Essential World Cinema: 5 Best Mexican Films

Mexico films

Mexican cultural touchstones have been present in Hollywood cinema for decades. Whether you’re talking about straight-up reverent parody like Three Amigos, overblown Latin American ultra-violence like Machete or Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts kidding themselves into thinking someone actually wanted to see them in a film together in The Mexican. Overall though it’s a pretty poor representation, especially considering the rich cinematic legacy that Mexico has behind it.

Mexican cinema enjoyed a golden age of comedies, romances and melodramas in the 1940s and from there it gradually evolved into a real crucible of talent. Some of the world’s foremost directors are Mexican and kick-started their careers on home soil, Guillermo del Toro, Robert Rodriguez and Alfonso Cuarón, to name a few. It seems like Hollywood would rather we all thought that Mexico was exclusively populated by sombrero clad, tequila fuelled stereotypes who ride around firing guns in the air, which beyond merely being fairly racist and utterly ham-fisted does a real disservice to a wonderful cinematic catalog. Here’s the highlight reel.

 

After Lucia

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Michel Franco’s After Lucia might be one of the most distressing, unbearable horror films ever made. It isn’t typically considered as a horror, at least not in the traditional sense but I’d argue that it’s more horrifying than most of the films that come out under that banner and for much more important, resonant reasons. Filmed mostly in static, fly-on-the-wall style shots, some of which extend for minutes before a cut, the film opens with a father and teenage daughter moving to Mexico City in the wake of some awful, unspoken tragedy that is very gradually brought into focus. Whilst the father struggles to overcome his crippling grief, his daughter Alejandra (the wonderful Tessa Ia) is drawn into a circle of popular kids at her new school. Things seem to go well initially but after going with them on a weekend away, a recording of her drunkenly copulating with one of the boys surfaces online and she becomes victimized by her peers. One girl in particular attacks her out of a sense of territoriality whilst one of the boys is motivated by entitlement and before long a group mentality kicks in and Alejandra is caught in a storm of despicable bullying.

This is one of those films that just keeps tipping into a steeper nosedive. Bullying is of course a very real and deeply important issue and After Lucia tackles it head-on, making no mystery of how much bad behavior can escalate if carries on unchecked. Alejandra initially beats her aggressors back but as things continue to get worse she withdraws into herself, muting her suffering for fear of tipping her despondent father over the edge. Arguably towards to end when things all go a bit William Golding the plausibility wanes but the tragic brutality most certainly doesn’t, it just tightens like a thumbscrew right up to the final, bone-chilling shot. After Lucia performed excellently at Cannes and is regarded by many as a must-see, I would tend to agree, but fair warning, this one will haunt you.

 

Ahi Esta El Detalle

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Mexico’s cinematic golden age mirrored Hollywood’s in a number of significant ways, numerous US films were given Spanish language remakes but in the realm of comedy it could be fair to suggest that Mexican cinema actually had a pretty direct influence on Hollywood, not least because of Cantinflas. Mario Moreno, better known as Cantinflas was an actor who became known as the Mexican Charlie Chaplain. Usually he played the kind of bumbling, lethargic asshat that manages to be charming and lovable despite only being interested in food, booze and fornication. Somewhere between Sterling Archer and Homer Simpson. He typically dressed to resemble a slum dweller with a distinctive, whiskery mustache and his brand of haphazard, rapid-fire comedy flung him into the spotlight, particularly in the early breakout hit Ahi Esta El Detalle.

Roughly translated as ‘All in the Details’ or ‘Here is the Point’, it stars Cantinflas as a bum who is romancing the maid of a local wealthy household when he is mistaken for an adulterer before being passed off as the madam’s brother. It’s the kind of hijinks driven, situational comedy that was wildly popular the world over back then, but stylistically it holds a certain distinction thanks to the rocket-fuelled, razor-sharp wit of the dialogue. The characters ping off each other so fast that even the subtitles have trouble keeping up, as if all the characters were being played by a mid-80s Robin Williams and Cantinflas uses a kind of speech that blends factiousness, turns of phrase and nonsense and seems to evoke early Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck outings (likely far from a coincidence, this kind of cinema was a key influence on Looney Tunes). This style of speech even has its own name: ‘cantinfleada’. Allegedly the sharp writing was drawn from director Juan Bustillo Oro’s time as a pro-bono lawyer, I’m not sure if that’s fascinating, depressing or both. The film is a must-see as much as a part of cinematic history as a piece of entertainment, but it certainly fills that quota. It’s a breakneck, twisting tornado of mishaps that even the world’s most humorless man wouldn’t be immune to.

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