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September 2024
In the early 2000s, Mexico turned yellow on screen. From Guadalajaran parking lots to Sonoran Desert, any scene in which tropical heat, air pregnant with danger and lurking baddies congregated — a combination mostly found in Latin America, according to Hollywood —got a sepia sheen. Notoriously nicknamed “The Mexican Filter”, the wash dominated Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and later Breaking Bad whenever chemist-turned-drug-baron Walter White crossed the border to expand his criminal empire, and Mexicans duly added this portrait to their ever-lengthening list of movie clichés, alongside gold toothed thugs, meek domestic help, and live-wire dealers.
For a place often creatively sieved through a foreign lens, it’s unsurprising that art carves out elements of this vast and varied country and offers a distorted taste of it. But screen entertainment, so easily consumed as an alternate version of reality, should perhaps be held more accountable for its portrayals. So how accurately is the foreigner-in-Mexico character depicted? Do we have the subtle expat equivalents of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation or Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together? Certain characters might have lodged in our minds like beloved, unbudgeable roommates, including tequila-fuelled clowns (The Three Amigos), lovesick sirens (Night of the Iguana), and doomed dreamers (Under the Volcano). With Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Queer on the horizon, I’ve been contemplating lesser-known examples. Here’s a non-exhaustive list from the last decade where Mexico is the loyal host, incomers are troublesome guests, and the usual tropes have been disinvited, even if they occasionally gatecrash.
ROTTING IN THE SUN (2023. Dir. Sebastián Silva)
One to avoid watching with your great-aunt, pet parrot, or anybody who might accidentally relay what they saw at a lunch party, Rotting In The Sun sees director Sebastián Silva playing a barely fictionalised version of himself lounging around Mexico City with post-pandemic fatigue and a drug-fuelled death wish. After accidentally rescuing real-life Instagram star Jordan Firstman in a Baywatch style meet-cute in Zicatela, the much paler, more nihilistic protagonists return to the capital, where Jordan relentlessly pursues Sebastián to make him ‘actually famous’ by collaborating on a film. Black comedy morphs into a nudity-filled thriller as Sebastián vanishes, leaving Jordan to play the lead in his own detective noir, assisted and obstructed by scenester friends, a nervous whippet, and a paranoid maid. Savage and explicit, this is Lars Von Trier on a Hitchcockian odyssey. Go to the filming location in Condesa and you might just see the film’s extras wandering around with lattes in hand and dogs on leashes, calling their friends about existential dread.
On MUBI, with a subscription.
SUNDOWN (2021. Dir. Michel Franco)
Flashing past with the dramatic subtlety of a sunset, Sundown is one of Mexican auteur Michel Franco’s best. Tim Roth, with blissful disassociation, plays Neil Bennet, a Brit whose holiday in Acapulco with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is disrupted by their mother’s death. Pretending to lose his passport to avoid returning to reality, Neil embraces inertia by joining those who, as Robert Frost described, ‘turn their back on the land’. Migrating between grimy hotel room and grimy beach with lover Berenice, he stares at the ocean while Alice single-handedly manages their family fortune made in pig slaughterhouses. The drama is masterfully underscored by complex undercurrents as Neil, an everyman, suffers the extraordinary, visceral effects of the lineage of traumas that founded his inheritance. Eerie and moving, Sundown is like that final hour on the beach, when tan and beer have morphed into burn and dread, and evening has arrived far too soon.
On Amazon Prime US, or with a Now subscription.
SUNDOWNERS (2017. Dir. Pavan Moondi)
Discovered, admittedly, while searching for the last film, it’s maybe telling that this low-budget Canadian flick didn’t put Franco off his title choice nor threaten to knock shoulders with the 1960 Western of the same name. Sundowners follows thirty-something Alex, a down-and-out photographer sent to Mexico to shoot a wedding, who ropes in equally down-and-out friend Nick to pose as his assistant. The plot meanders as the men navigate the doomed wedding, doomed romances, doomed finances, and a slightly doomed plot. But there is something curiously watchable about this indie, with its pretty handheld visuals, improvised dialogue and cast of non-actors. An off-kilter bromance becomes a warming Sunday night watch you don’t turn off, even if you realize halfway through you’ve got the wrong film. There’s something strange, though, about the Cancún-like setting and accent of the taxi driver. This mystery is swiftly solved when a Google search reveals it was all filmed in Colombia.
$5-9 on Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, YouTube, and more.
EISENSTEIN IN GUANAJUATO (2015. Dir. Peter Greenaway)
A film about filmmaking, another with unblinking nudity, and finally one without ‘sun’ in the title. Don’t let that put you off this wacky tale about the godfather of auteur filmmakers, Russian practitioner Sergei Eisenstein, attempting to make his ultimately abandoned 1930 revolution flick Que Viva Mexico! It’s got all the flamboyant, motor-mouth hallmarks of British director Peter Greenaway, which prove to be fitting bedfellows alongside Mexican surrealism and Russian zaniness. Eisenstein, played by Elmer Bäck, is having his first love affair at the age of thirty-three in this paradisical country that has driven him wild with passion, having been shunned by Hollywood. The film doles out delicious dollops of 19th century architecture, peering up at Porfirian buildings as though dropped into the middle of a birthday cake, making a great advert for Guanajuato, where the whole film was shot. Like its sometimes-forgotten protagonist, this is a film worth keeping in mind for its risk-taking eccentricity.
$5.99 on Amazon Prime, or with a BFI Player subscription.
499 (2020. Dir. Rodrigo Reyes)
Very much a voyage across unknown land, though whether seen through the eyes of a foreigner is debatable. Five hundred years after the first Spaniard set foot on Yucatan shores, a 16th century Spanish conquistador makes a pilgrimage through modern-day Mexico. He meets broken families of murdered activists, visits schools where children march uniformly, witnesses clandestine deals in clubs downtown, and observes a damaged landscape. As the blank-faced Spaniard, moustached and armour-clad, paces across the paradise his ancestors crossed half a millennium before, he absorbs the resentment and confusion of its living descendants. Half documentary, half fiction, Reyes infuses his film with beauty and anger in equal measure and plays with our understanding of time and trauma, debating whether the two can ever really be separately processed.
$3-9 on Amazon Prime or Apple TV+, or with a Criterion Channel subscription.