Wednesday 11 December 2013


As the cinema-goers emerged, blinking and disorientated into the light, the overwhelming murmur was one of approval.
Handing back their plastic 3D glasses, they were the latest audience in Mexico City to enjoy the cinematic assault on the senses that is Gravity.
But as well as approval, there was also a certain pride among viewers here that this extraordinary piece of filmmaking - tipped for an Academy Award and prompting comparisons with legendary US film director Stanley Kubrick - was directed by a Mexican, Alfonso Cuaron.
"I'd put Gravity up there with the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema," gushed audience member Maria Esther Dominguez referring to the 1930s, 40s and 50s when Mexican films were considered among the best in the world.
Hyperbole aside, 2013 has been a hugely successful year for Mexican cinema.
For the second year running, the Best Director prize at the Cannes film festival went to another Mexican, Amat Escalante, for Heli, a powerful drama set in a drug war-ravaged region of rural Mexico.
Meanwhile, Mexican comedies Nosotros Los Nobles and Instructions Not Included have successively broken domestic box office records.
 has been on the crest of a wave of success for over a decade now. And it is still thriving despite the challenges of a global recession and fierce competition for international funding.
What, then, is its secret?
"First and foremost, there has always been great, great talent in Mexico," says Daniela Michel, director of the 11th Morelia Film Festival held last month in the state capital of Michoacan.
"The institutions and film schools here work very well and they have supported interesting projects. There is a vibrancy and a great energy at the moment."
In particular, events such as the pop-up cinema nights in Mexico City called Ambulante have given a platform for young filmmakers to show their material on the big screen.
But beyond mere talent or institutional support, which is present in many other Latin American and European genres of film, there is something about the distinctly Mexican identity of the films being produced which seems to appeal to audiences.
The new boom started, Ms Michel believes, around the time of Amores Perros, a gritty urban movie made in 2000 by Mexican director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, which helped put Mexican cinema back on international screens after decades in the relative wilderness.





The fantastical meets the political inPan's Labyrinth

Written and directed by Guillermo del ToroPan's Labyrinth is something alchemical. To an astonishing degree, the 42-year-old Mexican filmmaker best known for his contribution to theBlade and Hellboy franchises has transformed the horror of mid-20th-century European history into a boldly fanciful example of what surrealists would call le merveilleux.
Literally and figuratively marvelous, a rich, daring mix of fantasy and politics, Pan's Labyrinthbegins with a "once upon a time" and then becomes utterly specific. Spain 1944: The civil war is over, and Franco's Falangists have long since subjugated the country. The Maquis, last remnants of Republican resistance, are fighting a rearguard action in the forested northern hills. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her ailing, pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil) have been relocated there, to a remote military base commanded by her new stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi López), a cold brutal autocrat.
Pan's Labyrinth itself may be too cruel and bloody for children, although kids would surely appreciate its exquisite yuckiness. (Del Toro can be as textural as David Cronenberg.) But this R-rated poetic fable is nonetheless set in a child's archaic reality, a magic world of ancient ruins and "fairy" insects. A persistent dragonfly (perhaps the manifestation of her own incipient madness) guides Ofelia from her bedroom to the center of an overgrown garden maze. There in the darkness she encounters the horned and wall-eyed faun. This mossy, capricious creature is an altogether different type than the gentle little Narnian faun who befriends the young heroine in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—a movie that del Toro turned down, apparently for religious reasons. (He told Sight and Sound that he "wasn't interested in the lion resurrecting.")
The faun persuades Ofelia that she is an orphaned princess and assigns the gravely self-contained child a series of magical tasks; her adventures in the underworld are then intercut with the guerilla war in the woods. Del Toro has an unusual capacity to keep the narrative moving on two levels. Secrets abound. Everyone has a mission. The commander's housekeeper, formidable, fearless Mercedes (the movie's secret star, Maribel Verdú, best known as the older woman in Y Tu Mamá También) is aiding the insurgents—as is the local doctor. From Ofelia's perspective, there are all sorts of monsters, human and otherwise. The latter range from the living mandrake root the child uses to forestall her mother's miscarriage, to the blind, devouring Pale Man (played, like the faun, by the proteanDoug Jones). The human monster is, of course, the faun's counterpart: the murderous Vidal.
Del Toro has mixed the political and the supernatural before. Another tale of an abandoned child in the Spanish Civil War, The Devil's Backbone (2001) was a discomfiting, albeit ambitious, mix of gothic thriller, boy's adventure story, and political allegory—visually coherent if thematically cacophonous. Pan's Labyrinth, by contrast, is not just strongly imagined but superbly integrated and marvelously fluid. It's also highly resonant. Just as the images in Ofelia's magical book (illustrated by the filmmaker himself) spread like Rorschach blots across the pages, all manner of conflicts and parallels churn below the film's narrative.
That surface is voluptuously detailed. The lighting is molded; the chiaroscuro is almost cloying. Javier Navarrete's score is rhapsodic. The totality of del Toro's design seems comparable to Tim Burton's (and del Toro seems equally taken with the dark, gnarly work of the early 20th century English illustrator Arthur Rackham). But unlike Burton—or his imperial cuteness Steven Spielberg—del Toro is immune to whimsy. There's certainly a measure of pathos to the movie's ending but there's nothing saccharine about Ofelia's struggle with evil.
Magic realism leavened with moral seriousness, Pan's Labyrinth belongs with a handful of classic movie fantasies: Cocteau's OrphéeCharles Laughton's The Night of the HunterNeil Jordan's The Company of Wolves. Its key precursor, however, may be the greatest of Franco-era Spanish movies, Víctor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive. Although utterly different types of filmmaking, each of these is the story of a brave little girl, lost in a world of make-believe—at once an intuitive antifascist and the innocent victim of a monstrous system.