Mexican Screen Fiction E-Book

Paul Julian Smith

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 534

Beschreibung

Mexican cinema is booming today, a decade after the international successes of Amores perros and Y tu mamá también. Mexican films now display a wider range than any comparable country, from art films to popular genre movies, and boasting internationally renowned directors like Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro. At the same time, television has broadened its output, moving beyond telenovelas to produce higher-value series and mini-series. Mexican TV now stakes a claim to being the most dynamic and pervasive national narrative. This new book by Paul Julian Smith is the first to examine the flourishing of audiovisual fiction in Mexico since 2000, considering cinema and TV together. It covers much material previously unexplored and engages with emerging themes, including violence, youth culture, and film festivals. The book includes reviews of ten films released between 2001 and 2012 by directors who are both established (Maryse Sistach, Carlos Reygadas) and new (Jorge Michel Grau, Michael Rowe, Paula Markovitch). There is also an appendix that includes interviews carried out by the author in 2012 with five audiovisual professionals: a feature director, a festival director, an exhibitor, a producer, and a TV screenwriter. Mexican Screen Fiction will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars and essential reading for anyone interested in one of the most vibrant audiovisual industries in the world today.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Figures

Preface

Introduction: Mexican Screen Fiction

Jump Cut 1: Y tu mamá también

Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Part I: Setting Scenes

1: Revising Mexican Cinema

Repeating and Renewing

Three ‘Third-Way’ Features

2: Following Festivals

Morelia, 2009: The Legacy of the Past, the Problematics of the Present, and the Retreat from the City

Guadalajara, 2011: Art and Industry

Jump Cut 2: Perfume de violetas, Frida

Perfume de violetas (Maryse Sistach, 2001)

Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002)

Part II: Auteurs and Genres

3: A Case Study in Transnational Gay Auteurism: Julián Hernández's A Thousand Clouds of Peace Encircle the Sky, Love, Your Being Love Will Never End (Mil nubes de paz cercan el cielo, amor, jamás acabarás de ser amor, 2003)

Straying Further

Looking Closer

4: A Case Study in Genre and Nationality: Guillermo del Toro's Pan'sLabyrinth (El laberinto del fauno, 2006)

Exploring Horror

Masked Cuts and Sound Bridges

Jump Cut 3: 21 Grams, Battle in Heaven, KM 31

21 Grams (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2003)

Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo, Carlos Reygadas, 2005)

KM 31 (Rigoberto Castañeda, 2006)

Part III: Marginal Subjects

5: Youth Culture in Mexico: Rebel (Rebelde, Televisa, 2004–6), I'm Gonna Explode (Voy a explotar, Gerardo Naranjo, 2009)

Founding Contradictions

Two Audiovisual Case Studies: Production and Consumption

Media, Youth, Apprenticeship

Rebel: Pleasures and Pedagogies

I'm Gonna Explode: A Finely Balanced Rebellion

The Impossible Dream

6: Lady Killers in TV Fiction: Women Murderers (Mujeres asesinas, Televisa, 2008–10), The Aparicio Women (Las Aparicio, Argos, 2010–11)

Ladies of Silence?

Women Murderers: Overview

Women Murderers: Specimen Episodes

The Aparicio Women: Overview

The Aparicio Women: Specimen Episodes

Vocal Women

Jump Cut 4: We Are What We Are, Leap Year

We Are What We Are (Somos lo que hay, Jorge Michel Grau, 2010)

Leap Year (Año bisiesto, Michael Rowe, 2010)

Part IV: Tales of Insecurity

7: Film Fictions of Violence: Hell (El infierno, Luis Estrada, 2010), Saving Private Pérez (Salvando al soldado Pérez, Beto Gómez, 2011), Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo, 2011)

Maps and Mirrors

Two Movie Surveys

Hell: Chronology and Cartography

Saving Private Pérez: ‘Narcomedy’ and Catharsis

Miss Bala: Fashion Victims

No Mere Maquiladora

8: TV Histories of Violence: In the Sewers (Drenaje profundo, Azteca, 2010), Cries of Death and Freedom (Gritos de muerte y libertad, Televisa, 2010)

Out of the Underworld

Two TV surveys

In the Sewers: Production and Reception

In the Sewers: Close Reading

Cries of Death and Freedom: Production and Reception

Cries of Death and Freedom: Close Reading

Paralegal Rebels

Jump Cut 5: The Prize, Windows to the Sea

The Prize (El premio, Paula Markovitch, 2011), Windows to the Sea (Ventanas al mar, Jesús Mario Lozano, 2012)

Conclusion: Between Cinema and Television

Appendix: Interviews with Five Media Professionals

The Director: Jesús Mario Lozano

The Festival Director: Daniela Michel

The Exhibitor: Alejandro Ramírez

The Producer: Roberto Fiesco

The TV Screenwriter: Leticia López Margalli

Bibliography

Index

To Mexican friends

Copyright © Paul Julian Smith 2014

The right of Paul Julian Smith to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8078-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8079-8(pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8125-2 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8124-5 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

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Figures

1Así (Jesús Mario Lozano, 2005)

2Alamar (Pedro González-Rubio, 2009)

3A Thousand Clouds of Peace (Julián Hernández, 2004)

4Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)

5Rebel (Televisa, 2004–6)

6I'm Gonna Explode (Gerardo Naranjo, 2009)

7Women Murderers (Televisa, 2008–10)

8The Aparicio Women (Cadena 3, 2010–11)

9Hell (Luis Estrada, 2010)

10Saving Private Pérez (Beto Gómez, 2011)

11Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo, 2011)

12In the Sewers (TV Azteca, 2010)

13Cries of Death and Freedom (Televisa, 2010)

Preface

I would like to thank, above all, the five audiovisual professionals who kindly and generously responded to my questions and whose answers are reproduced as an Appendix to this book: Jesús Mario Lozano, Daniela Michel, Alejandro Ramírez, Roberto Fiesco and Leticia López Margalli. Their contribution is invaluable.

Thanks are also due to my editors at Film Quarterly (Rob White) and Sight & Sound (Nick James, James Bell and Kieron Corless); to Raúl Miranda López and his staff at the Cineteca library; and to John Thompson at Polity for his kindness and impressive efficiency. Much of the material included here has been presented at conferences and lectures in Mexico, the US and Europe, and I am grateful for audience responses there, especially at ‘Mexican Itineraries’ organized by Oswaldo Zavala at the Graduate Center in 2012.

Julia Tuñón and Guillermo Orozco have been great inspirations in film and TV studies, respectively. Patricia Torres' work on cinema reception has also proved invaluable. My students and colleagues at CUNY Graduate Center, especially in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Program (José del Valle, Isaías Lerner and Lía Schwartz) have created the precious and productive environment within which this book was so happily written.

All of the ‘Jump Cut’ texts were first published in Sight & Sound, with the exception of the last, which was first published in Film Quarterly. Part of chapter 1 was published in Spanish as ‘Revisiones del cine mexicano’, Casa del Tiempo [Mexico], 29 (March 2010), 46–9; and parts of chapter 2 in Film Quarterly and as ‘Report on Guadalajara: art and industry’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 8.1 (2011), 101–108.

This book is dedicated with affection and respect to the Mexican friends who have opened up a new world to me over the last ten years.

New York City, November 2012

Introduction: Mexican Screen Fiction

This book is the first to examine audiovisual fiction in Mexico since 2000, examining film and television together. Most of the material it treats remains very recent and has thus not yet received critical attention.

As is well known, cinema in Mexico was revived at the start of the millennium with the critical and popular successes, at home and abroad, of Amores perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) and Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2002). Since that date production has increased to a healthy seventy features a year and Mexico's films now encompass a wider range than any comparable country: from austere art films, generally shown at international festivals and little seen in Mexico itself, to popular genre movies, localist in theme and audience, via the works of transnational auteurs such as Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro. It is striking that as I write these words (May 2012) the three films chosen for the Best Mexican Feature competition at the Ariel Awards 2011 are remarkably diverse: art movie Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo) (which I treat at some length in this book), riotous comedy Nativity Play (Pastorela, Emilio Portes) and a mid-market network narrative highly reminiscent of González Iñárritu, Days of Grace (Días de gracia, Everardo Valerio Gout).

Meanwhile television, although still largely subjected to the exhibition duopoly of Televisa and Azteca, has nonetheless broadened its offer, going beyond traditional telenovelas to produce for the first time higher value series and mini-series, especially in the criminal and historical genres, and staking a claim to being the most vibrant, as well as the most pervasive, national narrative. While film-makers complain that, unlike in Spain, there is no Cinema Law obliging TV companies to cross-subsidize feature films, there has in fact been a convergence between the two media in the industrial, aesthetic and thematic fields, and one that has generally gone unnoticed. It remains the case, however, that the worlds of cinema and television (both for practitioners and academics) remain separate. My intention, which may well prove polemical, is thus to bring them together, calling attention to their commonalities.

Paying close attention to the text of these rich screen fictions (for the first time in the case of television, whose researchers, in Mexico as elsewhere, rarely focus on content), this book draws on multiple sources. These include media theory, recent Mexican scholarship on cinema and TV audiences (especially the pioneering work of Patricia Torres San Martín and Guillermo Orozco Gómez), internet fan forums, and the trade and general presses. Scholarly debates in Mexico on violence by scholars such as Rossana Reguillo are also addressed in detail. In addition to this academic focus, the book provides some of my own journalistic reportage from the Mexican media scene. It also pays proper attention to the film critics of the Mexican newspapers and magazines, who often give the most incisive and far-sighted commentary on their country's cinema: Carlos Bonfil (above all), Leonardo García Tsao, Fernanda Solórzano and (also a distinguished historical researcher) Jorge Ayala Blanco.

The book begins by charting the audiovisual territory. The first chapter argues for a revision of contemporary Mexican cinema in the light of a new relation to the visual heritage of the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1940s, new attention to gender and the role of women, and a re-reading of the ‘national’ in national cinema. It also examines three features by young directors which blur the barrier between art cinema and popular film. The second chapter gives an account of the two most important festivals in Mexico (the very different Morelia and Guadalajara) in the years 2009 and 2011. Festivals are now the most important venues for the screening of many local films, which often fail to make it to theatres at home. My chapter offers a panorama of recent cinema and gives an industrial account of conditions of production, distribution and exhibition for the new decade, including the fraught relationship with television.

The second pair of chapters (chapters 3 and 4) is more textualist and compares and contrasts single films by two very different auteurs. Julián Hernández is an openly gay art director who now has three small budget features to his credit, films which have received wide festival acclaim. Funded, surprisingly perhaps, by the cultural institutions of the Mexican government, Hernández appeals to the transnational register of European art cinema even as he engages with highly local elements of mise-en-scène and narration. Here I examine his first, distinctive feature, A Thousand Clouds of Peace (Mil nubes de paz, 2003). Guillermo del Toro, on the other hand, is of course a celebrated transnational film-maker who has worked widely in Mexico, Europe and the US. Chapter 4 examines Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno, 2006), a film shot in Spain (arguing that it is a Mexican who has made the most original contribution to the cinema of the Spanish Civil War) and which, in spite of its wager on cultural distinction, relies on a horror genre that has a distinct history in both countries.

The third pair of chapters (chapters 5 and 6) makes the transition to television via genre once more and the (still) marginal subjects of the young and women. In the first, Rebel (Rebelde, Televisa, 2004–6), a notoriously successful teen telenovela, is contrasted with I'm Gonna Explode (Voy a explotar, Gerardo Naranjo, 2008), an accomplished art movie also with adolescent protagonists. I argue that the feature film coincides thematically and even formally with the TV series, even as it seeks to distance itself from the critically reviled medium of television. Chapter 6 in this pair deals with two innovative TV shows on the rare theme of female killers. In Women Murderers (Mujeres asesinas, Televisa, 2008–10), the dominant broadcaster adapted an Argentine police format of one-off dramas to a Mexican setting to great effect (when exported to the US this series beat the English-language networks in the ratings). In the second, The Aparicio Women (Las Aparicio, Argos, 2010–11), independent Channel 3 breached the broadcasting duopoly with an innovative telenovela that featured an all-female cast and an explicitly feminist and lesbian agenda. Both fictions boasted expert cinema-style production values, casts and scripts.

The final pair of chapters compares perhaps the most important theme in contemporary Mexico, namely violence and insecurity, in the twin media of film and television. Chapter 7 addresses three films in distinct genres in order to investigate their specificity: a mordant political satire, Hell (El infierno, Luis Estrada, 2010), a popular farce, Saving Private Pérez (Salvando al soldado Pérez, Beto Gómez, 2011), and the ambivalent art movie, Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo, 2011). The final chapter traces the histories of violence in two big-budget mini-series shown in 2010: In the Sewers (Drenaje profundo, Azteca, 2010) is an expert genre piece (between police and horror), which, it is argued, obliquely addresses Mexico's violent past as well as its bloody present; Cries of Death and Freedom (Gritos de muerte y libertad, Televisa, 2010) is a prestige production made for the Bicentennial year of Independence, which, beyond celebration, suggests that violence is at the very origin of the state. The Conclusion highlights the links between cinema and television in the current decade.

These formally written chapters are supplemented by what are called ‘Jump Cuts’, interpolated reviews of ten feature films released between 2001 and 2012 originally written for Sight & Sound and (in the final case) Film Quarterly. While these texts, which were composed on the occasion of each film's initial release, lack the academic apparatus of referencing to be found in the main chapters, they supplement scholarly reflection with a sense of journalistic zeitgeist, which I believe is essential when treating contemporary material. Moreover, they widen the scope of the book to include a number of directors who are both established (Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Maryse Sistach, Carlos Reygadas) and new and little known (Jorge Michel Grau, Michael Rowe, Paula Markovitch). Both the main chapters and the Jump Cuts are presented in broadly chronological order, thus giving a sense of how Mexican screen fiction has developed over the course of the first decade of the millennium.

My own text is supplemented and complemented by an Appendix made up of extended interviews carried out in 2012 with five audiovisual professionals, whose work I address at different points in this book: a feature director, a festival director, an exhibitor, a producer and a TV screenwriter. What is striking in the responses of my interviewees (which I have limited myself to translating from their original Spanish) is how much, from their distinct professional perspectives, these distinguished figures both coincide with and diverge from one another, thus offering invaluable evidence for the richness and complexity of the current Mexican audiovisual scene.

As will be evident, the first chapters focus mainly on institutional questions (production, distribution and exhibition in theatres and at festivals). But I have attempted to integrate such quantitative material into the close qualitative readings of texts that follow. Thus the opening chapter on ‘revisions’ of Mexican cinema includes an initial account of the current situation in Monterrey (taken from Lucila Hinojosa Córdova), which it juxtaposes with Julia Tuñón's feminist reading of Golden Age cinema, and case studies of three low-budget fiction films. The festival chapter includes a detailed account of a Forum on the Future of Mexican Film that I was privileged to attend in Guadalajara. The case studies of film-makers that follow take the conditions of genre and nationality (and gender and sexuality) as necessary and perhaps productive material constraints on unfettered auteurship, even as they provide close readings of individual features.

In the second half of the book, youth culture is framed within Gabriel Orozco's analysis of ‘televidencia’ (the particular mode of TV consumption), while femme fatale drama is read in the light of strains in the hegemony of both the telenovela and Televisa, the still-dominant genre and broadcaster. And in the last pair of chapters, film fictions of violence are contextualized by two contrasting accounts of the cinematic scene in 2010, while TV histories of violence are placed within the framework of twin surveys of the televisual year.

By using a wide range of sources for this quantitative material, I hope to give a nuanced account of the field (indeed, some of these sources contradict each other). And by offering close readings of all my chosen texts I am suggesting that even those that are wholly deprived of cultural distinction (most blatantly, teen telenovelas) are more complex and significant than they may at first appear. Certainly my aim is to contest the consensus of foreign film scholars and critics, who tend to focus on the small number of art movies that gain international distribution and are barely screened at home.

Such rare and little-seen features, whatever their artistic virtues, can hardly be called representative of their home nation and need to be supplemented by an awareness of TV series (like Rebel) and popular movies (like Saving Private Pérez) that have audiences in the millions. Moreover actors and, increasingly, directors migrate freely between the two media of film and television. It thus makes little analytical sense to separate the two vehicles of Mexican screen fiction that go to make up what is now de facto a single audiovisual sector. While, as I mentioned earlier, many Mexican film practitioners and scholars display an intense hostility to television, there exists one important scholarly precedent for my transmedia study, albeit for a slightly earlier period and on a more specialized topic: Raúl Miranda López's expert monograph on Televisa's neglected feature film production (2006).

Over the last decade of visits to Mexico, since I conducted the research for my book on Amores perros (Smith, 2003), I have been struck by two things: how an apocalyptic view of the (nonetheless very real) scourges of violence and corruption has made some citizens forgetful of their growing economic success and democratic gains since the turn of the millennium; and how a similarly negative attitude towards Mexican feature films and (on the rare occasions that they are treated seriously) television series have made critics and viewers blind to the increasing wealth of offer in both media. Curiously this instinctive hostility towards local production and continuing reluctance to think of cinema and television together occurs not just in Mexico, but also in Spain, a territory with which Mexico would otherwise seem to have little in common. I have published an earlier book on that country with similar intent and title (Smith, 2009b).

This book is, then, like its predecessor, the fruit of the pleasure I have felt in discovering and exploring screen fictions of the current decade, aided in this case by the invaluable guidance of Mexican scholars and friends. It is offered to readers in the hope that others may find that same pleasure in some of those texts (fragments of which are readily available on the internet), even if my accounts of them may prove polemical. Certainly my writing could hardly match the richness and diversity of Mexican screen fictions themselves, so self-evident to any knowledgeable and sympathetic observer.

Jump Cut 1

Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Mexican cinema is on a roll. Despite the political turmoil and crisis that plague the government-funded film institute IMCINE, it has produced a string of local hits. These have most recently been crowd-pleasing comedies that couldn't be more different from earnest art movies by the likes of Arturo Ripstein that are usually distributed abroad. Domestic cinema may even survive proposals, condemned by Ripstein and others, to increase the market for US imports – now shown only with subtitles – by dubbing them into Spanish. Nostalgic for the Golden Age of the 1940s, when the Mexican industry was one of the world's largest, boasting stars like Dolores del Río and directors like Emilio Fernández (not to mention Buñuel), local producers hope this latest revival may be here to stay.

Alfonso Cuarón's smart and sexy road movie Y tu mamá también broke the all-time domestic box-office record for a Mexican film, taking $2.2 million in its opening week, despite a widely ignored ‘X’ rating that should have excluded much of its target audience. A reprise of the oldest story in the book, Y tu mamá también tells the tale of two teenage hedonists, wealthy Tenoch (Diego Luna) and poor Julio (Gael García Bernal), who take off from the city with unhappily married Spaniard Luisa (Maribel Verdú) in search of a mythical beach called Boca del Cielo (Heaven's Mouth). Y tu mamá también is both a love-triangle and a coming-of-age movie in which, in the familiar cliché, ‘none of them would be the same after that summer’.

Writing in Variety, Mexican film scholar Leonardo García Tsao dismisses the film as a ‘south-of-the-border Beavis & Butthead’, its protagonists ‘oversexed and underdeveloped’. He also describes the theme of a boy's sexual education by an older woman as a fantasy ‘straight out of Penthouse’. There's no doubt many viewers read the film in this way: a glance at the messages posted on the film's official website confirms this salacious response. But most of the film's frequent and graphic nudity is male, for example when the two boys are shown desperately servicing their girlfriends before the latter leave on holiday in the opening sequences. In a later shower scene, Luna gamely wears a prosthetic glans (unlike the actor, his character Tenoch is circumcised). To accuse the film of crudeness is not only to misread its grungy technique but to confuse the characters' viewpoints with the film's own. Apparently a slight comedy, packed with the lewdness for which Mexican speech is famous, Y tu mamá también subtly revises models of gender and national identity for a new Mexico and a new international audience.

Cuarón himself is eager to disassociate himself from what he calls a ‘cinema of denunciation’: the explicitly political output of an earlier generation of engaged auteurs who explored poverty and exploitation among the underclass, or attacked US imperialism. Cuarón is willing to risk being branded as superficial because his film is entertaining, treacherous because it draws on US culture, and reactionary because it deals with bourgeois characters. Yet his attack on what he calls ‘ideology’ could itself be read as ideological. Julio's sister, a leftist student who supports the Zapatista rebels, is given short shrift: she exists only to loan the boys the battered car in which they make their trip. The opening sequences in Mexico City include such high-end locations as Tenoch's palatial home and a plush country club, and the official website unashamedly plays for pleasure: surfers are invited to tour the characters’ station wagon, dress the boys in their favoured grungy garments and shoot down flying phalluses that flit across the screen.

Nevertheless, there's no doubt that, like Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores perros (2000), which also starred the charismatic García Bernal, Y tu mamá también marks a new cinematic moment that coincides with a new political order. Indeed, its sober closing sequence refers explicitly to the defeat in July 2000 of the oddly named Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which had ruled Mexico with the dead hand of corruption for seventy-one years. With the election of new president Vicente Fox of the rightist National Action Party (PAN), Mexicans were more than ready for political and cultural change. The first film to herald the end of the ancien régime was Luis Estrada's political satire Herod's Law (La ley de Herodes [1999]), a cause célèbre after the PRI-controlled IMCINE tried in vain to prevent its distribution. But while La ley de Herodes is too local to appeal to foreigners, Y tu mamá también's coming-of-age story has hit a universal nerve, winning film awards for Best Screenplay and Best Newcomer at 2001's Venice festival.

Rejecting the glossy professionalism of his Hollywood features A Little Princess (1995) and Great Expectations (1997), Cuarón employs a loose and supple technique. The plot develops, in true road-movie fashion, with apparent spontaneity, helped by the fact that the film was shot in sequence with the actors seeming to change and mature over the 105 minutes of its running time. The camera work is seemingly artless: Cuarón's account of his collaboration with director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki recalls Buñuel's relationship with Gabriel Figueroa in that both seek to avoid prettiness, refusing to film if the light or landscape is too beautiful. Cuarón and Lubezki also favour sequence shots – when Luisa goes off with the boys, the camera watches her linger in her apartment and go out of the door before simply wandering to the window to see her exit into the street below. Performances appear improvised. García Bernal and Luna are real-life long-time friends, first having worked together at the age of twelve. Their intimacy and awkwardness in the sex scenes seem quite unforced, while their expert chilango (Mexico City dialect) will prove as opaque to outsiders as it is to the Spanish Luisa.

But just as the seeming absence of ideology is itself ideological, so the apparently artless form relies on artistry. Though the actors contributed to the script during the rehearsal process, the screenplay (by Cuarón and his brother Carlos) is deceptively well made. When they set out on their journey, the two boys recite a Rabelaisian manifesto to Luisa – it comes down to ‘do what you want’ (but don't screw another guy's girlfriend). Towards the end of what is now an exhausting trek, Luisa lays down the law herself, improvising an alternative, woman-centred manifesto. Dramatic irony ensures the audience knows more than the characters: we have seen Luisa split up with her philandering husband, but the boys have not.

The casual-looking cinematography is also smarter than it appears. When the camera strays from the table where the main characters are enjoying a meal, it is to enter the kitchen where Indian women cook. As the trio crudely discusses sexual techniques in the car, they pass roadblocks where we glimpse soldiers interrogating peasants. In long shot, the car, suddenly diminished, vanishes in the vast landscape or appears behind women washing clothes in a river. If framing unobtrusively makes a political point, then so does editing. Cuarón cuts for contrast: from the sunny swimming pool where the boys jerk off together to the fantasized image of ‘Salmita’ Hayek to the dark bedroom where a solitary Luisa confronts her husband's infidelity on the phone. A student demonstration in the city is juxtaposed with the teenagers' trip to a vast supermarket in the suburbs – a temple to consumerism.

Favouring long shots and lengthy takes as the film does, its principals need all their professional technique to keep control. Cuarón has said that initially he intended to cast amateurs, but they couldn't give the performances he required. The experience of Maribel Verdú, veteran of some thirty films in Spain, anchors the relative newcomers García Bernal and Luna. From a prim, melancholy wife (dressed in ivory satin), she is transformed into a denim-clad sexual predator who takes on the boys in a seedy motel and on the back seat of a car. Her voyage of discovery thus complements the teenagers' more familiar quest for identity. All three are at their best in a final drunken dinner scene, a tour de force that lasts for an unbroken take of seven minutes.

But the strongest indication of the unforced seriousness of this sexy, funny film lies in its use of voice-over. Throughout, dead-pan, third-person narration informs us of what the characters can never know or choose not to reveal. Speeding heedlessly through the city, the young lovers are ignorant of the fact that a migrant worker has been killed on the same road. Later Tenoch doesn't tell his companions they are passing the village of his Indian nanny, whom he called ‘mother’ until he was four. The fisherman the characters meet on the magical beach will, we are told, be displaced by a luxury hotel. Cuarón cites Godard as an inspiration for the voice-over and Y tu mamá también can be re-read as a Mexican nouvelle vague, deftly skewering the Latin American cinéma de papa even as it shares aspects of its predecessors' social critique.

The notorious Oedipal Mexican profanity to which the title refers is also incorporated and ironized. Luisa may be a mother-whore or Penthouse fantasy, but she has hidden motives for her sexual abandon. Moreover, she loudly exposes the homoeroticism underlying Mexican machismo, claiming the boys only fight like dogs because they want to fuck each other. Gender stereotypes are revised, culminating in a final twist that has disconcerted some fans, just as national identity is re-evaluated. The only sign of fetishistic folklore is at a glamorous wedding where charros (cowboys) and mariachis perform in a muddy arena. But Cuarón's camera pointedly abandons the wealthy masters to follow a maid taking food to the chauffeurs outside. Or again the camera tracks after Tenoch's nanny as she treks through the huge family house to deliver a sandwich and answer the phone ringing unheeded at his side. The ‘cinema of denunciation’ Cuarón critiques is not so much abandoned in Y tu mamá también as fully and unselfconsciously integrated into the film's narrative and form.

Important here is a new aspect of cultural nationalism: Mexicanness need no longer be defined in opposition to the US. Cultural commentator Carlos Monsiváis has recently noted Mexico's naturalization of Hallowe'en, a holiday hitherto unknown. Likewise, Cuarón Mexicanizes the US genre of the road movie and is confident enough to employ a gloriously hybrid soundtrack. While the script was written to the sound of Frank Zappa's melancholy instrumental ‘Watermelon in Easter Hay’, the songs booming from the boys' cassette player stray from Eno and Natalie Imbruglia to Latin dance numbers. Most telling is the fact that the term charolastra, which the boys use to describe themselves (an invented word said to mean ‘space cowboy’), is derived from misunderstood English-language lyrics overheard on the radio. This is significant because the idiosyncratic speech is the most local element in the film: the Castilian-speaking Luisa repeatedly asks the boys to translate their chilango, and while Y tu mamá también has been shown around the world, most Spanish speakers are partly excluded from its dialogue. As sociologist Manuel Castells has written, globalization is combined with a resurgence of intense localism. The website is intriguing here – surfers from Montevideo to Madrid lament their failure to understand chilango but an equal number post their fan mail in versions of that same idiolect. Like a Mexican A Clockwork Orange, Y tu mamá también schools its consumers in a rich and strange idiom.

If the language remains irredeemably local, the same goes for the landscape. Heading south and east of the capital through the impoverished states of Puebla and Oaxaca to the Pacific coast, Y tu mamá también reveals unselfconsciously and unobtrusively a Mexico rarely seen on screen. The travellers chance on popular traditions: a local carnival queen being used to extract money from cars stopped on the highway; an ancient woman standing guard over an indigenous altar where saints and candles mingle with fluffy toys. And when we finally, miraculously, reach the longed-for beach, we are not allowed to forget the ravages of tourism on this unspoilt environment as the voice-over informs us that the fisherman the friends encounter will end up as a hotel caretaker. The ‘magical, musical Mexico’ toasted by the drunken trio is both ironically celebrated and ruefully mourned.

In a final, downbeat sequence the two boys meet up by accident back in the city. This is the only time the voice-over is explicitly political – the PRI has, we are told, just lost the presidential elections. Cuarón has described Mexico as an ‘adolescent’ country, struggling to grow up and acknowledge aspects of itself for which it was not prepared. The sombre dialogue here (filmed in shot/reverse shot as opposed to the wide shots and long takes favoured in the rest of the film) suggests the boys’ quest for identity is equally unsettling: there are some things about ourselves we would prefer not to know.

While the decline of state funding for film is disturbing in a country where the government was for so long a major participant in production, Y tu mamá también (like Amores perros before it) is testimony to a sector newly invigorated in part by private money. Like the equally surprising Argentine renaissance, the revival of Mexican film will lead to destinations that cannot be predicted. This is the final moral of Cuarón's artfully artless road movie.

Sight & Sound (April 2002)

Part I

Setting Scenes

1

Revising Mexican Cinema

Repeating and Renewing

In October 2008 a special issue of the cultural magazine Letras Libres put an evocative image on its cover, reworked from a nineteenth-century engraving of the Zócalo or main square of Mexico City: on the left is the Cathedral, looking as it always has, but to the right, perfectly preserved, is the long-destroyed Aztec temple, which had originally stood in that place, complete with Mexican flag hoisted proudly at its summit. Within this issue are collected essays offering alternative versions (or ‘revisions’) of Mexican history, imagining (as in the cover image) that the Spanish and Aztec cultures had reached an accommodation, or even that the indigenous civilizations had conquered the conquistadors and survived to our time. According to the editor of the magazine, ‘Mexico is, for better and for worse, what it is. But it could have been otherwise.’ (‘México es, para bien y para mal, lo que es. Pero pudo haber sido de otro modo.’) These ‘imagined pasts’ or ‘invisible Mexicos’ are ‘ghosts’ used to ‘combat historical determinism and intellectual resignation’ (‘combatir el determinismo histórico y la resignación intelectual’, 2008: 7).

This first chapter explores some recent revisions of the national narrative of Mexican cinema, which are perhaps similar to those suggested by Letras Libres in the case of the Mexican nation and which offer radically different perspectives on the development of this cinema. These revisions are: the special issue of Artes de México entitled precisely ‘Revisión del cine mexicano’, focused on the so-called ‘Golden Age’; Julia Tuñón's reinterpretation of that Golden Age from the perspective of gender and women's studies (a feminist approach much less familiar in Mexico than in the USA or UK); and two recent case studies of Mexican cinema from the UK and Mexico, by Andrea Noble and Lucila Hinojosa Córdova respectively. The chapter concludes with a discussion of three feature films of the millennium that exemplify this process of revision (of repetition and re-creation) which I have proposed as central to current Mexican film and its relation to the past. It is no coincidence that all three address the theme of adolescence, emblematic of a cinema that, despite a long and rich history, still regards itself as somewhat immature and underdeveloped.

But first, a few comments on the concept of ‘revision’ that I am proposing. In a historiographical context, the term ‘revisionism’ has nuances in English that are contradictory and even disturbing. On the one hand, it is used in cases of transparent and ideologically motivated mendacity, as in the denial of the Holocaust; but it is also used, like its Spanish cognate, to name a continuous and necessary process under which canonical ideas are put to the test, citing new materials and new hypotheses.

Likewise, according to the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, ‘revisionismo’ is the ‘tendency to submit established doctrines, interpretations or practices to methodical revision with the aim of updating them’ (‘tendencia a someter a revisión metódica doctrinas, interpretaciones o prácticas establecidas con la pretensión de actualizarlas’, DRAE, 2012: s.v. revisionismo). This is how I understand ‘revision’ in the context of Mexican cinema, irrespective of how different the successive versions of this phenomenon may be. In the words of Letras Libres once more, such revisions are fighting against historical determinism and intellectual resignation. Secondly, if I may return to a theoretical model that is now somewhat outdated, revision as it is presented here is a ‘supplement’ in both senses of Jacques Derrida's use of the term: it is both the insertion of an additional element that serves to fill a gap or absence and the replacement of an existing element with a new one (1998: 141). I suggest that the logic of the revision, then, as in the case of the supplement, is both cumulative and substitutive.

This process is seen even in the least ambitious of my materials, the special issue of Artes de México, which originated in an exhibition of photographs on the legends of Mexican cinema held in the capital's Palace of Fine Arts (Palacio de Bellas Artes) in 1990 (the issue was re-published in 2001). The magazine, beautifully produced, is presented in general terms as an encyclopedia of cultures in Mexico, resurrected (it was first founded in 1951) to give a new perspective on visual culture and using a method that ‘ranges between history of mentalities and cultural studies’ (‘oscila entre la historia de las mentalidades y los estudios culturales’, 2001: no page number).

The issue itself is presented in a wilfully paradoxical way as a ‘visual narrative’ and ‘an image essay’ (‘narrativa visual … ensayo de imágenes’, 2001: 25), both of which are carried out by means of the glamorous photos that occupy the vast majority of its pages. The texts, on the other hand, are rather brief and based on interviews with well-known figures in their respective fields (cultural commentator Carlos Monsiváis, historical scholar Emilio García Riera and director Arturo Ripstein). According to the editors, they constitute ‘images that are in a sense written’ (‘de alguna manera imágenes escritas’, 2001: 25), documenting the emotional and aesthetic relationships of the contributors with Mexican cinema, and based on ‘favourite moments’ or ‘elements … that could be taken up to develop a new aesthetic for the end of the century’ (‘momentos favoritos … elementos … que se podrían retomar para formular una nueva estética de final del siglo’, 2001: 25).

Although the editors are aware that the magazine, halfway between image and text, is only ‘one of many possible itineraries’ and ‘routes of memory’ for Mexican cinema (‘uno de los múltiples recorridos posibles … rutas de la memoria’, 2001: 22, 23), and claim that this issue is a tool against a falsely totalizing ‘overall account’ (‘recuento global’, 2001: 23), it is clear that this self-proclaimed revision includes some perspectives even as it excludes others.

For example, in historiographical terms, the emphasis on the Golden Age is overwhelming, beginning with the many faces on the cover: here we first see Dolores del Río and Pedro Armendáriz, luminous in María Candelaria (Emilio Fernández, 1943), and once the cover is unfolded, María Félix in a gorgeous gown in May God Forgive Me (Que Dios me perdone, Tito Davison, 1948) and Jorge Negrete as a handsome rancher in Rapture (El rapto, Emilio Fernández, 1954). Even a critic as wilfully iconoclastic as Jorge Ayala Blanco examines in his essay a Golden-Age film of love and deadly passions, Sensuality (Sensualidad, Alberto Gout, 1951) with Ninón Sevilla (albeit under the tendentious title ‘Necrophilia is Culture’ [‘La necrofilia es cultura’]). Only the young Guillermo del Toro dares to invoke another history of Mexican cinema. In an essay entitled ‘Retomar el cine de géneros’ (‘Retaking Genre Cinema’), the last of the collection, he deals, uniquely in the volume, with neglected or scorned genres such as wrestling movies, horror and popular comedy (2001: 79).

In a somewhat predictable way, then, the extravagant visuality of the Golden Age blends with the hegemony of the image in a magazine that here serves the function of a museum. But there is some irony nonetheless: the fetishistic scopophilia so gloriously displayed in Artes de México is based not on the films themselves but on still photos that were taken in studios for publicity purposes. Such promotional shots, ‘supplementary’ in nature, serve here as both substitutes for and additions to the movies of the Golden Age. It is perhaps with good reason that the editors write (2001: 22) that mental images of Mexican cinema fail to come together to make continuous sequences, such is the power of these stills, frozen as they are into immobility.

Just as the editors of Artes de México propose the hybrid terms ‘visual narrative’ and ‘image writing’ to address Mexican film heritage in a new way, so the distinguished historian Julia Tuñón incorporates within her minute study of the Golden Age her own terminology, which is at once visual and textual. Mujeres de luz y sombra en el cine mexicano: la construcción de una imagen (1939–1952) (Women of light and shade in Mexican cinema: the construction of an image, 1998) starts with what the author calls an ‘establishing shot’, and proceeds with a ‘travelling’, a ‘sequence-shot’, and even a ‘high angle’, all of them, of course, written and not filmed.

For Tuñón, in the introduction to her study (characteristically entitled ‘Trailers’), the films themselves are not enough, acquiring their full meaning only in the context that creates them and which they in turn address (1998: 13). According to the author, such movies are deeply involved in the construction of sex and, revealing as they do the dominant ideology of the period, serve as invaluable sources for the historian (1998: 13). However, this historiographical imperative is not limited by positivism. Tuñón develops a new mode of looking (in my terms, a ‘revision’) that incorporates its own subjectivity and affectivity: ‘My reading does not break down the images shot by shot, but appeals rather to a mode of attention, that is floating, careful, annotated by the movies’ (‘mi lectura no desarma las imágenes toma por toma, sino que acude más bien a la atención flotante, cuidadosa, anotada de las cintas’, 1998: 14). On the same page she proposes her intention of ‘working on the film as one browses a book … with the reflection, leisurely pace, and analysis that is elicited by the printed word’ (‘trabajar la película así como se hojea un libro … con esa reflexión, detención, análisis que provoca la letra impresa’). Tuñón even suggests that ‘working on a film when one has been touched or irritated … is important in order to penetrate its unique meaning’ (‘trabajar una película cuando una ha sido conmovida o irritada … es importante para penetrar en su sentido propio’, 1998: 15).

Moreover, reading ‘between the lines or, rather, between the images’ (‘entre líneas, o más bien, entre imágenes’, 1998: 18), Tuñón discounts the criterion of quality as a basis for scholarly insight, claiming rather that ‘it is the crude or bad films that show … the hidden face [of gender ideology]’ (‘las [películas] burdas y malas son las que … muestran esa cara oculta’, 1998: 18). And if she identifies some recurring elements and fetish figures in her large sample of films (love, family, motherhood and sexuality; the bride, wife, daughter, lover, mother and prostitute [1998: 20]), even these elements are not stable or easily accessible: ‘films are not a window to the world but a construction of that world’ (‘los filmes no son una ventana al mundo sino una construcción del mundo’, 1998: 21).

Besides the evocative analyses of the Golden Age films themselves (many of which coincide with those appearing in the ‘visual essay’ of Artes de México) and the innovative methodological approach of the study, Tuñón explicitly proposes a revision (or ‘recycling’) of the Mexican film canon which engages author and reader alike in a process of renewed analytical and emotional interpretation: ‘I trust … that the reader will share … the code that allows me to recycle movies without freezing them [and] I seek [his or her] complicity’(‘Confío … en que el lector comparta … ese código que permita mi intención de reciclar las cintas pero sin congelarlas … solicito una complicidad’, 1998: 21). Freed from the voyeuristic burden to which they are subject in the glossy pages of Artes de México, these ‘women of light and shadow’ may have ‘caged bodies’ like the nineteenth-century women Tuñón studied in another book of that name (2008), but under her close inspection, at once critical and complicit, they yield meanings that may be latent or patent, but are always moving, in both senses of the word.

Although it is not her priority, Tuñón also offers some well-judged comments on the transnational aspect of her revision of Mexican cinema, insisting on the latter's distinct ‘personality’ even as she acknowledges the ‘obvious’ influence of Hollywood (1998: 17) and concluding at the end of her study that the ‘originality’ of Mexican cinema lies in the fact that ‘unlike in that of the United States, love between a man and a woman does not bring happiness’ (‘a diferencia [del estadounidense] el amor hombre-mujer no da la felicidad’, 1998: 289). As we shall see, the interplay of gender and the national project are also central to the argument of British scholar Andrea Noble in her monograph Mexican National Cinema of 2005.

As with other contributions to Routledge's collection (such as the excellent Spanish National Cinema by Nuria Triana Toribio, 2003), the author's aim here is not to celebrate but to question the concept cited in her title, thus combating historical determinism. With this in mind, Noble's very first chapter is called, somewhat surprisingly, ‘Remaking Mexican Cinema’ and focuses on a feature produced in 1991: Arturo Ripstein's Woman of the Port (La mujer del puerto), which was a new version of the classic of the same name made by Soviet exile Arcady Boytler in 1934. Noble begins her chapter, again surprisingly, by examining the conclusions of these two films: in the original, the prostitute-protagonist, having performed an unknowing act of incest with her sailor-brother, commits suicide in a highly melodramatic way; in the remake, there is by contrast a disturbingly happy ending: the two siblings have formed a couple and now have one daughter and another child on the way.

In a rather complex argument and alluding both to Mexican scholarship and to the issues typical of what Noble calls ‘Euro-American movie studies’, the author proposes that ‘the relationship between the two films becomes a vehicle through which we can tell a history of the development of Mexican cinema … linked to the geopolitics of the Mexican nation and the pursuit of cultural modernity’ (2005: 24). These are all key themes of her book.

Noble further suggests that the first Woman of the Port, celebrated today as a classic of national cinema by critics as different as Emilio García Riera and Jorge Ayala Blanco, sought in its time to go ‘beyond the national, with the intention of articulating themes and forms with international resonance’ (2005: 32). The director himself, Noble writes, explicitly rejected films that were too ‘vernacular’ in subject and tone (2005: 33). In its attempt to place Mexico at the international forefront of modern culture, Woman of the Port employs that modernity both as a theme (the story narrates the vicissitudes of a modern life in which the old certainties about social and sexual relationships no longer hold) and as a technological achievement (the film's unusually high production values rival those of Hollywood and it very consciously creates a local star, Andrea Palma, who is modelled on the cosmopolitan Marlene Dietrich) (2005: 33). Moreover, the film's theme of family breakdown is fused with that of the ‘modern form of social organization experienced as dispossession and dislocation’ (2005: 34), both of which are conveyed in ‘a sophisticated film language’ (2005: 35). In a rather Derridean way, one might say that the ‘original’ term is here itself a repetition; and the classic film, the property of a presumed national cinema, is contaminated from the start by cosmopolitan alienation.

For Noble, Ripstein's remake of The Woman of the Port, with its iconoclastic ending and overtly postmodern self-reflexivity, irony and pastiche, ‘contests the myth of progress articulated by the first film’ (2005: 44). The ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ of Boytler and of the 1930s has long failed and for Ripstein local, folk and popular elements have triumphed, ironically for a Mexican film of the 1990s which was aimed primarily at the international circuit of arthouse cinemas (2005: 46). Hence the importance of the unusual theme of incest here, reminiscent perhaps of the ‘necrophilia’ so ironically invoked by Ayala Blanco in Artes de México. The endogamous relationship par excellence is rejected by Boytler as superseded by modernity (the main character has no choice but suicide), but it is reborn by a Ripstein who delights in the supposed continuing underdevelopment of an inbred Mexico.

But there is for Noble another element here linking geopolitics with (failed) modernity: psychoanalysis and national adolescence. She cites Samuel Ramos who, in his famous El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico) of 1934, posits the continuing existence of a national childhood trauma historically based on the experience of the Conquest (2005: 38). According to Ramos, the Mexican male, still maimed by an inferiority complex towards his European ‘parents’, requires re-education in order to be integrated into Western civilization. It goes without saying that for Noble (as for Tuñón in the case of gender) such a hypothesis is evidence for the construction of nationality in a certain historical moment and cannot be taken as an essential or timeless truth. Yet, as we will see in my approach to the three films on the theme of adolescence, psychology merges, still, with geopolitics in both national cinema and the nation-state.

To conclude this overview of the status quaestionis, I would like to contrast Noble's geopolitical and psychoanalytic revision with another very different monograph on the national film project: El cine mexicano: de lo global a lo local (Mexican Cinema: From Global to Local) by Lucila Hinojosa Córdova, published in 2003. Essentially quantitative rather than qualitative, unlike the studies by Tuñón and Noble, and focused not on film texts themselves but on government and industrial institutions, Hinojosa's book (like Tuñón's) uses a film term to visualize its methodology: the latter is defined as a ‘cognitive zoom, an approach that attempts to create a horizon of meaning on how globalization, with its uncertain and complex dynamics, is changing the production process of Mexican cinema, not to mention its exhibition and consumption’ (‘zoom cognoscitivo, una aproximación que intenta crear un horizonte de sentido acerca de cómo la globalidad, en su dinámica incierta y compleja, está modificando el proceso productivo del cine mexicano, así como su exhibición y consumo’, 2003: 5–6). For my own purposes, the ‘revisionist’ contribution of Hinojosa's study to the narrative of national cinema lies in the fact that, perhaps in spite of its author's intentions, the familiar history of Mexico's underdevelopment and failed modernity is supplemented here by another more positive, albeit contradictory, evolution in which increased globalization and market liberalization have facilitated the emergence of new and fragile forms of production and consumption.

In her first chapter, Hinojosa, reviewing theories of the new global order, sketches out the conflicting positions of the ‘apocalyptic’ scholars who predict a future of cosmopolitan cultural homogenization and the ‘integrated’ theorists who are supporters of ‘glocalization’. According to the latter, ‘the global and local are mutually constitutive rather than exclusive’ (‘lo global y lo local constituyen, no excluyen, el uno al otro’, 2003: 30). It is a debate that, as we have seen, Noble traces back to the 1930s. Hinojosa's second chapter deals with Mexican cinema's recent battle with market forces (2003: 44), outlining the familiar story of the gradual abandonment by the government of industrial protectionism, which resulted in the sudden collapse of production (from fifty-six features in 1994 to just fourteen in 1995) (2003: 46). Meanwhile, market concentration was increasing in the exhibition sector, with the closing down of old facilities and the opening of new theatres by national exhibition chains dedicated, with the rising cost of entry, to a more educated and affluent audience (2003: 47).

However (and this is where I discern the ‘revisionist’ element in Hinojosa's study), despite such devastating conditions for national cinema, from the turn of the millennium domestic production began to grow once more. And viewers returned to theatres that were no longer decrepit and even went on to surpass their previous total (there were 1,434 screens in 1994 and 2,200 in 2001) (2003: 48). As for distribution, US films experienced some decline (if not as much as the Mexican movies) from 219 in 1990 to 145 in 2001 (2003: 47). Unlike Canada, Mexico had not negotiated a ‘cultural exception’ when it came to its signing of NAFTA with the US. However, the Mexican public returned to the cinema to see national blockbusters, which were small in number but big at the box office, such as Amores perros and Y tu mamá también. These titles were produced with private capital outside the old system of protectionism and cronyism. Such films, although very few, managed to achieve a global impact that far exceeded any Canadian feature of the period.

Putting supply to one side to address audience and demand, Hinojosa outlines once more the dominant theories in the field of Mexican cultural consumption. She notes that already in 1995 Néstor García Canclini had shown that there was a Mexican audience, especially a young and educated one, eager for a cinema that offered not just the light entertainment typical of Hollywood but rather a ‘problematic treatment of contemporary issues concerning everyday life’ in their own country (‘tratamiento problemático de cuestiones actuales, cercanas a la vida cotidiana’, 2003: 74). This diversification of tastes may well be derived, as García Canclini himself suggests, from a new ‘fashioning of domestic citizenship’ (‘la formación de una ciudadanía doméstica’, 2003: 74). But clearly it also corresponds to a certain revision of the preferences of those attending theatres in Mexico, one which is closely related to the industrial changes in production and exhibition so often denounced by scholars and practitioners of Mexican cinema alike.

Hinojosa ends with an empirical analysis of audiences in the northern industrial city of Monterrey in 2001, a valuable contribution to the study of the local. The results confirm that it is young people and the better educated who frequent the theatres in the metropolitan area (51 per cent are between twenty and twenty-nine years old; 55 per cent of them are professionals [2003: 91]); and that, while favouring US movies, such spectators are not averse to domestic product. While there is some standardization of offer (most theatres exhibit fewer films than they did in the 1990s [2003: 89]), of those spectators who recall seeing any Mexican film (56 per cent of the sample), 79 per cent said they enjoyed it (2003: 100). Interestingly, in third position after two highly transnational titles (Y tu mamá también and The Devil's Backbone [El espinazo del diablo], Guillermo del Toro, 2001), the film most remembered by the Monterrey audience is an unsung teen romantic comedy, Inspiration (Inspiración, Angel Mario Huerta, 2001). It may be no accident that this film was one of the few features shot in the same city in which the young audience saw it (2003: 101).

In her epilogue, Hinojosa regrets the increasing convergence of cultural industries and the unequal access to their enjoyment, trends harmful to the public interest and quality of life (2003: 111). And the difficulty of making and showing movies in Mexico should not be minimized. But when the author argues for a more regulatory role by the state in order to promote the film industry, she seems to discount the ‘revisionist’ data that she herself has provided: the fact that there is already a young audience willing to consume national or local films with serious themes, if only they could succeed in being produced and distributed. In the second section of this first chapter, then, I will discuss three films of this type, placing them within the context of the multiple revisions (textual, sexual and industrial) that we have outlined above.

Three ‘Third-Way’ Features

What caught my attention in these fiction features (two of which are from first-time directors) is not just the privileged role of the theme of adolescence, but rather their revision (recycling and renewal), in a local context, of a genre usually associated with Hollywood: the youth film (I return to youth film and television at greater length in chapter 5 of this book).

Given that their budgets are reduced, if not negligible even by Mexican standards, my three films do not seek the high status of what I have called elsewhere ‘prestige pictures’ (by transnational auteurs Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro); but nor do they conform to the more austere and minimalist parameters of the purist ‘festival films’ (by art directors Carlos Reygadas, Nicolás Pereda and the relatively accessible Fernando Eimbcke) (Smith, 2012: 68). They could thus be considered a ‘third way’ within national production. And within a global context, my youthful trio adopts and adapts some stylistic techniques considered to be typically ‘European’ without wholly abandoning the narrative drive and visual pleasure held to be characteristic of much US cinema. In this they attempt to circumvent the dilemma facing Mexican film-makers whose works, according to Jesús Mario Lozano (latterly an established film-maker himself), are judged and legitimized by foreign standards: compelled in a Catch-22 situation to choose between what he calls ‘cinéma mexicain’ (French-style auteur films) and (in English) ‘Mexican cinema’ (American-style commercial movies) (Lozano, 2011: 265).

The features are Así by the aforementioned Jesús Mario Lozano (2005), Año uña by Jonas Cuarón, son of Alfonso (2007), and I'm Gonna Explode (Voy a explotar, 2008), by Gerardo Naranjo. In the first, a solitary young man from Monterrey, who has only one friend, who is blind, is progressively involved or entangled with a couple of practitioners of street performance; in the second, a teenager from Mexico City undertakes an uncertain and inconclusive affair with a somewhat older American girl; and in the third, which is more clearly melodramatic, two kids from Guanajuato, the girl as charismatic and rebellious as the boy, attempt to escape their monotonous provincial lives (I treat this film at greater length in chapter 5).

Despite this common theme of youth, what we do not find here is the familiar tenets of social realism, in which the teen condition is presented as one of the problems of contemporary life; and, although the three plots all have a romantic or erotic element, nor do we find the explicit scenes of sexual acts as in the case of the first two films of Carlos Reygadas. Likewise, avant-garde film techniques (which one might call ‘French’, in contrast with the more transparent style of commercial cinema from the US) are refurbished or recycled so as not to interfere too much with the enjoyment of narratives that are somewhat elliptical but by no means at odds with entertainment.

With Así