The Golden Dream – Diego Quemada-Diez

The Golden Dream (La jaula de oro) (Diego Quemada-Diez – Guatemala/Spain/Mexico) 102 minutes

It is a strange coincidence that two wildly different films about immigration/emigration were released this year with roughly the same title. There was the sunny and very light French-Portuguese film La cage d’orée (‘The Gilded Cage’) and now there is Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez’s significantly darker Mexican film La jaula de oro (‘The Golden Cage’, though it has been retitled The Golden Dream for English-speaking markets). Quemada-Diez’s film covers similar ground to Cary Fukunaga’s Sin nombre (2009), which followed the efforts of Honduran migrants to reach the US and Victor Nava’ El Norte, where the hopeful emigrants were Guatemalan. The Golden Dream’s teenage heroes also hail from Guatemala though this time they are fleeing poverty rather than war and political repression. Juan (Brandon Lopez), a cynical and moody sixteen-year-old, is joined by his friends Samuel (Carlos Chajon) and Sara (Karen Martinez) in their journey across the border into Mexico and then north to California. Sara cuts her hair and disguises herself as a boy, for reasons that become apparent later in the film.

When Mexican police arrest and deport them, Samuel gives up and decides to return home. They have now been joined by a Maya Indian, Chauk (Rodolfo Dominguez), who speaks no Spanish and who is the butt of Juan’s racial bullying. Sara sticks up for the resilient and selfless Chauk and Juan grudgingly agrees to let him tag along.

The Golden Dream is familiar enough stuff but it is lifted above the run-of-the-mill humanist drama by the soare sobriety of Quemada-Diez’s style. He manages to keep sentimentalism at bay for the most part, with one lapse late on. Though we see some acts of solidarity and kindness from ordinary people towards the masses of strangers hitching a ride north on the roofs of freight trains, Quemada-Diez knows that the decks are stacked firmly against the migrants. Since the narco-isation of Mexican society in the 1980s, the journey has become even more precarious than before with more than just social adversity and natural conditions to surmount. The cartels prey on the migrants, whom they see as expendable, to carry out dangerous undesirable work and there are lesser venal ‘entrepreneurs’ operating in the drug-lords’ slipstream. Quemada-Diez’s masterstroke is to square the demands of the drama with credible shocks emanating from the simplest situations. The Golden Dream is of a genre that affords little wriggle room for thematic or formal innovation but Quemada-Diez is attuned to both the often super-human determination of the Wretched of the Earth to reach the developed world, no matter the risks, and to the sorrow that lies forever in the hearts of even those who make it safely in the end. A fine debut from a very promising director.

Post Tenebras Lux – Carlos Reygadas

Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas – Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany) 115 minutes

As this year’s Cannes Film Festival unfolded, a largely forgotten prize-winner from last year made it to French screens, mostly unremarked. Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ fourth film was a rather unpopular winner of the Best Director prize; in fact Reygadas’ films on the whole have so far fared far better with festival juries than they have with critics. Personally, I would side with the juries on this as the Mexican is one of the most interesting filmmakers going at the moment and one who never makes the same film twice, even if they are often far from perfect.

He was certainly setting himself up for a fall with the pretentious Latin title Post Tenebras Lux (Light after Darkness) and this recondite tale of a young bourgeois Mexican family pushes the envelope in enough ways for people to be tempted to call bullshit on it – the elliptical structure, with seemingly unrelated scenes shuffled about, a nocturnal appearance from a CGI’d luminous cartoon devil, digital photography in Academy ratio that is sharply focused at the centre of the frame and all blurry at the edges. That said, Post Tenebras Lux might be the formally most challenging of Reygadas’ work but, thematically it is probably the most accessible. Given that his previous films included a man who goes to a village in the Mexican mountains to die (Japón), a working class chauffeur who kidnaps a child to make a bit of money and whose sexual fantasies concerning his boss’ teenage daughter are played out for real on screen (Batalla en el cielo) and a portrait of a German-speaking Mexican Mennonite community (Silent Light), this might be a mercy of sorts.

The unnamed family live in a bucolic sustainable-living home somewhere in the Mexican countryside, designed by architect father Juan. The balm of the rural existence is spoiled early on by what appear to be nightmares had by the two young children Rut and Eleazar (played by Reygadas’ own children of the same name). It then becomes clear that Juan is addicted to internet porn, his workers are variously drug addicted and stealing from him, and his marriage therapy with his wife Natalia appears to consist of a trip to a wife-swapping hammam in France, where he watches her being penetrated by a stranger. There is no narrative to speak of, and it is not even clear if we are getting any particular deep insight into its character’s minds and feelings. The whole thing, however, works. It might be confusing, obscure but the sequences function so well as micro-stories, are so beautifully filmed, they needle the viewer’s interpretative faculties with their strange, off-kilter drama. When two sequences appear out of the blue of teenage boys at an English public school preparing for and taking part in a rugby match, the effect is jolting and bracing in its non sequitur detour. (It becomes less mysterious though when you learn that Reygadas was himself a pupil at the same school.)

There are people for whom Reygadas is an outright charlatan, whose cinema is self-indulgent nonsense. That’s fine by me – I think much the same of Guy Maddin, Reygadas’ compatriot Alejandro González Iñárritu or the recent work of Terrence Malick. They all have their fervent defenders. If anything, Reygadas makes the same type of cinema as Malick but far better, with a clearer focus on the contours of his drama, and less obfuscatory in its lyricism. Post Tenebras Lux doesn’t approach the majestic beauty of Silent Light’s unlikely adultery drama, which won Reygadas the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007. It may even be ultimately unsubstantial but it is an open-ended film poem that gets you thinking and looks like little else in contemporary cinema.

Here and There - Antonio Méndez Esparza

Here and There (Aquí y Allá) (Antonio Méndez Esparza — USA/Mexico/Spain) 110 minutes

There are plenty of films about immigration but far fewer take emigration as their subject matter. Much of this has, of course, to do with the economic imbalance between countries of origin and destination (though there are net-emigration countries, such as Mexico and India, that have strong film industries). In richer English-speaking countries, ignorance of the phenomenon is such that the words ‘immigration’ and ‘emigration’ have become interchangeable in the minds of many. Ireland, which has recently seen a resurgence in large-scale emigration, is an exception, though it too has produced few films on the subject (though it does loom heavily in the greatest Irish stage play of the last 70 years, Philadelphia, Here I Come). Quite why there is relatively little cinematic interest in emigration is uncertain — you might say it is too depressing (as it is viewed in, say, Ireland and Portugal) but in many poorer countries it is seen as an opportunity, something people bankrupt themselves to accomplish. Perhaps people in those countries just see it as just too mundane, too ordinary a subject to merit wider interest.

 This is probably why it took a Spaniard — the first-time director Antonio Méndez Esparza — to direct this charming drama about a Mexican who returns to his village in the state of Guerrero after a second spell living in New York. The returned emigrant, Pedro (played by a real-life one, Pedro de los Santos) finds his two daughters approaching adolescence and grown distant from him in his absence; when he tries to sing songs on his guitar in front of them, he is surprisingly shy and they treat him as a likeable but goofy stranger. Pedro picks up casual work in the fields and on building sites but his main plan is to earn a living with a new band, called The Copa Kings, for hire for weddings, village fiestas and so on. Financial pressures soon begin to pinch though, as Pedro’s pregnant wife Helena is forced to give birth by a very complicated Caesarean. The medication for the mother and child eats up his savings and Pedro is left facing the possibility of another trip back north. In a subplot that is just about touched upon, a local teenager approaches Pedro for help in getting across the border, while attempting to convince his own girlfriend to make the crossing too.  

 Here and There is a subtle low-key drama in which the absence of the other life (the ‘there’) bears down inexorably on the characters. Pedro is a model of calm and patience, but also a man whose years away are beginning to wear on his relationship to both his family and his native village. The real-life Pedro was an immigrant whom Esparza befriended while the latter was studying film in New York; the Spaniard clearly saw something in Pedro’s back-story that might have been of little interest to a Mexican or American filmmaker, each of them focussed entirely on a US-anchored immigration. Esparza films with a clear eye and the little glimpses of life are gently but candidly observed.

Though the film is shot and edited in what might be known as the International Arthouse Style — a string of long, static takes; all the vital visual information shunting off-centre to the edge of the frame — it is his simple filming of the quiet interaction between the family (amateur actors all) where Esparza really sets his film apart from other first-time directors. He has been amply rewarded for his adventurousness and sensitivity, garnering a slew of international awards, including the Critics’ Week prize at Cannes last year, a just reward for a gentle, unassuming, little gem.