IMDB is a very useful tool for the chronically bored cinephiles with a penchant for online procrastination like me. Filing through the seemingly endless dentrytes of this meta-search engine devoted to cataloguing films and the people who do them, one begins to connect the invisible dots that reveal the film industry, and not just the one in Hollywood mind you, as a very small world after all. It really is just like playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but on a much grander scale.
It was while surfing this world wide web of end credits that I discovered that the current holy trinity of Mexican cinema, the filmmakes Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo Del Toro are credited in each others films. I had heard that they were friends, but the IMDB made it official, these guys form a loose collective in which they executive produce and/or dispense story and editorial advice on each other’s projects. This, of course, struck a resonant chord in my Hello Kittyish movie buff heart, being as fond as I am of elite groups of directors who, sharing a particular time, nationality and sensibility, have gotten together to play out their ideas at certain pivotal moments of movie history. In doing so they have created specific movements shrouded in the haze of mythology.
Just think of Eisenstein, Kuleshov and the rest of the Soviet gang getting high on montage and revolution. Or the too cool for school French spear-headed by Godard, Truffaut and Rivette, who smoked their Gauloises and wore their shades even as they rewrote the visual grammar of movies together. Much has been written about the friendship of the bearded American auteurs of the Seventies. The first generation of directors to come out of film school formed a series of strategic allegiances that led to many of their opera primas getting made. In this way Coppola gave a helping hand to Lucas, enabling American Graffiti, and he, in turn, coached Spielberg through The Sugarland Express.
In the past fifteen years we have seen the rise of two groups of friends who have shaken the panorama of current film art. On the one hand you have the subversive Danes, who brought cheap, democratizing DV to the forefront of filmmaking with their early-nineties Dogma. It could be argued that theirs has been a dubious contribution: a glance at the crappy, wobbly-scope, masturbatory excesses of so many student films espousing the “vows of chastity” manifesto held forth by Von Trier, Vitenberg and their acolytes seem to confirm this. However, the widespread influence they exerted, and continue to wield to some extent, tends to underline their importance. On the other hand you have the rebel of the backlot Americans: Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Having exploded into the scene in the mid-nineties, they led the American independent film explosion that revitalized the U.S.’s tired dominance of the film world. The two eternal teen agers at heart share a love for Sergio Leone, girls with guns, and ultra-violent stories peppered with brilliant, pop culture induced dialogue. Nowadays they work on each others films just for kicks, crediting their collaborations with the ludicrous title of “guest director”.
The international film festival circuit forms the backbone of “world film” (which in essence, is just an euphemestic phrase to refer to films which are not American, but which, despite this crushing setback, are a common occurance). In many ways the major festivals, with their Palme D’Ors, Golden Lions and Silver Mormons (isn’t that how Sundance’s grand jury prize is called?) –not to mention the travelling court of international critics that hand these out- have become the self-proclaimed arbitrers of which region is annointed as the next world film powerhouse. It is a cyclical affair. In the past fifteen years a line could be drawn from the Dogmatic Danes to the neo-realist Iranians, to the hyper-violent Asians (Park Chan-Wook, anyone?). With the release this year of Babel, Children of Men, and Pan’s Labyrinth, it is now, unquestionably, the far out Chilangos’s hour.
Chilango is actually a derogatory term used in Mexico to describe the inhabitants of Mexico City, which are viewed as somehow different from the rest of the country. Well, it could certainly be said that those who hail from that notoriously oppressive megalopolis, brimming as it is with pollution, twenty million souls, and its staggering contradictions, are not just aliens to the rest of their countrymen but to the rest of the world as well. In any case, they are obviously treated that way by their powerful neighbor to the north. And yet, that is precisely the gritty, urban energy that the filmmaking triumvirate of Iñárritu, Cuarón and Del Toro have harnessed to take the film world by storm in 2006.
Clearly, their rise is no overnight success. Each of them has been developing their careers, honing their style and tackling increasingly diverse themes for years. Cuarón, for example, has been working in the film industry for the past twenty-five years, climbing up the ranks in Mexico, first as an assistant director, although he continued to write and direct his own short films. His first feature, Sólo con tu Pareja, came out in 1991. It is a dark RomCom of manners that deftly showed Cuarón’s power of observation as well as a willingness to play against the traditional, melodramatic Mexican character. Guillermo Del Toro also spent the early Eighties developing his short films even as he put his quircky obsession with movie monsters in the service of the make-up/special effects department of low-budget Mexican horror ficks. His first ping in the critical radar came with the release of his first feature in 1993. Cronos is a pop-gothic tale with Bogesian undertones that goes from the 16th Century to the mid-nineties featuring a couple of scorpion shaped devices that could unlock the secret of eternal life to those who would learn how to manipulate them.
Cuarón’s and Del Toro’s more familiar trajectory of film kids going at it until they got their first break stands in sharp contrast with González Iñárritu’s entrance into the film world. Iñárritu was actually the youngest executive ever to be in charge of production at Televisa, Mexico’s most important TV station, and one of Latin America’s leading “telenovela” factories. After leaving Televisa he founded Zeta films, one of the biggest producers of TV ads and music videos in the country. So it wasn’t until after he had forged a career as Mexico’s foremost director of commercials that he got the urge to make a feature. Through his search for good scripts he partnered with writer Guillermo Arriaga, and out of that collaboration Amores Perros sprang forth. That film, with its fractured three story narrative and exuberant hyperactive style, shook the film world in 2000 and cemented a stormy relationship between the director and scribbler Arriaga that has recently come undone with the post-release controversy over Babel’s auteurship.
It is no secret that Hollywood’s headhunters search far and wide for emerging talent. The West Coast industry’s history is littered with outsiders, wether they be artists from other fields such as literature or foreign filmmakes who have been brought over in order to cash in with their talents. It is, however, a tricky transition. It could be said that the road to Hollywood is paved with the washed-up work of many a genius. For example, both Brecht and Faulkner tried to fatten their paychecks with screenwriting work during the Major Studios’s heyday only to encounter frustration and resistance. Eventually they left town with a whimper rather than with the Big Bang they had set off respectively in Western Theater and the American letters. Buñuel, to my mind one of the masters, tried to get work as a director only to leave for Mexico after hitting a wall of incomprehension in Hollywood.
Of course, for every Bergman that comes to California thinking that he can make The Seventh Seal on a Hollywood budget with a star-filled cast and is quickly sent back to Sweden, there are Langs, Lubistchs, Wilders and Woos that prove that the transition can be a profitable one, both creatively and at the box office. In fact, the Chilangos have added one more chapter to the Hollywood success story. Moving north of the border Cuarón has flourished with the big-budget imaginative children’s fare that he has turned out such as The Little Princess and The Prisioner of Azbekaztan installment in the monolithic Harry Potter franchise. Del Toro has also been “taken in” by Hollywood. He has turned his turned his inner comicbook geek into a succesful filmmaker helming the transition of alternative heroes like Blade and Hellboy from the comic page to the screen. It is obvious that the latter one is a movie that is very dear to him and all reports point out that he is developing it into an ongoing love-affair with the character.
Meanwhile, after Amores Perros, the Iñárritu/Arriaga team found themselves in the enviable position of making any movie they wanted, anywhere in the world. They chose to go with 21 Grams, a somber drama that features the patented Arriaga fractured plot with three main characters. It was not an obvious choice, either in material, a bleak exploration of lives as they are brought together by death, or setting: the United States. Still, it was financed by Focus Features, one of the leading independent producers in the country and it featured an all-star cast led by Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, and Naomi Watts. Although it did not enjoy the earth-shattering critical success of Amores Perros and did not do nearly as brisk a business as the more commercial Blade 2 or The Little Princess, it did cement the Iñárritu/Arriaga partnership’s reputation as one of the leading auteurs working in cinema today.
Hollywood notwithstanding, recent developments in the career of the three Chilango filmmakers suggest that they are not satisfied with the benefits afforded by the American industry. Cuarón went back to Mexico and made his best film to date: Y tu mamá también. A loose reworking of Truffaut’s menage a trois story Jules and Jim, the movie exploded in the United States’ cinephile consciousness and brought with it a huge revelation for American audiences: there is a middle class in Mexico City and its sensibility, manners and foibles make for poignant human drama. At the very least it does in Cuarón’s hands. In that film the director introduced the basics of his film style. A curious, roving hand-held camera presents the characters in extended takes. This camera, however, it is not afraid to leave the protagonists in mid-sentence in order to present the character’s context, thereby enriching the narrative with an eye for the seemingly insignificant details. In this sense Cuarón writes a chronicle with his camera of his characters, of their youth, of Mexico and, ultimately, of the tragic dimensions involved in friendship and death.
Del Toro has also cemented his style even as he has found a second home in Spain. His 2001 feature is a ghost story set in a Spanish orphanage in the middle of the Civil War. In this sense, this movie marks the debut of Del Toro’s off-Hollywood penchant for mixing disperate genres within the same movie: the dark horror/fantasy and the political. His camera features smooth and classical motion, ever ready to linger over creatures, jars filled with slime and any other trace of the supernatural. His images are full of gorgeous, art-direction heavy sets that always seem to lead to the unexpected. And yet Del Toro seems to be the most classicaly minded of the three filmmakers. There is little of the grungy, gritty feel that Iñárritu and Caurón lapse into. Echoes of Hitchcock and the b-movies of Vincent Pryce, not to mention his beloved comic books, reverberate throughout his work.
And then the three chilangos decided, almost in a concerted manner, that they would own 2006. From Spain Del Toro delivered Pan’s Laberynth, a historical horror/fable film set during the waning days of the Spanish Civil War. Its young protagonist gets embroiled with supernatural figments of her own imagination even as she gets tangled up by her country’s dark, 20th Century History. The effects are amazing, but much more so is Del Toro’s assured direction that mixes the historical drama with the horror in a smooth manner that shows no fissures. It is not an easy trick to pull, considering the disparity between the genres. Iñárritu fired off another of his disjointed, straight to the gut, grand old statements with Babel. The story takes place everywhere, seemingly at the same time. The message in the bottle is as subtle as a car crash: what divides us is pettiness and misunderstanding, what unites us is a shared humanity. It was one of the most devisive pictures of the year, people either got it or the didn’t, and then they either loved it or hated it. Regardless of which side you stand on it is impossible to overlook the fact that, pound for pound, Iñárritu is one of the greatest directors working today. Babel works precisely because its director knows no boundaries when coaxing fearless performances from stars such as Brad Pitt or Cate Blanchet while the Moroccan kids that are brought in contact with them are just as good. The action is relentless, as is the dramatic tension. I honestly don’t know of another filmmaker that can sustain the tension for such an extended period of time. While Iñárritu ruled the broken up present Cuarón aimed at the future with his Children of Men. For my money, it was last year’s best picture. Cuarón develops the camera style he inaugurated with director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki in Y tu mamá también even further creating a character out of the visual. The dystopian nightmare belongs to that rare pantheon of near future fucked up world movies that includes Clockwork Orange and The Road Warrior. Not a bad company to be in.
Oscar night was two weeks ago. The telecast went off with much fanfare about the “three amigos” and the fact that is was the most international of awards ceremonies. The Mexicans began getting snubbed early, however. Children of Men wasn’t even nominated for best picture or best director, like Babel and Iñárritu were. Del Toro was considered a shoo in for Best Foreign Picture but in the end the German Lives of Others won. Once it was all over, they all came out empty-handed. Fuck it, I say, 2006 still belonged to them, not to Little Miss Sunshine or The Retarded (mercy, overdue oscar for Scorcese not withstanding). Never mind the Oscars, the chilangos are here to stay and they are not content with staying in Mexico. They have their sights set on the entire world, past, present and future.
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