Mexico Polar
Much has been said about the flamboyant "new Mexican cinema" which emerged at the end of the 1990s, symbolized by the success of Amores Perros by Alejandro González Iñárritu (2000). The movement’s talented filmmakers gave Mexican production a renewed visibility, which had been lost in the desert of the previous decades. Its ambition is to stand out from TV production (the tele-novela) and the Hollywood blockbusters which saturate Mexico’s domestic market, by getting close up to everyday life in a country in the throes of great change. Against this backdrop, the violence of the cartels, which has descended into a full-blown war against government forces in recent years, is a subject which deeply affects the country’s structure. Narratives resonate with this theme, and even those movies which are not strictly speaking genre films often contain fragments of the thriller or crime saga : from the hit man in Amores Perros to the kidnapping story in Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas), crime fiction is never far away.
Corruption, extortion, kidnapping and massacres linked to narco-trafficking flood the shared space of television news. In Brazil, a Latin American country beset with similar corruption problems, crime thrillers happily tackling the reality of the favelas have flourished in the wake of City of God by Fernando Meirelles (2002) and Elite Squad by José Padilha (2007). In Mexico, films dealing with the state corruption and runaway criminality which are eating away at the country’s fabric are numerous, but are not as obviously part of the thriller tradition. These often involve cineastes with a powerful message, who want to keep the "genre" issue at arm’s length. The topic is too loaded to be treated like in a movie by Scorsese or Tarantino, and the “playfulness” of the genre leads one to question the spectacle of violence.
Comedy and black humor are one possible route : the success of the film El Infierno by Luís Estrada, which paints a vitriolic, critical portrait of the narcos, can be seen as a good example of an entertainment movie with a sharp political undercurrent. But other films in recent years have shown that the crime thriller, on condition that it doesn’t fall into the pitfall of complaisance, is a possible vehicle to recount the everyday. SIN NOMBRE, the first film by Cary Fukunaga, is a dazzling debut, which treats immigration in an almost naturalistic manner, with its Honduran characters hanging off the roofs of trains heading to Mexico. But it has a subplot involving an incredible reconstruction of gang rituals. It is at least as much an ultraviolent thriller about how to escape from the clutches of the gangs as it is a melodrama about two immigrants seeking freedom.
A director like Amat Escalante, star of the last Festival de Cannes, veers between social drama and crime thriller with a rare skill for thematic coherence. The Bastards described the descent of two illegal immigrants in Los Angeles into shockingly violent crime. But with his latest movie, HELI, he goes even further, giving audiences a high-voltage jolt. A long sequence of drug lords imprisoning some teenagers who played with fire can be seen as the exact opposite of the infamous torture scene in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. We are indeed in the realm of the crime thriller, but the film’s hyperrealistic power and its political dimension totally subvert the codes of the spectacle of violence as applied in Hollywood. One finds this desire to play with the codes of thriller in LA ZONA (Rodrigo Plá, 2007), which deconstructs the Mexican security system and its paranoid excesses by dropping several petty delinquents into an ultra-protected neighborhood of Mexico.
In a different vein, films like Días de gracia (Everardo Gout, 2011) and the impressive MISS BALA (Gerardo Naranjo, 2011) make no hesitation in appropriating all the apparatus of the American thriller with their deluge of visual effects borrowed from music videos and action movies. The first juxtaposes a popular theme – the soccer World Cup – with the sordid reality of crime ; the second unmasks the hypocrisy of “glamor” in a country in the grip of the worst kind of criminal machismo, the heroine being a local beauty queen plunged into the hellish world of the narcos. These roughhewn thrillers overturn clichés and the tendency for folklore and exoticism that certain filmmakers look for in Mexico (from Soderbergh in Traffic to Oliver Stone with Savages). Let’s not forget either that Mexico has a tradition of the underground thriller – known as “narco-cinema” – which has produced around a thousand titles since the 1980s : these films are released straightto- DVD and celebrate the mythology of organized crime. This filmic output, financed by the mafia, is seen by everyone, since 82% of Mexicans cannot afford to go to the cinema. Countering the clichés of this parallel production – action, guns, helicopters, women, cocaine, pick-ups – is one of the motivations that drives new Mexican thriller.
VINCENT MALAUSA
Film Critic
MEXICO POLAR SELECTION
- 2013 HELI
- 2011 MISS BALA
- 2009 SIN NOMBRE
- 2007 LA ZONA, PROPRIÉTÉ PRIVÉE (LA ZONA)
- 2000 AMOURS CHIENNES (AMORES PERROS)
