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

It's a Wrap

138 It’s a Wrap C Making, experiencing, interpreting, and judging twenty-first-century Mexican films requires us to use our perceptual, emotive, and cognitive faculties. As we have seen, these capacities lead to different artistic products. In this way Mexican films can be seen as a dialect of a planetary cinema. We can come to these conclusions because of an approach that carefully considers the composition of the Mexican film blueprint, as well as how it is made and consumed in time (history) and place (region), all this interfaced with questions of silver-screen backdrops, genres, trends, productions, distributions , and exhibitions. At this point, I would like to reiterate several salient points. First, Mexican filmmakers create blueprints or recipes for filmgoers to follow.There are many ingredients in the recipes; some of the more important include screenplay, cameras and lenses, type of shot, editing, music, mise-ensc ène, casting, costumes, and score, among others that I touch on in detail at the beginning of this book. Second, the filmmaking ingredients work together to trigger emotions in the audience.When the ingredients do not cohere, viewers often stop investing in the story either emotionally or cognitively. Such a disconnection may occur when, say, a twenty-four-year-old actress plays the part of a teen in González Iñárritu’s Babel or a misguided body movement is used to indicate the hard-laboring class in Cuarón’s Rudo y Cursi. If these elements are mixed well and with a strong sense of the way the parts add up to a whole, then a Mex-ciné film can become something spectacular. In making Sin nombre, for example, Fukunaga did his homework to be sure that all the parts cohere . First, he spent two years traveling the trains that migrants ride across Mexico; he then spent time writing and rewriting the screenplay with members of the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, an extremely violent and dangerous It's a Wrap • 139 transnational gang whose organized criminal networks involving drugs and prostitution extend from the United States into Central America. Filmmakers such as Fukunaga make their films by testing their knowledge of reality against reality itself to create stories that work logically, sidestep sentimentality, and can move an audience powerfully. Fukunaga, for example , built his sturdy blueprint out of the harsh reality of migration across Central America and through Mexico, where people like Sayra and her family are mugged, raped, and killed by MS-13 and la Migra. And he adds to this experience his imagination, style, and skill as a director, orchestrating DPs, composers, sound designers, editors (in this case Luis Carballar and Craig McKay), casting directors, and costume designers, among many others, in his transformation of this all too common tragic story into a compelling Mexcin é film. All this effort and craft allowed Fukunaga to create one of the first films to depict the harsh reality of forced migration from Central and South American countries into and across southern Mexico’s borders, littered with predatory gangs and corrupt immigration officers; he created a film that powerfully portrays the impossible struggle young people face in developing “healthy” emotional responses. Fukunaga understands his trade well and knows how to use all the elements of filmmaking to transform this story into a beautifully shaped artistic creation. Conversely,when a Mex-ciné film fails to work (as Babel does),the failure quite likely arises because the director ignored connections between neurological emotion and reason systems. Noticeable incoherence interferes with the neurophysiological systems subtending emotional responses, yielding a less than captivating viewing experience.We finish watching a film like Babel and wonder why we wasted over two hours of our lives. Third, as was already explained in the previous discussions of Amar te duele , De la calle, and La zona, without emotions there is no empathy, and without empathy there is no compass for acting positively or destructively toward others. Furthermore, only directors who possess a well-developed capacity to elicit emotional, empathetic, and ethical assessments in viewers can make films that, as does Francisco Vargas’s El violín, trigger a series of contradictory responses in the audience: the captain is despicable, but we understand how his limited choices in life as a peasant led to his later choices and the destruction of his empathic system. Vargas’s creation of a recipe filled with complex emotions and tensions makes the difference that is the difference between El violín and Jorge Colón...