THE PASSION OF MARIA ELENA (Mercedes Moncada Rodríguez, 2003)

An achingly lovely documentary from Mexico, The Passion of Maria Elena (La Pasión de María Elena) was written and directed by sociologist Mercedes Moncada Rodríguez, who won for it the International Jury Award for best documentary at the 2003 São Paulo International Film Festival. The film also took the prize as best Mexican feature at the Guadalajara Film Festival. Rodríguez’s writing credit goes beyond, I presume, the questions we hear her off-screen voice ask individuals she interviews. Like a documentary by Werner Herzog, Rodríguez’s film perhaps bends the rules, benefitting from her scripted interventions. (It may be that certain flashbacks are reconstructions.) In any case, Rodríguez achieves a fascinating portrait of a woman, her parents and their community.

María Elena Durán Morales is a divorced young Rarámuri who, after the death of her 3-year-old son, Jorge, moves with son Luis from rural Rejogochi, in the middle of the Taramuhara Mountains, to a city in Chihuahua, Mexico. She moves to find work; most of all, she moves because of terrible sadness. Her home village is now haunted by memories of her dead child.

Jorge was killed by a hit-and-run driver in a pickup truck. María Elena and her sister Crucita were walking with him; when Crucita let go of Jorge’s hand for a second, the vehicle struck, crushing his foot. When the driver, a white—that is to say, Spanish Mexican—girl named Marisela, the daughter of a local landowner, sped away, her vehicle crushed the boy’s head. Jorge’s mother is not alone in her grief over the loss. María Elena’s mother’s stoicism barely conceals tremendous grief; her father cannot even manage stoicism, which may be why his wife must. A neighbor, not a Rarámuri Indian, also keenly feels the loss of the happy little boy he was so used to seeing playing about.

It is this neighbor who convinced María Elena and her father, against their doubts, to have a Rarámuri trial, the purpose of which isn’t punishment but admission of responsibility, forgiveness, reconciliation—in sum, communal harmony. At this trial, Marisela tearfully confessed and María Elena forgave her in her heart, but when they hugged María Elena could tell that Marisela was mocking her. At her official mestizo trial, Marisela denied she had anything to do with Jorge’s death; “white justice” acquitted her. Marisela’s ridiculous claim of innocence was supported by the police diagram of the accident location, which had been doctored to make it look as though the driver of the truck could not have been responsible. We hear about all this, but we actually see María Elena, after her own lawyer has given her the runaround and washed his hands of her, confer with a Human Rights Commission attorney, who tells her, and probably honestly believes, that the matter can be set right by the correction of the corrupted diagram. However, the matter is never resolved; Mexico’s system of justice simply isn’t attuned to the rights and grievances of poor, dark-skinned indigents.

The contrast between native and official justice is interesting. However, one errs, I believe, if one interprets María Elena’s pasión as being a grieving mother’s pursuit of justice. Rather, María Elena’s pasión is her spiritual dimension and spiritual resourcefulness. At the beginning of the film, we hear the voice of the sympathetic neighbor: “Around here, people believe if a child dies that child will be born again in the body of another child, especially if you dream about him often.” Later, we watch and listen as María Elena tells of her son’s visitations after his death. In one, he tells her, “Mama, don’t cry for me anymore. I’ll be with you wherever you are.” In all these dreams she sees him flying. After she gives birth to a new son, whom she finds to be Jorge all over again, María Elena quips that it has been easier to bring Jorge back from the dead than to secure justice from white people. It is this element of spirituality that unifies the film and best explains its title.

Indeed, it is this element that accounts for many of the film’s most gorgeous shots. The film is divided into separately titled segments or chapters, an early one of which is called “Soul.” Its opening shot is extraordinary: at night, out of the dark, illumined by the torch one of them carries, a flock of children run toward the camera. As María Elena recounts one of her dreams of her dead son, we see a solitary figure outside at night, in long shot, walking away from the camera into the darkness. Elsewhere in the film, there are near-closeups of the silver moon in the black sky. In perhaps the film’s most exquisite shot, white clouds pass over the mountains, their haunting movement the result of subtle time-lapse photography that also shows the mountains beginning in sunlight and darkening to dusk. The clouds thus poetically connect to María Elena’s dreams of Jorge flying, while the mountains’ going from light to dark intimates the mystery of Jorge’s passing and the eventual mystery of his return. This is a film shot through with intimations of spirit—but not in the city, where the flat appearance and noisiness from traffic suggest the opposite: spiritual deprivation.

Rodríguez thus succeeds, at least to some extent, to find visual correlatives to the spiritually inclined minds of the Rarámuri—a way of seeing things, of apprehending the world in its connection to the solemn and magical eternal, that eludes our supposedly more advanced grasp of reality. Or is so-called civilization a retreat from the primitive mind that persists in close connection with Nature? Consider this: María Elena gets her Jorge back. Marisela’s lies enable her to escape the legal consequences of her reckless disregard for the life of a child. But, to be truly free, wouldn’t she have had to undo the hit-and-run, from which even her limited conscience will never quite be able to shake loose? Yet, in effect, this is what the Indian woman, María Elena, has achieved. The return of her son to her arms in a new life undoes, for her, the tragedy of her loss.

Rodríguez’s Pasión de María Elena occupies a space betwixt objective and subjective cinema, between harsh reality and dreams, between bondage and freedom, between matter and spirit—if you will, between documentary reportage and observation, on the one hand, and richly poetic fiction, on the other. It is about more than a mother’s passion for justice. It is about a mother’s passion to renew her life-giving, life-affirming role.

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Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Y tu mamá también (And Your Mother, Too) certifies the shallowness of Mexico’s Alfonso Cuarón, whose A Little Princess (1995) suggested promise. (I haven’t seen Cuarón’s 1998 Great Expectations or his 2004 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.) It is the kind of film I like least: a coarse, manipulative entertainment that is contemptuous of its audience, and decked with features and mannerisms to attract culture vultures and hoodwink the gullible. A road picture (a genre of films I love), it won a truckload of foreign-language film prizes (including nearly all of the major ones in the U.S.), not to mention the best screenplay prize, for Cuarón and his brother Carlos, at Venice. At the Havana Film Festival, moreover, it won the prize of the international critics, whose citation reads as follows: “For the good melange of the comic and the tragic expressed in a very sophisticated style.” Different people see the same movie with different eyes.

As a summertime rite-of-passage film involving two high school boys, while their girlfriends are away in Europe, and their road companion, a not-that-much older woman related by marriage to one of them, it’s a feast for those whose hearts and eyes haven’t progressed beyond high school. There is even a scene where the boys, naked in the shower room of an exclusive club, flick towels at one another—for those who are nostalgic for this sort of thing, and for others who, for whatever reason, simply enjoy watching spirited naked boys. (Be forewarned: throughout, male nudity is stressed while female nudity is given short shrift.) The film thus functions mostly at the level of Porky’s (Bob Clark, 1982), with the boys’ leering at girls there replaced (I guess) by the filmmaker’s leering at boys here, and not a chance in paradise of the career of another Kim Cattrall being launched. One can only hope that Cuarón, in his latest film, at least lets Harry Potter keep his duds on.

But there are two even more egregious aspects to the film. One of these is the film’s attempt to seduce certain audience members into believing that they are watching a serious, intelligent film, not some silly adolescent romance. This attempt takes two forms. One refers to the narrative, whose road trip out of Mexico City exposes the boys to “the other Mexico”—the poor Mexico from which their pampered lives have protected them. (One of them is rich; the other, bourgeois.) But this is an empty tack, for the boys, Tenoch and Julio, themselves seem little affected by what we get to see (for example, in roadside stores and diners): instances of hardworking, sometimes impoverished humanity. Nor does the film in any fashion reflect on the boys’ nonresponsiveness to anyone but Luisa, the woman who, cheated on by her spouse, joins them on the road, as they presumably head in the direction of an exclusive beach called Boca del Cielo—“Heaven’s Mouth,” a nonexistent place, the boys’ ruse. Julio and Tenoch aim for sexual adventure; for them, Heaven’s Mouth exists between Luisa’s thighs. You get the picture; the souls whose paths the boys cross along the way are distractions for us. They’re not really what the film is about, but Cuarón, a liar and a cheat, nonetheless wants to take credit as though Mexico’s socioeconomic divide is what his film is really about.

Cuarón tries to augment this manipulation of his audience with another, equally false and reprehensible tack. Periodically, there is a burst of voiceover. (The narrator is Daniel Giménez Cacho.) At first, this narration provides background information about the boys and their families. Soon, however, it provides more potentially interesting information, about the economic and political state of things in Mexico. For instance, referring to the time of departure of the road journey, the narrator notes, “That day, three demonstrations took place across the city.” But all such comments turn out to be provocative though pointless observations—throwaway lines unaccompanied by any rigorous political or socioeconomic analysis. There is less to Cuarón’s film than meets the ear, and two of the eventual turns of plot, the boys’ passionately making out with Luisa and then, under the umbrella of her ravishing sensuality, with one another and the subsequent dissolution of their friendship, less over their homosexual encounter than over other matters (sexual jealousy; the difference in socioeconomic status between them), may or may not add something substantial to the mix. Cuarón is mostly playing us by making it appear that his film is about more than male adolescent high jinks.

Cuarón also plays us in a worse way. Luisa is dying of cancer. She knows this, but Cuarón doesn’t bother disclosing the fact until very near the end of the film. (Worse, the narrator slightly earlier teases us in the direction of the disclosure.) Ikiru (1952), Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, immediately lets us know that its protagonist, Kanji Watanabe, is dying of cancer; nor does Ingmar Bergman’s magnificent Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop, 1972) delay our awareness that Agnes is dying of cancer. Even Hollywood’s Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939) doesn’t so callously toy with us regarding Judith Traherne’s medical condition. It is soulless to reduce someone’s dying of cancer to a plot point, for goodness sake. Cuarón has no concept of human tragedy. He is indeed a man without a soul.

All that said, the final nighttime dance among the three lead characters in a roadside restaurant, which leads to their menage à trois in a motel bedroom, is among the most erotic passages in all of cinema, and Luisa (Ana López Mercado), gorgeously bronze and covered in silken sweat, is at last permitted to come into her libidinous own. How much more profound, though, this good moment would have been had we known that Luisa was dying.

The roles of the two boys are enacted by twentysomethings. Diego Luna, who plays Tenoch, cannot act; diminitive Gael García Bernal, who plays Julio, can. He is excellent here, and he is even more remarkable in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s earlier Amores perros (2000). (Bernal’s stirring speech denouncing the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the high point of the 2002 Academy Awards ceremony until Adrien Brody, winning as best actor, stole the show.) Luna and Bernal shared acting honors at the Valdivia International Film Festival and at Venice.

One more thing must be counted in the film’s favor: the cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezski, like his work in A Walk in the Clouds (Alfonso Arau, 1995), is gorgeous throughout.

21 GRAMS (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2003)

The Mexican film Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch, 2000) employed the gimmick of a horrible traffic accident to orchestrate three overlapping stories whose characters wander in and out of each other’s fractured narrative domain. A middling piece of work, the film nevertheless demanded some legitimate interest because of the riveting acting by heartthrob Gael García Bernal. Now the same writer-director team, Guillermo Arriaga Jordán (who has dropped the Jordán) and Alejandro González Iñárritu, have brought their punishing notion of cinema to the English language. Technique easily wins out over humanity in 21 Grams, a soap opera so tedious and selfconsciously solemn that it becomes inadvertently funny. The actors give the nonsense their all, apparently knowing what they’re playing at any given time, but we are compelled to do what mental gymnastics we can to figure out the chronology of what we see on the screen. It’s a losing task.

Don’t ask me what the story is. If I had a year to devote to deciphering it, perhaps I might prevail against the morass of melodrama this film kept throwing up at me as I persevered through the viewing of it; but I see no point to the challenge. González Iñárritu isn’t deconstructing anything; he is simply toying with us with one hand while playing with himself with the other. It is sufficient to say two things. One, another traffic accident yields a plethora of misery amidst intertangled human lives. Two, one of the characters, a mathematician named Paul Rivers, finds himself in a desperate slump next to an empty, abandoned swimming pool like the one in which dogs illegally fight to the snarling death in Amores perros. Iñárritu remains what he has always been: a former radio disc jockey and commercial advertiser (poorly) pretending to make films. Still, since either he or Arriaga Jordán “explained” the symbolism of the pool as it pertained to the earlier film (I forget which), the explanation perhaps is applicable to 21 Grams as well. Vacated bourgeois hopes and aspirations. Could be. Darned if I know.

It all boils down to this: Does one go to the movies to be tortured, depressed, oppressed, humiliated?

The title? Apparently twenty-one grams are lost in human body weight at the point of death. Hallelujah, it’s the soul, brother and sister, it’s the soul!

Oh, one thing more: Benicio Del Toro plays (ineptly, his emotional flexibility somewhere betwixt that of Victor Mature and Joan Crawford) a Jesus-freaking ex-convict whose family name is the same as the scenarist’s. Make of that what you will.

Except for Del Toro, who really should be put out of his misery (what about a snarling fight to the death between him and another bad actor?), the acting is commendable. Sean Penn, who played the part of a grieving father whose teenaged daughter has been murdered in Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, 2003) peculiarly close to the vest, is rather more emotionally full here, as Paul Rivers, whose heart—I’m speaking organically, not metaphorically—once belonged to the hit-run-killed spouse (Danny Huston—John’s son) of the woman he is bedding with, Christina Peck, a recovering drug addict who also lost her two children in the same accident. Needless to say, Christina’s triple loss pulled the world out from under her recovery. This is a poignant role, and Naomi Watts reconfirms that she is a fine actress, transcending Iñárritu’s irritating technique in order to disclose a torrent of human suffering. Penn and Watts were named best actor and best actress at Venice and by the Florida film critics; Penn also took prizes from the National Board of Review and the Las Vegas critics, while Watts took prizes from the Los Angeles, the San Diego, and the Southeastern film critics’ groups.

Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Mary Rivers, Paul’s wife. Can it be more than fifteen years ago already that she played la petite voleuse (The Little Thief, Claude Miller, 1988)?