New Mexican Cinema and the Cha Cha Cha

Mexican cinema is back in the international spotlight at the moment thanks to the recent release of Rudo y Cursi, a melancomic buddy-movie about a couple of football-playing brothers from the sticks. It’s the first film to be made by Cha Cha Cha Producciones, a newly formed outfit that’s the child of Mexico’s three major directing stars: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo Del Toro. Which means that Rudo y Cursi may well come to signify a seminal moment in Mexican film history.

At the turn of the 21^st Century, Mexico’s cinema industry became the one to watch. Cine Nuevo Mexicano had simmered away nicely during the 90’s, producing spirited, eye-pleasing films (Like Water for Chocolate, The Other Conquest) without ever really going global. Then along came Y Tu Mama Tambien and Amores Perros. Released within a year of each other, these stylish and unashamedly grandiose films tapped into the post-millennium party-and-paranoia paradox; they played in cinemas across the world and very quickly became ‘of their time’. Cine Nuevo Mexico, it seemed, had finally come of age.

And then everything went quiet. Or it didn’t go quiet – it just moved abroad. Cuaron went to England, first helming a Harry Potter movie and then the startlingly good Children of Men. And Inarritu promptly sold himself to Hollywood, where he continued to develop his form of tangled-web filmmaking with two big money blockbusters (21 Grams and Babel). It wasn’t just Cuaron and Inarritu either: Guillermo del Toro and Gael Garcia Bernal – both major figures in that turn-of-the-century breakthrough – also found themselves working overseas on major international productions (Hellboy and The Motorcycle Diaries respectively). All of these films were successful, and all were made by Mexicans. Yet none truly belonged to Mexico.

In fact, Mexico has form when it comes to losing filmmaking talent. From Dolores Del Rio in the 20’s to Salma Hayak in the 90’s, Mexican actors have a history of finding stardom abroad – especially in Hollywood, where Latin flavour is a prized asset. Equally, given the notorious difficulty of getting projects financed at home, a migration overseas is as necessary as it is inevitable for the country’s more ambitious filmmakers.

So Cha Cha Cha Producciones is big news in a quiet sort of way because it’s backed by significant players in the movie industry who have a patriotic interest in seeing Mexican film flourish again. Which begs the question: Could Rudo y Cursi be the first of a new wave of Cine Nuevo Mexicano (a Cine Neo-Nuevo, perhaps)?

It’s a question a recent three-day festival of ‘New Mexican Directors’ at Kolkata’s Nandan Institute sought to address. While the festival was unable to show Rudo y Cursi (the film has yet to be released in India), it did screen a welter of films by Mexico’s new generation of filmmakers. And the conclusion proffered? Well, it read something like this: The talent pool of filmmakers in Mexico remains as deep as ever, but a new beast is becoming king of the pond. Step forward the intrepid Documentary Maker (shaky cam and looming boom in tow).

Far and away the program’s standout film was Tropico de Cancer. Directed by first-timer Eugenio Polgovsky, its a brutal little doc that takes an unmediated look into the lives of a small community indigenous to the harsh Mexican desert. For just under an hour, Polgovsky’s camera pushes incessantly through dense scrub, thrusting his viewer into the community’s hunter-gatherer way of life and following it avidly without telling us exactly why we’re there. Only at the very end do we find out that the day’s catch (which includes rats and rattlesnakes) is sold to passing city-slickers as souvenirs. Much to Polgovsky’s disgust and the viewer’s surprise.

The themes of struggle and under-representation at the core of Tropico de Cancer also surface in Island Being (Eun Hee Ihm) and 1973 (Antonino Isordia), two vastly different films that nonetheless share a common anger. Island Being is another watchful, uncomfortable doc that highlights continuing prejudice against lepers by telling the story of Sorokdo Island in South Korea, a designated leper community that basically functions as a jail for its inhabitants. 1973, meanwhile, is an all-guns-blazing blitz of a documentary that tells the story of three disenfranchised youths born in 1973. Where Island Being and Tropico de Cancer look on and reflect, 1973 recreates, distorts, upends and transmogrifies its footage. But the effect is the same: this is an engaging and deeply affecting film to watch. And its anger is palpable.

It would be unfair to completely sideline the fiction films shown during the festival at Nandan. There were some reasonably good flicks on display, with the Gael Garcia Bernal vehicle The Eve in the Nape (Rodrigo Pla) particularly – if predictably – worth a mention (Bernal is just so damned beautiful you feel he could play wallpaper in a film about home furnishings and still make the whole thing compelling). But nothing here could match the sheer brio of the documentaries on show.

If Mexican cinema is to re-establish itself on the international stage, common sense suggests this impressive new vein of documentary makers should be encouraged to stay in Mexico. But whether Cha Cha Cha Producciones, as the star-backed newcomer to the industry, is part of a movement that funds them remains to be seen. The company’s founders (Inarritu, Cuaron and Del Toro) all tend towards heavily accented fiction films, and Rudo y Cursi – Cha Cha Cha’s first release – signifies no departure from the trend. If production companies like Cha Cha Cha continue to fund fiction at the expense of documentary, the result could well be an old-fashioned Mexican Standoff, with the money in one place, the talent in another, and no one emerging the better for it.

Where does this leave the future of Mexican cinema? In good hands controlled by awkward arms, perhaps.

Article reproduced courtesy of The Statesman. Originally published 25/7/09.