Mobility and Modernity in María Novaro's Sin dejar huella

The premiere of Sin dejar huella/Without a Trace (María Novaro, MX, 2000), which charts the journey of two women from the U.S.–Mexico border south to Cancún, provoked immediate comparisons between the Mexican director's road film and British filmmaker Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (US, 1991). Notwithstanding the debate following its own release, Scott's feature was credited with offering a pioneering "[re]consideration of Hollywood's road rebel history from a feminine perspective."¹ Novaro lamented the correlations made between the two films, however:

Los gringos tienen la manía de catalogar una película en función de otra yanqui. En mi medio laboral uno está hasta la coronilla de eso. Es como una cruz a cargar [. . .] Parece que no se puede filmar una película de carretera con dos protagonistas femeninas, porque ya existe Thelma and Louise.²

[The Americans have an obsession with classifying one film in comparison with another Yankee one. In my working environment, we're fed up to the back teeth with that. It's like a cross to bear [. . .] It seems that you can't film a road movie with two female protagonists, because Thelma and Louise already exists.]

Here the Mexican director bluntly articulates a long-standing antipathy toward Hollywood in the Latin American cinema, which has always competed in unequal terms with a dominant high-tech model that has not only "universalized a 'correct' way of filming [but also] a 'correct' way of seeing."³ That historical asymmetry was exacerbated in Mexico's case following its entry into NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994. Subsequently, and unlike Canada (another of three "partner" countries to enter into the agreement), Mexico became increasingly unable to protect its film industry from the onslaught of Hollywood, particularly in the areas of distribution and exhibition, and, between 1995 and 1997, film production slumped to an all-time low there since the 1930s. In this regard, Novaro's eminently justifiable regret about the comparison between her film and Thelma and Louise is about much more than the films' formal or thematic properties: indeed, in at least one crucial respect, her own road movie attests to the vicissitudes of that relationship between the center and a "peripheral" country "moving in the shadow cast by uneven development."⁴ Despite garnering a number of awards at film festivals including Guadalajara and Sun-dance, Sin dejar huella showed for barely two weeks in Mexico City cinemas before disappearing without a trace.⁵ Although timing may have played a part in this debacle—the film was released during the Easter holiday period—the short-lived showing of Novaro's fourth full-length feature throws into relief the difficulties facing a cinema such as Mexico's when competing in a market dominated by Hollywood. This is a subject on which Néstor García Canclini has written extensively, pointing out that globalization, in respect of which NAFTA was a critical step for Mexico, is not simply a process of unification but also fundamentally a "segregating and dispersing mechanism."⁶ It is precisely what García Canclini calls the double agenda of globalization, therefore, that Novaro's film epitomizes in material terms but also, more crucially for the purposes of this essay, thematizes in a suggestive if by no means straightforward fashion.

If Novaro's remarks resound with the legacy of cultural dependency, in other respects, however, their Manichean tenor obscures a number of other issues that also merit attention here. The comparison between Novaro's and Scott's films is not only inescapable, especially given that at issue here is the road movie, a genre that is inexorably transcultural, but it is in fact indispensable because of the peripatetic nature of cinema itself, an apparatus of moving pictures that perpetuates, to varying degrees of success and with a myriad of motivations, a high degree of generic intertextuality.⁷ Indeed, it is worth noting that this is not necessarily Novaro's first engagement with this specific cinematic intertext: her previous film, El jardín del Edén/The...