Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/14/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, October 14, 2019

Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, 1993)

Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, 1993)

Cast: Federico Luppi, Ron Perlman, Claudio Brook, Margarita Isabel, Tamara Shanath, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Mario Iván Martínez, Farnesio de Bernal, Juan Carlos Colombo. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro. Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro. Production design: Tolita Figuero. Film editing: Raúl Dávalos. Music: Javier Álvarez.

Guillermo del Toro's Cronos, his first feature, is a "horror movie" with the hard moral clarity of a folk tale, a characteristic the writer-director has maintained into his more celebrated films like Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017). In fact, I think I prefer Cronos to these later films because its moral vision is not distracted into social or political directions. Granted, we can interpret Cronos as a tale about the cultural contamination of Mexico from the age of the conquistadors to the age of multinational corporations, but that takes more work than the film itself demands. What we have in Cronos is a fable about the hunger for immortality, as basic as it is to any vampire movie, but with the difference that in this film the vampirism, with its blood lust and photophobia, isn't spread in the usual plaguelike fashion, but confined to those eager enough to seek it out. The fable of the consequences of human overreaching, as old as Genesis, gets a fairly sophisticated reworking in Cronos, where the horror movie tropes are more insidiously displayed than usual. Del Toro is less out to shock us than to infest our dreams.