Mex-Ciné: Mexican Filmmaking, Production, and Consumption in the Twenty-first Century

Bubblegums That Pop; Refritos That Go "Ah"

121 Bubblegums That Pop; Refritos That Go “Ah” C Perhaps surprisingly, the filmic sincerity and relevance informing some made-for-teens bubblegum films and adult-oriented refritos stand in sharp contrast to the buena onda alternative films of Cuarón and González Iñárritu. There are bubblegum and refrito films that renovate our perceptions, emotions , and cognitions related to the world. In several of such films, we see a strong presence of the will to style of directors who produce both form and content that can open our eyes,ears,thoughts,and feelings to something new. They exhibit refreshing novelty and provide clear cases of aesthetic success in Mexican filmmaking. Bubblegums . . . Being and the World Amar te duele The story of Amar te duele/Loving You Hurts (2002), takes place in our present day, in an area located on the outskirts of Mexico City that was built essentially in the last twenty years as a sort of gated community for the upper crust of the Mexican bourgeoisie, surrounded by lower-middle-class neighborhoods and, farther away, shantytowns. The wealthy people who inhabit this area, called Santa Fe, live behind high walls and are protected twenty-four hours a day,seven days a week,by armed bodyguards.This,of course,is part of our contemporary form of barbarism,a rebirth of the fortresses of the Middle Ages and seclusion of the very rich in the new ghettos. Fernando Sariñana’s film shows certain aspects of this phenomenon. Sariñana gives us a tragedy, though not a Shakespearean one of starcrossed lovers; instead, he offers us a present-day tragedy of young people 122 • Mex-Ciné who are not allowed to be young, that is, inquisitive, questioning, rebellious, exhilarated, hungry to know everything about themselves and the world they inhabit, and, most fundamentally, optimistic. All the protagonists are teenagers . One is Ulises (Luis Fernando Peña), an aspiring artist whose work in progress is a representation of his dream of a better world,which he paints on a street wall and in the pages of a comic book he is drawing. The other protagonist is Renata (Martha Higareda), the wide-eyed, curious , adventurous elder daughter of a wealthy couple, capable of empathy toward people she is only beginning to know and having an affectionate attitude toward her sister, Mariana, her parents, and her schoolmates. Mariana (Ximena Sariñana) is younger but belongs to that growing category of people who are not just cynical but mentally and emotionally rotten at the core long before they have left their youth. She is also an alcoholic, and her behavior is rigidly dictated by all the prejudices and nearsightedness of the most retrograde members of her class. Devoid of empathy and imagination,Mariana does not care to know anything about herself, others, or the world at large. But the society in which she lives has little room for people like Renata, and so it is the young Mariana (old before her time) who will live and the promising older Renata (young at heart) who will die. Fig. 29. Amar te duele: Renata’s house in Santa Fe Bubblegums That Pop • 123 La hija del caníbal Antonio Serrano’s use of voice-over narration as a central ingredient in La hija del caníbal/Lucía Lucía / The Daughter of Canibal (2003) allows the film to perform some extraordinary metaphysical acrobatics. Throughout the whole picture, the story is told completely in the realist mode. The style presented makes viewers feel that they are perceiving what is really happening within the storyworld. Simultaneously and subtly, however, Serrano introduces clues that lead viewers to start doubting the truthfulness or reliability of the story and,therefore ,of what they perceive on the screen.By the end of the film,audiences are entirely justified in reading the narrative as totally unreliable. Viewers come to doubt that the narrator-protagonist really is what they have encountered her to be. In much of the film, Lucía (Celia Roth) seems to be much as her voiceover narration and the diegetic events suggest her to be: a writer in her late thirties/early forties who is experiencing a crisis in her life. This much is reliable, but it differs markedly from the image of Lucía in a photograph presented at the film’s close, although this image also depicts, in a way that matches the rest of...