravo (Hugo Stiglitz) teaches his young son Valentín (who will be played, as a grown-up, by the film's director and co-writer Eugenio Derbez) how not to be scared, largely by plunging the child into a series of traumatising situations that serve the exact wrong purpose. For instead of having no fears, Valentín has all of the fears, which he visualises in the form of wolves ready to tear into him if he goes up that ladder/into that pool/by that spider/etc.

The biggest fear of all, he confides in truly weird cut across 25 years, is the fear of commitment. But the montage of random, family-friendly fucking that begins in this second face of the film, the "slapstick sex comedy" face, is brought to a close when one of Valentín's conquests, the American hippie Julie (Jessica Lindsey), arrives on his stoop with a baby girl that the dissolute chauvinist fathered, and leaves before he has a chance to react. He's so angry that he sneaks into the United States illegally just to dump the baby back at her feet, but something magical happens, and he realises that he's ready to be a father. Except that, now he has an American-born infant with him and no proof that he's related to her, any attempt to get back across the border would be suicide and a half.

At this point, the film skips ahead a few years, to find Valentín a hugely successful Hollywood stuntman, and his daughter Maggie (Loreto Peralta) a criminally darling 7-year-old with more fanciful ideas than you could possibly know what to do with. Valentín feeds these fantasies, spinning a ridiculous life story for the absent Julie involving spying and trips to the moon, and he spends a huge portion of his improbably high wages on buying every imaginable toy for Maggie. At just about the same time he gets a hugely discouraging diagnosis from the family doctor - which he deliberately hides from everybody besides his producer, Frank Ryan (Daniel Raymont) - Julie shows up, with her partner Reneé (Alessandra Rosaldo), looking to re-enter Maggie's life and, if possible, sue to get custody and bring the girl back to New York.

That's still two entire genre shifts from the end yet, one of which involves the single biggest tonal shift that I've seen in a 2013 movie, but let's go ahead and slow down to catch up with what the hell we just read. Instructions Not Included is assuredly not the bland, totally generic thing it looks like from the outside: the precise opposite of that, in fact. It's a florid, ADD-afflicted magpie of a film, including every plot point and emotional register it can, switching from smutty sex jokes to buoyant kiddie-flick slapstick to the treacly warm dramedy of a Very Special episode of an '80s family sitcom within the span of a shot, let alone a scene. It has intimations of political commentary (that it pointedly steps back from) and a weird fantasy idea of what the movie industry is like; it becomes a sober and serious custody battle drama that takes a sharp turn at the last possible instant into a shameless tearjerker. If it were American-made, I like to think of Lee Daniels getting his paws on it; it has the same register of anything goes creativity and disregard for traditional notions of emotional coherence that I respond to in his films.

I also suspect that it would be a better film in that case, given how weirdly Derbez mismanages the thing. I gather that he is a highly-regarded comic mind in Mexico, but Instructions Not Included isn't entirely a comedy; it has comic elements, but it has elements of everything else, too, and the jokes are more of a cute and warm register than actually being funny. Though I'll allow the possibility of a cultural or language gap between me and the film.

Anyway, the comic parts of the film, outside of the sex farce elements and the brief scenes of Valentín plying his trade as a stuntman (doubling for a powerfully unamusing parody of Johnny Depp), are mostly stuck in the "rubber-faced clown and darling moppet" mode that Roberto Benigni ruined for the rest of time with Life Is Beautiful. It actually works in this film, more than I'd have expected, thanks largely to Peralta, a distractingly good child actor (who, even more distractingly, looks like Kristen Bell's clone); not as much to Derbez, visibly ten years too old to be playing a developmentally arrested manchild specifically indicated to be in his mid-30s, though his clowning actually does add to the tenderness of the relationship, rather than just playing as cloying.

In fact, were it just for the candy-colored father-daughter relationship, I could see myself waving Instructions Not Included through, on the grounds that it's effectively sweet, and we need sweet things, just as much as we need anything else. Even the ginned-up conflict between Bitch Lesbian edition Julie and Valentín "works", though I should have preferred it working in some other movie than this one. The whole affair, though is so unevenly handled, slurrying emotions in a way that feels careless rather than cleverly unconventional, and the whole thing is about as visually drab as anything with this many bright colors and painfully quirky touches in the costumes and sets could manage to be. It's a slack movie that tries to coast on hamfisted emotional manipulation to make the viewer feel feelings, and ends up (particularly on the back of a crass, overwrought ending) playing as superficial and insincere at far too many key moments.

6/10

Read More