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.

Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017)

Daniel Giménez Cacho in Zama

Don Diego de Zama: Daniel Giménez Cacho
Luciana: Lola Dueñas
Vicuña Porto/Gaspar Toledo: Matheus Nachtergaele
Ventura Prieto: Juan Minujín
Fernández: Nahuel Cano
Malemba: Mariana Nunes
El Oriental: Carlos Defeo
Capitán Parrilla: Rafael Spregelburd

Director: Lucrecia Martel
Screenplay: Lucrecia Martel
Based on a novel by Antonio Di Benedetto
Cinematography: Rui Poças
Art direction: Renata Pinheiro
Film editing: Karen Harley, Miguel Schverdfinger

In her New York Times review of Lucrecia Martel's Zama, Manohla Dargis suggests that we should see the film, then read the novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, and then see the film again. That's a little more work than many of us are prepared to put into our movies, but it gets at one central fact about Zama: It's a brilliant movie, but appreciating it -- perhaps even comprehending it -- demands a viewer's attention. Just figuring out who Zama is takes a little effort: When we first see him he's striking a kind of heroic pose on the seashore, but his life is anything but heroic. Don Diego de Zama is a magistrate in a backwater of the 18th-century Spanish colonial empire, somewhere in Argentina. The place is a kind of hell-hole, the sort of colony where the settlers constantly badger the officials for help in getting native laborers, the ones they once had having either escaped or died from overwork. Zama wants to escape, too, to return to his wife and children, or at least to be transferred to a better place, but bureaucracy stymies him constantly. Eventually, he agrees to go on an expedition to capture a notorious bandit, but that doesn't end well. It's a scathing, often funny, eventually tragic portrayal of colonialism, and Martel is unwilling to let Zama's story take a predictable course. The land, the New World environment, is too much for the people trying to tame it. The randomness of existence in this outpost is captured by a beautifully absurd moment when Zama is trying to deal with a recalcitrant superior and a llama wanders into the frame, peering with a blankly benign gaze over Zama's shoulder, mocking his serious mien. Rui Poças's cinematography superbly captures both the beauty and cruelty of this inhuman landscape.

Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Gael García Bernal in Y Tu Mamá También

Luisa Cortés: Maribel Verdú
Julio Zapata: Gael García Bernal
Tenoch Iturbide: Diego Luna
Narrator: Daniel Giménez Cacho
Silvia Allende de Iturbide: Diana Bracho
Diego "Saba" Madero: Andrés Almeida
Ana Morelos: Ana López Mercado
Manuel Huerta: Nathan Grinberg
Maria Eugenia Calles de Huerta: Verónica Langer
Cecilia Huerta: Maria Aura
Alejandro "Jano" Montes de Oca: Juan Carlos Remolina
Chuy: Silverio Palacios

Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Screenplay: Carlos Cuarón, Alfonso Cuarón
Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Production design: Marc Bedia, Miguel Ángel Álvarez
Film editing: Alfonso Cuarón, Alex Rodríguez

Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También is kept aloft for so long by wit and energy, and by the skills of its actors, director, and cinematographer, that it's a disappointment to consider the way it deflates a little at the end. It is, on the whole, a brilliant transfiguration of several well-worn genres: the teen sex comedy, the road movie, the coming-of-age fable. Cuarón has credited Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Féminin (1966) as a major inspiration, but I think it owes as much to François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962), not least in Daniel Giménez Cacho's superbly ironic voiceover narrator, who provides a larger context for the actions of the three main characters. It's the narrator, for instance, who tells us that the traffic jam that holds up our middle-class teenagers was caused by the death of a working man who tried to cross the freeway because otherwise he would have had to walk a mile and a half out of his way to use the only crossing bridge. Or that Chuy, the fisherman who befriends the trio when they finally reach the secluded beach, will lose his livelihood to developers and commercial fisheries and wind up as a janitor in an Acapulco hotel. Somehow, Cuarón manages to avoid heavy-handedness with these comments, injecting the necessary amount of serious social commentary into a story about two horny Mexico City teenagers and the older woman who goes in search of a beach called "Heaven's Mouth" with them. Even in the story, the subtext of social class in contemporary Mexico keeps peeking through: There's a slight tension between the upper-middle-class Tenoch, whose father is a government official, and the lower-middle-class Julio that's suggestive of Tenoch's sense of privilege. Similarly, Luisa, who was trained as a dental technician, confesses to a sense of inferiority to her husband, Jano, Tenoch's cousin, and his better-educated friends. The screenplay by Cuarón and his brother, Carlos, deserved the Oscar nomination it received for these attempts to provide a deep backstory for the characters. Even so, the film owes much to the obvious rapport between Luna and García Bernal, and to the steady centering influence of Verdú, all of whom participated in rehearsals that were often improvisatory embroidering on the Cuaróns's screenplay. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who would go on to receive three consecutive Oscars for much showier work on Cuarón's Gravity (2013) and on Alejandro Iñárritu's Birdman (2104) and The Revenant (2015), here maintains a strictly documentary style of camerawork, though often with the subtle use of long takes and wide-angle lenses. As I said, I think the film deflates a bit at the end with the revelation of Luisa's death: It seems an unnecessary attempt to moralize, to provide a motive -- knowing that she has terminal cancer -- for her running away and having sex with the boys, turning it into only a final fling. Would we think less of Luisa if she were simply asserting her right to be as pleasure-driven as her philandering husband? Were the Cuaróns attempting to obviate slut-shaming by giving Luisa cancer? I hope not, because the film shows such intelligence and sensitivity otherwise.