mexican cinema

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For instance, El Norte, a 1983 film by Gregory Nava, is about a Guatemalan brother and sister who flee political violence in their country and make their way to the United States, "El Norte." Enroute they have to traverse Mexico where they get a lift from a truckdriver who curses a lot (since profanity is apparently typical of Mexicans and not Guatemalans, as is stated by an INS officer later in the film) and manage to avoid any major Mexican city until they are dazzled by the bright lights of San Diego. Although a well-made film, its message is essentially a negative one. The girl dies from rat bites while crawling through a drainage pipe and her brother tries to survive as a day laborer in Los Angeles.

Nava, an American of Mexican ancestry who has done quite well in the United States,12 seems to be saying that his country is not a good place for Latin American immigrants, legal or otherwise. The numbers of Mexicans, Guatemalans, and others who are constantly trying to enter the United States would seem to belie this. Perhaps if Nava and his fellow "Chicano/Latino" filmmakers tried to stop presenting their characters as eternally marginalized, oppressed, and hopeless, the public might be a little more receptive to their films.




<< 1 2 3 4 5 >> For instance, El Norte, a 1983 film by Gregory Nava, is about a Guatemalan brother and sister who flee political violence in their country and make their way to the United States, "El Norte." Enroute they have to traverse Mexico where they get a lift from a truckdriver who curses a lot (since profanity is apparently typical of Mexicans and not Guatemalans, as is stated by an INS officer later in the film) and manage to avoid any major Mexican city until they are dazzled by the bright lights of San Diego. Although a well-made film, its message is essentially a negative one. The girl dies from rat bites while crawling through a drainage pipe and her brother tries to survive as a day laborer in Los Angeles. Nava, an American of Mexican ancestry who has done quite well in the United States,12 seems to be saying that his country is not a good place for Latin American immigrants, legal or otherwise. The numbers of Mexicans, Guatemalans, and others who are constantly trying to enter the United States would seem to belie this. Perhaps if Nava and his fellow "Chicano/Latino" filmmakers tried to stop presenting their characters as eternally marginalized, oppressed, and hopeless, the public might be a little more receptive to their films.
	Tortilla Soup (2001), an upbeat, cheerful film about a Mexican-American family, was well received by critics. However, the director is, curiously, a little-known Spanish woman, María Ripoll, and the film is derivative, a remake of Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman (1994). This points to another incongruity between U.S. Latinos and foreigners. The latter, when they make films in the U.S. (and there are precious few) certainly bring a quite different weltanschauung to their depictions of Latins in American society. In fact, at present there are only two well-known Mexicans in Hollywood-actor/producer/director Alfonso Arau and actress/producer Salma Hayek. There are also three other Mexican directors in Hollywood whose films are quite familiar to American moviegoers, although their names are not. They will be discussed below.

Alfonso Arau, after a respectable career as an actor and director in Mexico and actor in Hollywood (The Wild Bunch, Romancing the Stone), had his greatest success in 1992 with the Mexican film, Como agua para chocolate, adapted from the best-selling novel authored by his wife at the time, Laura Esquivel.13 On the basis of this box-office success, he made A Walk in the Clouds (1995) for a major Hollywood studio. Based on a 1942 Italian film, Quattro passi fra le nuvole, it starred Keanu Reeves as a young soldier who meets a pregnant girl (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) on a bus and she invites him to her home. Her "aristocratic" Mexican-American family owns a large 400-year-old Napa Valley vineyard. And her father (Giancarlo Giannini) is a tradition-bound patriarchal tyrant. The film betrays its Italian origin because nothing Mexican in California is 400 years old and Californians of Mexican ancestry don't behave like titled Italians. Yet what was different and refreshing about Arau's film is that he placed Mexicans at the top of the social ladder, unlike the American (i.e., Chicano) filmmakers who focus on poverty, gangs, and social exclusion. Also, his cosmopolitan choice of actors-American, Spanish, Mexican, and Italian together with the late Anthony Quinn-passed over the usual Hollywood Latino roster of actors. It seems the more optimistic films (of which there are very few) are made by foreigners who are unencumbered by the "victimized minority" mentality of so many U.S. Latinos, especially those of Mexican descent. Salma Hayek is better known than Arau to the U.S. public simply because she arrived on the Hollywood scene more recently and has appeared in a number of high-profile films (Desperado, Wild Wild West, Dogma, The Faculty, Traffic). She is also young and beautiful, giving her a distinct advantage over Arau. She has also ventured into producing with her Ventanarosa production company. Her most ambitious project to date is her film Frida, in which she plays the tortured Mexican surrealist painter. Directed by Julie Taymor (Titus and the Broadway production of The Lion King), the film also stars Alfred Molina, Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas, Geoffrey Rush, and Edward Norton.
After repeated delays, Frida was finally released in November 2002 to generally favorable reviews but initially unimpressive attendance figures. But through Hayek's steady promotion, the film has been finding an audience. Frida is an unusual hybrid, combining an art film topic with big-name stars in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience. It has strong performances by Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera and Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo. The film begins as a standard Hollywood biopic in which Rivera and Kahlo "meet cute" and significant events in their lives are dutifully depicted. However, its tone changes after Frida's bus accident, especially when Julie Taymor employs her stage-nurtured creativity in combining animation with live action to express Frida's emotional anguish and how it contributed to her painting. As one critic observed, "…when the movie manages to break free-in bursts of color, imagination, music, sex and over-the-top theatricality-it honors the artist's brave, anarchic spirit." 14 Hayek's best actress nomination in March 2003 was also significant in that it was the first time a Mexican was so honored.