Isaac Figueroa Borquez in Gael García Bernal's Lucio

Ten short films to commemorate, and ruefully comment upon, the Mexican revolution

A collection of 10 min. short films directed by: Mariana Chenillo, Patricia Riggen, Fernando Eimbcke, Amat Escalante, Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo García, Diego Luna, Gerardo Naranjo, Rodrigo Plá & Carlos Reygadas, 2010, Mexico, 105m.

Omnibus films are hard to write about -- to be thorough, you must write eight or ten reviews just about a film that may last little over an hour and a half -- and harder still to describe when you don't get to see them all. A problem with the sound track caused the NYFF P&I screening to be halted after four segments, so as a stopgap I will summarize with quotes from Leslie Felperin's coverage from the Berlinale published earlier in Variety. I would concur with evaluations of the first four. My comments: Eimbecke's film The Welcoming is very nicely photographed and its humor is redolent of promises not kept and rural backwardness. One might question his heavy use of long blackouts in such a short film. Riggen's Beautiful & Beloved indeed is highly conventional, though its references to a dream deferred, however obvious, are well taken. García Bernal's Lucio promises a great deal with its hint of revolution in the very young character, Omarcito, who takes down the crucifix from the wall, and his young actors are lively and attractive. The ending is a little weak, perhaps from the improvised nature of the film Halperin assumes. Amat Escalante's The Hanging Priest begins with spectral, haunting images (one is in the world of Buñuel or Cormac McCarthy) and ends with the priest and two children appealing to real people on the street (their faces blurred out) for help and being turned away. Pretty strong stuff.This is as far as I can go from personal observation. The projection was halted a few minutes into This Is My Kingdom.

Felperin notes that the ten-film collection was initiated by the production company Canana's funders Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna, and Pablo Cruz. Films by García Bernal and Luna are included. There is some unevenness in quality both artistic and technical, but "a subversive streak throughout" augurs well for the future of Mexican filmmaking. A running theme is to question what the revolution has achieved and suggest that ceremonial platitudes about it are pretty hollow at this point in the country's history. There is a considerable coherence in the unfolding of the films.

The Variety review notes that Einbecke (of Duck Season and Lake Tahoe) seems to have shot his black and white film with "proper film stock," with images in "soft, pencilly grays." The film focuses on a rural tuba player (Ansberto Flores Lopez) practicing to perform with the town band at a ceremony to welcome an honored guest who, in the event, does not arrive. The tubista has to juggle farm chores and caring for a baby with late-night solo practice. When the event comes next day and the local official gives up and lets citizens and band alike go home, the tuba player stays and waits longer, but to no avail. In what follows I am often, or wholly, summarizing from Felperin's Variety review of the collection written when it was shown earlier in the year at the Berlinale.

Riggen's Beautiful & Beloved is a "schmaltzy but well-intentioned segment about an American-reared woman (Adriana Barraza) who finds "an inventive way to get her father's corpse (Ramon Duran) across the border so he can be buried in his hometown." Felperin says the film provides "another spin on themes of family and migration at play in Riggen's feature debut, Under the Same Moon." Line deliveries are "stilted."

In contrast Gael Garcia Bernal's Lucio "appears to be improvised" -- having no screenplay credit and showing "spontaneity" in the young cast, some kids who are visited by a slightly older cousin called Omarcito (Isaac Figueroa Borquez), who startles the kids by declaring Catholic rituals undesirable (though he believes strongly in God) and at bedtime taking down the crucifix from the wall and sliding it under the bed. This is discovered by the kids' "devout grandmother (Samantha Mayer)" who punishes them. Felperin feels the "accessible tale" is "let down by patchy digital lensing."

The powerful The Hanging Priest is the narrative of a pair of lost children (Hector Cortes Barrientons and Ambar Sixto Marroquin), "whose whole village has been wiped out." They rescue a priest hanging upside down from a little tree in a desolate field. All three ride a donkey to safety; the donkey does not survive. The film was written, directed and edited by a pupil of Carlos Reygadas, Amat Escalante (The Bastards). His film carries themes of violence and despair that resonate with and set the stage for the next entry.

The next short film, This Is My Kingdom, was directed by Reygadas himself. It's a" kind of quasi-docu," Felperin notes, recording a wild rural fiesta "at which Mexicans and the odd Anglophone first get smashed, and then smash stuff up (mostly cars), while in one disturbing cutaway, a family of peasants looks on impassively from outside the party." As Felperin points out, Reygadas, the most internationally respected of the directors of this omnibus, deviates here from the tranqulity of his recent feature Silent Light (shown in the 2007 New York Film Festival), and goes back toward "his notorious sophomore outing, Battle in Heaven to again make reference to the prominent roles of violence and exces "within the nation's soul" and to point to the significance of class differences.

With The Estate Store, according to Felperin, the director Mariana Chenillo (of Nora's Will, a "local hit") fantasizes how workers in a Walmart-like big box store might behave if they were paid partly in vouchers redeemable only at the store, as in fact was "a policy in practice before the real revolution." Felperin feels the segment's screenplay "lacks subtlety" but has a good performance by its lead Monica Bejarano "as a cash-strapped store employee."

R-100 is "a taut but fragmentary mini-action film" about a man (Noe Hernandez) who "resorts to desperate measures on a remote desert highway to get help for his wounded friend" (Manuel Jimenez). The director is Gerardo Naranjo, whose I'm Gonna Explode was in the Main Slate of the 2008 New York Film Festival. I saw his rougher Drama/Mex at an earlier London Film Festival, in 2006.

30/30, by Rodrigo Plà, is a "strong" segment, Felperin writes, that suggests "with pointed irony that the Revolution's legacy is often used as a meaningless vehicle for empty rhetoric by politicians." Rodrigo Plà's previous films are La Zona and The Desert Within) Here, Francisco (Justo Martinez), the elderly grandson of Pancho Villa, is seen "arriving in a town for the centennial parade and party. The local honchos want him there only as a figurehead and never give him a chance to read his carefully prepared speech."

Felperin notes that Diego Luna's feature debut as a director, Abel, was well received at Sundance this year, but his segment here, Pacifico, is "one of the complilation's weaker contributions." It tells a "schematic story of a would-be property developer (Ari Brickman) arriving at a coastal town to find he's been conned, prompting a re-evaluation of what's really important in life." The "tech credits" are "subpar."

Variety's review concludes that the best is saved for last. This is Rodrigo Garcia's 7th Street and Alvarado, a tableau in super-slow motion without dialog, depicting a troupe of "exhausted, sad-eyed revolutionaries in period dress, riding on horseback down the colorful streets of the titular Los Angeles intersection, unnoticed by the residents walking by." The scene is accompanied by a "swelling, plangent musical score by the Newton Brothers." This is shot on "luscious color stock." The horsemen's "disappointed expressions mutely speak volumes."

The implied message of several of the films is that not only has Mexico today after a hundred years reverted to violence, corruption and chaos as bad as anything in the old days, but it all becomes rather irrelevant when so many of the breadwinners drain off to El Norte as illegals or Green Card holders supporting their families and villages by providing the backbone to the US economy. This does indeed seem like an unusually good omnibus film, and one that would introduce me to several important new Mexican directors whose work I am unaquainted with. Too bad about the sound track of the copy at the Walter Reade October 5. The film is scheduled for public showing at the New York Film Festival October 9, 2010, and was seen in part and reviewed in part at Lincoln Center.

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This film was released theatrically for the first time in Paris May 11, 2011, and seeing it there, I added these comments:



Revolución (2010) is the Mexican anthology of short films that I missed more than half of due to a projection problem during the first press screening. It is reviewed, with help from Leslie Felperin's coverage, in the NYFF 2010 section of Filmleaf [url="Revolución (2010)"]here.[/url] It is an interesting collection to see, since it includes Mexican directors to a larger audience. Since it opened in limited theatrical release in Paris May 11, I got to see it in toto.

The Reygadas segment is a shocker, sort of an alegory of indulgence, violence, and chaos. It's just a very unruly, ticky party, with drinking and smoking, some chatter, destruction of a derelict car. The car is later set on fire. Reygadas' aim seems to be to create a sense of danger and disorder and ugliness. It's not pleasant to watch and isn't meant to be. I thought of Trash Humpers, though it lacks the fantasy.

I was not very impressed by "The Estate Store," though it is significant in being by a woman director and presenting a woman's point of view. The main relationships don't seem quite credible, and the story-line isn't entirely clear. Maybe Mariana Chenillo is just trying to cram too much information into ten minutes.

In contrast in "R-100" Gerardo Naranjo creates a story that's vivid, visceral, and simple. There is no dialogue, no attempt to explain how the two men became covered with blood and one of the unable to walk. It's truly a slice of life.

I would have to see 30/30, by Rodrigo Plà to understand the irony Felperin refers to more thoroughly the irony Felperin refers to in its story of an exploited grandson of Pancho Villa in a revolutionary political evennt. It took me the whole time to see what was being got at. I give the film credit for a convincing feel of authenticity.

Diggo Luna's "Abel" seems very fragmentary. I missed something. I'm not so sure its tech credits are below par as Felperin says, but I'm not convinced either Luna or Garcia Bernal are going to be notable as directors. What they are notable for is encouraging cinema in Mexico and helping it to be recognized internationally through their own international recognition as actors, particularly Garcia Bernal's. [IY tu mama tambien ]I[/I] seems like some kind of classic to me, along with Amores Perros, a signal of something coming alive in Mexican filmmaking, at least for the foreign audience. Both put contemporary Mexican filmmaking on the map for American moviegoers.

Rodrigo Garcia's 7th Street and Alvarado indeed is a standout. It's images are haunting and beautiful, and profoundly thought-provoking. It's quite amazing how the men or horseback constumed so realistically as Mexican revolutionaries of a hundred years ago seem etched in stone against the sunny sky, while the pedestrians wander below, seeming unreal, though unaware of the horseman. I'd have to see more by Rodrigo Garcia to know what he's like; apparently he has moved to the Anglo world, and his new feature for 2011, Albert Nobbs , is set in Ireland and features Jane Eyre star Mia Wasikowska -- so we may forget about his contributing to a new Mexican cinema.

I would like to see more by Amat Escalante ("The Hanging Priest"), and of course by Reygadas and Naranjo. I know I like anything by Fernando Eimbcke, whose wistful, ironic black and white fim of the welcoming party whose guests (for a celebration of the revolution?) never show up at the tiny town. Fernando Eimbcke's film, by the way, on the real film stock, is the best looking, along with Rodrigo Garcia's.

Revolucion dubet on Mexican TV last November Paris May 11, 2011 seems to be its first theatrical release anywhere. I'd expect to see it in a little West Village theater. Allociné gives this film a good critical[url="http://www.allocine.fr/film/revuedepresse_gen_cfilm=178234.html#pressreview20049795"]rating,[/url]3.2 with 10 reviews consulted. "Diversity" and "richness" were noted.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.