The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón by Deborah Shaw (review)

Deborah Shaw’s impressive book, which treats the three best known, but very different, Mexican film directors, is well aware of the ironies in its (and their) project. The monograph is published in a series called “Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers.” Yet, as Shaw writes in her introduction, none of her subjects have directed a film in Mexico since 2001 (1). And if they have “strategically claimed a collective Mexican identity” (2), they no longer view Mexican cinema in opposition to the US, but have rather created a “symbiotic” relationship between the two. Further contradictions, explored throughout the lengthy book, arise: the threesome’s rare combination of commercial success and critical praise; their appeal to genre movies, which problematizes the identification of their mode of auteurism with art film; the ambiguous understanding of “independent” cinema in this production context; and a transnational focus which embraces not just Mexico and the US but also Europe (with del Toro and Iñárritu shooting in Spain and Cuarón in the UK). Theoretically Shaw focuses here on what she calls “the politics of the transnational,” asking where the directors position themselves through their films and interrogating the relationship (or lack of it) between their explicit statements on the subject and the commercial demands of each project (12).

The focus on the topics of independent cinema and transnational border-crossing coincide with another recent book, Misha MacLaird’s Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry. Unlike MacLaird, who treats a wide range of titles, however, Shaw focuses all but one of her nine chapters (three for each filmmaker) on a single film. Thus del Toro’s much studied Cronos “questions the fixity of borders while also making a political statement on US-Mexican relations” (20); Hellboy II (curiously, del Toro’s most “autobiographical” film) is examined for its authorial para-text and reception (enterprisingly, the author started a thread on a fan forum to gain evidence) (47); and El laberinto del fauno is held to be emblematic of how del Toro “the alchemist” combines “discrete modes” or genres to make a “specialized film” rather than an “art movie” (68). Iñárritu is examined for his fraught “independent” status. Amores perros is said to borrow from both US models and global patterns, while still establishing “signature traits” (96). 21 Grams, however, shot in Memphis with a mainly Mexican crew, is read as “an example of American independent filmmaking,” even as Shaw points to “the inability of simplistic categories of national cinema to adequately explain shifting cinematic landscapes” (115). Babel is interpreted rather as an example of the fraught category of “world cinema,” which exploits a “tourist gaze” (141). As Shaw recognizes, Cuarón’s is the most discontinuous development. Sólo con tu pareja is read within a strictly Mexican context as “a shift to more audience-friendly productions by serious filmmakers,” which fails to strike a chord with foreign viewers (159); Y tu mamá también as a bid for “authorial distinction” through such techniques as documentary camerawork and the long take (178); and Children of Men as a case study for “the limits of radicalism in a commercial film text” (2002) (here the analysis of commentaries on the film by Slavoj Žižek and Naomi Klein is intriguing). A conclusion notes that the success of the “amigos” (otherwise known in Mexico as “the three musketeers” or even “the Holy Trinity”), nominated simultaneously for Oscars in 2007, requires “new ways of theorizing cultural power relationships between the USA and Mexico” (229).

The merits of this book are clear. Shaw (like MacLaird) devotes considerable space to teasing out the complex industrial factors (in production, distribution and exhibition) which enable films to exist and filmmakers to prosper. Indeed she identifies previously unknown key recurring personnel in Focus Features (a “mini-major” of Universal Studios) in this context (227...