Mock Classicism: Latin American Film Comedy, 1930–1960 by Nilo Couret (review)

Comedy is a genre often said not to travel well. Undeterred, Nilo Couret declares in the opening pages of Mock Classicism, "This book not only discusses where comedy is from but also what it says and what it does."¹ Couret's book addresses the question of how extremely popular, commercially successful films negotiate local and global cultural influences. His central thesis is that such films function as responses to modernization from the periphery. As the author writes, "Mock Classicism addresses the impasse in film studies regarding how to speak about local cultural practice in nonessentialist terms and avoids producing world cinema either as defensive authentic cultural expression or as derivative of foreign (i.e., Hollywood) models."² The book's title plays on both the verb and the adjectival form of the word "mock," and its contents explore how Latin American comedies poke fun at classical Hollywood and produce a mock-classical cinema particular to their own geographical context. Couret makes an important, scholarly addition to the bibliography on Latin American popular cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s, and film comedy more broadly, by arguing that Latin American film comedies produce a classical mode of spectatorship that differs from the classicism figured in Hollywood. As the author observes: "Comedy proves difficult to reconcile with the classical precisely because of its relation to the texture of experience. If comedy functions as a limit case in these classical Hollywood debates, then perhaps Latin American comedy can offer a similar heuristic value in delineating a mode of address particular to Latin American cinema."³

Each of the chapters in Mock Classicism combines close reading of a selection of films, empirical research, film theory, and Latin American studies. The range of film theorists whose ideas inform but are also interrogated in Couret's work is impressive. Drawing from the ideas of Miriam Hansen, for example, he argues that "the inability of comedy to travel well complicates the circulatory dynamics of the vernacular in vernacular modernism and problematizes its transnational and comparative frame."⁴ The author equally engages with Latin Americanist debates on transculturation and posthegemony, arguing for a "politics of spectatorship that makes the experience of modernity sensuously graspable," and with the recent uptake of affect theory in Latin American film studies.⁵ In dialogue with Laura Podalsky, Couret traces the epistemological crisis she identifies in the contemporary moment to early cinema in the region, arguing that "comedies' parodic textuality, intermedial production, variable circulation in space, and specific reception in and across time offer possible sites of disjunction within an apparatus considered paradigmatically to articulate the nation-state."⁶

Challenging the traditional approach to Latin American film history, this book rejects the constraints of "nationness" and avoids using genre theory or a chronological approach, centering instead on the formal and narrative operations of film comedies from various Latin American countries and their circulation within and between diverse national contexts.⁷ Unsurprisingly, it nevertheless explores comedic figures and tropes that are conventionally aligned with specific nations, not least the Mexican star Mario "Cantinflas" Moreno, the focus of the opening chapter, which revisits his popular comedies from the golden age of Mexican cinema. This chapter challenges the interpretation of Cantinflas's films as escapist and ideologically suspect, arguing instead that they "represent peripheral spaces of subversive difference that in their cultural and historical specificity cannot be easily co-opted by a cultural-imperialist center."⁸ Analyzing in detail Cantinflas's first successful film, Ahí está el detalle (You're Missing the Point; Juan Bustillo Oro, 1940), Couret explores the star's characteristic linguistic play and the film's textual instabilities. This consummate example of popular film analysis demonstrates convincingly how this comedian's appeal relied on the avoidance of intelligibility and how "this film comedy more broadly complicates the denotative nature of classical film language and frustrates narrative-cognitive approaches to spectatorship."⁹ (The detailed analysis...