The Exterminating Angel (1962)

Mexico

3.5*
Director:
Luis Buñuel
Screenwriter:
Luis Buñuel
Director of Photography:
Gabriel Figueroa
Running time: 88 minutes

Original title: El ángel exterminador

The Exterminating Angel demonstrates how elusive explanations for human behaviour can be, and while we can often feel confident that rationalisation will eventually win out, or that time will tell why people behave the way they do, it’s not quite as simple as that. It is true that people have their reasons, but these reasons may be obscured by so many other factors that an explanation, though it may seem just beyond our reach, could in fact be forever out of reach.

The film is surreal, which means the pieces don’t quite fit together unless you allow for the loose traits of a dream. However, unlike more avant-garde works such as Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, this film by Luis Buñuel has a general plot outline that can very easily be summarised.

At the house of a rich couple, their servants all decide to leave one night just as a whole host of guests arrive for a dinner party. They do so with their own very obviously made-up reasons, but it’s not made clear what their real intentions are. Only the majordomo remains. At the end of the evening, after many backstabbing bits of gossip between them, some drinks and a piece played on the piano, the guests prepare to leave, but then they realise they cannot bring themselves to do so.

They end up spending many days in the house, mostly inside one room, where their once mannered behaviour lapses and they descend to a level of basic needs and uncivilised outbursts, though the actual occurrence of some incidents is brought into question by the presentation of the material in the film.

The first shot of the film shows the name of the street on which this mansion is situated: Calle de la providencia (Providence Street). And the last shot in the film is of the exterior of a cathedral. The role of religion in the film is very oblique , although the title obviously has that connotation. The most straightforward connecting tissue would be the issue of free will and predestination, but Buñuel doesn’t make these themes explicit in any real way.

The easiest solution to the film lies in its inception. Having just left Spain after the controversy sparked by his Viridiana, and suffering under the rule of General Franco, Buñuel returned to Mexico to make this film, and it presents no obstacle to being interpreted as a demonstration of what happens to a group of people cut off from the rest of civilisation, left to fend for themselves in a small space and unable to leave.

The metaphor is problematic, especially because so many of the possible escape routes we think of never get tested, or the film discards them as soon as they are raised, for the example the possibility of pushing someone across the invisible but apparently insurmountable threshold inside the house.

“Life is amusing… and strange,” says one guest shortly after she realises she will be stuck against her will. At first, it seems it is the good manners of the guests that imprison them, as they are all too embarrassed to admit they want to leave, and simultaneously the hosts feel they cannot ask their guests to leave. But this explanation also unravels somewhat once the guests make it clear they truly want to go home. Unfortunately, the situation is summed up very explicitly in a laughable bit of dialogue by the character of the doctor, when he states that “no matter how hard we try, we cannot leave this room.”

One man dies, and two people commit suicide, and while the bodies rot and the stench drifts into the room, people are literally passing out from hunger and thirst. However, whenever they do get a bite to eat or something to drink, the small respite seems to prolong their stay even more – another potentially political statement.

The film isn’t always entertaining, as it has too many different characters who are never properly introduced or distinguished from one another, and the acting isn’t great either, but Buñuel’s ellipses between reality and dream are exceedingly well executed and often keep us in suspense as to the true events.

The Exterminating Angel contains numerous bizarre moments involving animals – among them a bear and a flock of sheep roaming around the mansion, and a bird in someone’s purse – that are left unexplained but never fail to pique or renew our interest in the events on-screen.

As social commentary, the film is biting, and its political slant is also difficult to miss. However, by refusing to explain why certain solutions are not available to his characters, Buñuel often doesn’t answer our questions and it is tough to read the film as a serious work of art. Dialogue scenes are too short and fragmented, and characters who start an important conversation or make a valid point are often interrupted and we are left hanging.

With a very sharp outline, the film’s central premise is difficult to forget, and while the film has its ambiguous moments, most of the plot is presented as if the actions of the characters were taking place according to the physical rules of nature. Determined filmgoers will scratch their heads about many of the events, and Buñuel likes to tease the viewer, as in the scene with a young boy who makes it onto the house’s grounds before, inexplicably, backing away. But all too often, explanations remain out of reach, and parts of the film cannot satisfy the viewer who demands some kind of cause and effect.

Quartet for the End of Time (1983)

Mexico

2*
Director:
Alfonso Cuarón
Screenwriter:
Alfonso Cuarón
Director of Photography:
Ariel Velázquez
Running time: 27 minutes

Original title: Cuarteto para el Fin del Tiempo

Alfonso Cuarón handles comedy much better than drama and as he would show with many of his greatest achievements, he is in total control when he has free reign to do both. But his student film, Quartet for the End of Time, about a guy who lives alone in an apartment and never speaks to anyone, provides no entertainment and left me as bored as the tortoise that serves as the only thing the main character speaks to.

“Quartet for the End of Time” is the title of a famous composition by the twentieth-century French composer Olivier Messiaen, and indeed the main character plays a few chords from the piece’s third movement, “Abyss of the Birds”, on his clarinet. According to Messiaen: “The Abyss is Time, with all its sadness, its weariness. Birds are the opposite of time; it’s our desire for light, stars, rainbows and jubilant vocals.” Such sadness and weariness are certainly well conveyed by this particular short film, but beyond an expression of such dismal tedium, there is little else of note.

The cinematography is also a let-down. Besides the very few tracking shots, all of which reveal some bit of information, the staging is quite simple and the visuals simply lack imagination.

The very first scene shows some promise: lying in the bathtub, while a very small pet tortoise, hidden in its shell, balances on the edge, the main character reads out loud about tortoises. The protection that the shell offers to the little animal is not an uninteresting point, and its potential for meaning is hinted at by the subsequent dedication in the opening credits: Mariana and her belly. At the time, director Alfonso Cuarón (here billed as Alfonso Cuarón Orozco) was married to Mariana Elizondo, whose belly, we can surmise, was the protective shell to their child, Jonás, born in 1981. But the film does nothing to develop this idea in any shape or form.

Instead, we get a loose assortment of scenes, mostly taking place inside the apartment. Fortunately, with one or two exceptions, we are spared the prospect of listening to explanatory interior monologues, but watching the main character sit at his window (with a sticker for the “Paiste 2002″ brand of cymbals) is far from exciting, nor does it substantially contribute to our impression of him as someone completely isolated – what the reasons for this isolations are, however, remain a mystery.

The apartment is clearly his shell, the space in which he feels comfortable and protected, and when he does leave the apartment – even though some of these excursions seem to be illusory – we can breathe a momentary sigh of relief. When a film takes place in one setting, our attention needs to be focused, as the Cuarón-produced Duck Season so admirably managed to accomplish.

At the time he made the film, Cuarón had little filmmaking experience and this lack of understanding the form shows very well in his failure to properly direct his main actor (we get a comically amateurish scene in which this character fries a sausage in ten seconds) and the sound effects are completely atrocious. I could easily have ignored these points, were it not for the film’s unwillingness to provide some kind of plot. Granted, we see some transformation from beginning to end, but the reasons for this transformation are never even suggested. A mass of balloons that the character releases from his window might have something to do with it, but such symbolism obscures the plot even more.

It would take Cuarón eight years, and some experience in the field of television, before he undertook another film project, the delightful Love in the Time of Hysteria, and he needed that time to mature, for this student film is an uninteresting, tiresome disgrace that doesn’t even look good.

Love in the Time of Hysteria (1991)

Mexico

4.5*
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Screenwriter: Carlos Cuarón
Director of Photography:
Emmanuel Lubezki
Running time: 94 minutes

Original title: Sólo Con Tu Pareja

In 2001, Y Tu Mamá También, Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece, would open with a shot that is almost an exact replica of the first shot in his first feature film: a young man and woman are having sex on a mattress while the camera slowly tracks towards them amidst their passionate shrieks of pleasure. Cuarón has a penchant for mixing comedy with much more serious reflections on human nature, and his first film, though much more broadly comical than any of his other projects, gives the viewer a taste of things to come.

Love in the Time of Hysteria shares a great deal with a 1980s Almodóvar classic such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and at many points the film had me in stitches. If you remember the running joke about the Shi’ite terrorists in Almodóvar’s film, you will love Cuarón’s recurring references to a gringa who put her French poodle in a microwave.

A young playboy called Tomás Tomás works in the advertising industry and has stuck it in so many places he has all but lost count of his conquests. When some white spots appear in his throat, he goes to see his friend, Mateo de Mateos, who is a doctor. Silvia, Mateo’s nurse, falls for Tomás and in the blink of an eye, they have arranged to meet at Tomás’s flat that evening. The only problem is that Tomás’s boss and part-time lover, Gloria, is on her way over to discuss the latest ad campaign. When the two women arrive, Tomás has his hands full to ensure that they are both satisfied without finding out about each other.

Unfortunately, a third woman piques his interest: a young flight attendant named Clarisa, who has just moved in next door. And so, Tomás loses track of time and poor Silvia leaves in a huff the next morning. In fact, she is so beside herself with frustration that she decides to play a trick on Tomás: we have already established that she is a lascivious little sadist, but now she informs him that his HIV test has come back positive.

But while this turn of events in Tomás’s life could potentially have terrible consequences, all of which Tomás seems to consider very seriously, Cuarón’s use of the colour green – as in so many of his other films, most visibly in Great Expectations – hints at the victory of life over death, whatever the red arrows of Cupid (that serve as accents on the green text of the opening credits) might otherwise indicate.

This is a film full of incidents of varying hilarity, staged with a magnificent sense of direction and energy, and while one could easily fault the film for a lack of real substance, it certainly holds the viewer’s attention, because the chaos does not overwhelm the storylines. Also, Cuarón’s use of mostly classical music on the soundtrack (which often consists of Mozart - predictably, the “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” aria from Don Giovanni) gives a slightly heavier, though perhaps only ironically, gloss to the events we witness.

Love in the Time of Hysteria doesn’t take itself too seriously – exhibit one is the opening quotation of the film, from e.e. cummings, which states that “mike likes all the girls [...] all the girls except the green ones”, but these quotes ranges from such nonsense to Newton’s Third Law; its characters usually have the same first and last names, and Tomás’s friend Mateo uses cliché Latin sayings in most of his sentences. Nonetheless, the film certainly entertains and while the characters of the two Japanese businessmen have no real place in the story, this film showed the great promise on which Alfonso Cuarón would soon deliver. His cameraman, Emmanuel Lubezki, would continue to work with him on most of his subsequent projects, as well as the films of Terrence Malick, while his other cameraman, Rodrigo Prieto, would work with the other great Mexican director of the last decade, Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Silent Light (2007)

Mexico

4*
Director: Carlos Reygadas
Screenwriter: Carlos Reygadas
Director of Photography:
Alexis Zabe

Running time: 127 minutes

Original title: Stellet licht
Alternative title: Luz silenciosa

It is not only light that is silent in Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’s third film: the characters’ world seems to be in perpetual stasis, though we rarely get the sense that they are frustrated with their quiet way of life. It is refreshing to see a heavily faith-based community presented in a way that makes them appear completely understanding and accepting of human nature, and it is this aspect that raises the film above similar other projects dealing with the same dramatic thread.

The three main characters are Johan, his wife Esther, and Johan’s mistress Marianne, who all form part of a small Mennonite community in Mexico, and almost all the dialogue is in Plautdietsch – a mixture between Dutch and German, with a pronunciation that made me think of Danish. Esther knows about Marianne, because Johan has told her about his mistress from the very start. We discover this important piece of information when Johan confesses to his father, the local preacher, about the affair, and the handful of scenes that precede their conversation is filled with tender moments of interaction between Johan and Esther that make it clear there is love and affection but not without some unknown sadness.

When discussing this film, audiences will focus on the rhythm of the film and the second to last scene, which is very reminiscent of the famous climax in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, though Reygadas refuses to provide a simple “miracle” and instead his film ends on a suitably ambiguous note. The rhythm of the film is slow without being overbearing, and while the camera certainly takes its time recording what seems to be the minutiae of everyday life in the community, the frames are not void of action, and the many actions that do cross the screen are all of great importance to the characters. Perhaps it was not necessary to record a very long take of Johan driving, in which the camera first shows us the road in front of the car, and then Johan at the wheel, but the tedium of this particular scene early in the film quickly dissipates.

The honesty of the main character is admirable and so is the complete lack of judgment of his affair in this tiny community – an affair that ultimately (at least, indirectly) leads to a tragedy. Distinctions between good and bad may only be made by the viewer, for the film does not venture into such territory of clear-cut oppositions, and the drama that does exist is the result of the viewer’s projections and expectations based on the material that is given to us in a very straightforward manner that is unembellished. The film also uses non-professional actors to create a world that is plain yet far from simple.

Silent Light opens and closes with impressive shots that seem to bring cosmic significance to the film, and the sustained lens flares during a romantic scene on a hill also make visible the presence of light in the characters’ lives. The amazing state of grace in which these characters exist is beautiful to behold and a far cry from the usual dramatic tension that results from actions, reactions and tension between polar opposites. The film seems to relate an optimism about forgiveness, but it is important to note the central issue that is the internal struggle of all three main characters and how they deal with it. While Silent Light is entirely divested of extradiegetic music, it does contain a very touching moment in a van when Johan and his children watch Jacques Brel on television performing “Les Bonbons”, a song whose lyrics vaguely mirror Johan’s love triangle.

Carlos Reygadas has made a very special film that illuminates the isolated community of the Mennonites in Mexico and while one might argue that the story is too small for a two-hour film, the pace of the film is as steady and as firm as the flow of the characters’ lives and these lives end up unexpectedly moving our emotions.

Duck Season (2004)

Mexico

4*
Director:
Fernando Eimbcke
Screenwriters: 
Fernando Eimbcke
Paula Markovitch
Director of Photography:
Alexis Zabe
Running time: 85 minutes

Original Title: Temporada de patos

When we, the viewers, spend an hour and a half in the company of a very small group of characters – four, to be precise – in one location, then they better be likeable. Fortunately, Duck Season does not disappoint.

One Sunday, two young teenage boys, Juan Pablo (“Moko”) and Mario (“Flama”), both thirteen or fourteen years old, spend the day at Flama’s mother’s flat, while she is out doing her chores. They drink Coke, eat chips, and play video games. Then, sixteen-year-old Rita from next-door arrives to use their oven. They don’t pay much attention to her. Even when the power goes out, they prefer to sit in silence in front of the TV, rather than strike up a conversation. They order pizza, which leads to an oddly thrilling sequence in which the pizza delivery guy tries to outrun the clock. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t (although the soundtrack is clear on this point), and this uncertainty leads to a showdown between him and the boys.

By this stage, we’re only 30 minutes into the film, but you’ll have noticed that quite a lot actually happens, in spite of the many many moments of silence, at least initially, in which the characters are visibly bored and just waiting for time to pass, for things to become less awkward.

Director Fernando Eimbcke demonstrates real skill in finding many different positions to place his camera: inside cupboards, inside the refrigerator, inside the oven – at one point, the camera even takes the place of an important painting in the living room. The film, shot entirely in black and white, on what must have been a shoestring budget, shows what can be accomplished when the characters are interesting and the story is well developed.

The only deviation from the apartment setting – apart from the quirky sequence, mentioned above, in which Ulises, the pizza delivery man, races to deliver the pizza on time – is a flashback to a dog pound, which feels completely out of place. Also, the film tends to cheat from time to time by using the cuts, occurring between the scenes that mostly take place in the living room and the kitchen, as bridges across time, and these ellipses actually obscure important events that occur off-screen.

The self-confident Rita provides plenty of material to work with, but it is the young Moko, played by actor Diego Cataño, who impresses the most with his splendid performance, hinting at awkwardness and secrecy in his outer appearance of mere shyness and yet these traces are never overstated or overplayed.