However, my sister and I grew up in Virginia for seven years, where we were very disconnected from our Mexican heritage. It wasn't a choice by our mom not to teach us, but rather because there was no Mexican community there for us to join. We didn't learn Spanish, didn't grow up with any sort of Mexican popular culture, and didn't know anything about Mexican holidays. When we moved back to California, the Mexican population of Virginia dropped exponentially.
We have been back here for well over a decade now and I have become conversationally fluent in Spanish, but the disconnect from Mexican culture has been harder to repair.
I have been successful to a small degree, though, by doing what works for me. Instead of celebrating el Dia de los Santos Reyes or dancing corridos, I've reconnected in ways that make more sense to who I am as a person. One is by studying Latin American history. Another has been through Mexican film. In modern Mexican cinema, three names stand out above the rest.
They are often called the "Three Amigos of Mexican cinema": Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Guillermo del Toro. These three directors have been responsible for some of the best films to come out of Mexico since the new millennium, and indeed some of the best films the entire world has seen since then. The three of them are good friends in real life and help each other out with their projects from time to time. Here I will name my favorite film from each of them, and more importantly explain why I chose each of these films.
*for anyone who hasn't seen the term "Latin@" before, the "@" is there instead of an "o" or "a" so as to be more gender inclusive
Alejandro González Iñárritu: Biutiful
This film follows Javier Bardem as Uxbal, a divorced father in Spain who manages both a group of undocumented Chinese workers who manufacture knock-off designer products and undocumented African street vendors who sell these items. Near the beginning of the movie, he is diagnosed with prostate cancer and has to figure out what to do with his kids before he passes, while also trying to keep his affairs in order for as long as he can despite all the stress and chaos. When this movie was first released, a lot of critics praised Bardem's performance but didn't care for the film overall. They felt it was too dismal, not much more than a nihilist portrait of suffering.
González Iñárritu took issue with that. He pointed out that, while it follows a person at the end of their life, "it's an homage to life. It's a life that you care about. It's an expression of a simple man in a very complex situation, where a man under the toughest circumstances ever is able to find love, to find forgiveness, to find compassion, to understand the meaning of his own life, and how people feel about him. And that's what I consider to be uplifting, it's an homage to a life that was lived with dignity." This vision of what he was going for matches up with how I observed the film when I saw it.
Uxbal goes through a lot in the movie and it certainly is an emotionally draining experience, but part of what makes it emotionally draining is the fact you grow to care about him and his kids. This is done through scenes of joy that are incredibly sparse throughout the movie, but incredibly rewarding. These few happy scenes feel like a well-earned breath of fresh air that make the despair worth it. They give life to the characters, especially Xubal and his older child Ana. Ana is a kind hearted girl who smiles as much as she can given the bitter circumstances handed to her by life, and she tries to hold onto this warmth even when things are crumbling right in front of her. If you don't grow attached to her and find yourself genuinely concerned about what will happen to her by the end of the movie, you are dead inside.
The other aspect of this movie that blew me away was how human and complex all of the others involved in the tragic counterfeit operation web were. Usually in a movie about a person trying to make the best of a bad situation in life, everyone else in the movie is a caricature of greed, apathy, foolishness, or straight up malice. Here, everyone else clearly seemed similar to Uxbal- real human beings caught in fucked up circumstances.
One great segment that illustrates this involves the undocumented African immigrants selling the phony products. In the beginning Uxbal goes off on them for selling the goods in the public squares with lots of foot traffic, since there is an abundance of cops in the area. He tells them they should be selling them in the lower sections of town, in more secluded spots. Later on, they end up going back to some of the large public squares to sell the merchandise again. The cops spot them and a huge raid ensues.
Afterward, Uxbal confronts one of them about it. Normally, this is the part where the group would be portrayed as reckless idiots who should've just listened to directions. Not here, though. The person instead responds by telling Uxbal that they never make enough money when they sell in the areas that are less crowded and lower income. Sure, they may get caught when they go to the more crowded, upscale places- but if they sell away from there, they are guaranteed to not make enough money to feed their families. What would you do in that situation?
Having watched some of his other movies, like Amores Perros and Babel, I can tell González Iñárritu and I have one thing in common: we both think Gael García Bernal is a pretty cool guy and we'd like to hangout with him or whatever. But also, we both clearly think about death a lot. Not in the sense that we hate life or like the idea of death, but in the sense that the idea we will die someday is something that is constantly at the back of our minds. González Iñárritu responded to that by making a movie that, while often full of despair, offers the portrait of a person who spends their last days with as much dignity and good intentions as possible given his situation.
Alfonso Cuarón: Gravity
When this first movie was announced, I had zero interest in seeing it. And I don't mean zero degrees Fahrenheit disinterest- I mean zero degrees Kelvin disinterest. Another disaster movie about things going wrong, but this time in space? I'm pretty sure if you assembled a team of linguists and translators, they'd tell you that this movie premise is a culturally universal way to tell people around the world to go fuck themselves.
When the movie started getting positive buzz from the film community and good reviews from critics, my interest was piqued. Eventually, after a couple weeks and enough good reviews from friends whose opinions on movies tend to sync up with mine, I went to go see it and was glad I did. I was blown away in a way I hadn't been in a long time at the movies: I was actually in awe.
The movie did a good job of making me feel the scope and immensity of space. The cinematography and editing are top notch, done in a way that make you feel the quiet majesty of the cosmos. Normally in movies set in space, there is a fast paced approach to the presentation, designed to make it feel exciting. It is a fun approach and there is nothing wrong with it, but I personally like the way it was presented here better. The shots are wide, slow, and panning. Even when the plot would get tense, the cinematography occasionally calmly pans out to remind us how insignificant the protagonist is in the grand scheme of things.
Aside from the technical aspects, the way this movie plays helped push this cosmic grandeur along, too. This wasn't a universe bent on the destruction of Sandra Bullock's character, Doctor Ryan Stone. Rather, it is a vast universe that doesn't care about her one way or the other. This is also illustrated when the doctor tells the story of how her child died. It wasn't some brutal murder or tragic suicide; her young daughter simply slipped, fell on the playground, and died. That's all there was to it.
Of course, if this movie were only about how insignificant we are in the universe, then we wouldn't get much out of it we couldn't already get in those thoughtful nights staring up at the ceiling before falling asleep. Grounding this movie is Dr Stone's own personal story. This film is as intimate as it is vast; that's what helps make it great. At the center of everything, the main character has to deal with her own struggle for survival in a harsh, cold universe. She also has to find the drive to keep pushing through it- there is a scene where she almost gives up on her mission to come out of the disaster alive that is quite emotionally disarming. The way she finds her way back leaves a bit to be desired in my opinion, but everything up to that point is very poignant and fantastically executed.
The film also does a good job of making a statement about the human condition by making parallels between the space stations. For instance, each space station has a little miniature religious figure or symbol on their dashboards. To me, these represent the idea that all people around the world try both to assign a grand meaning to their lives and find answers to life's biggest questions. Its one of the crucial ways we cope with our existence. The specifics in how we search and what answers we come up with may be different, but our quest for meaning and answers is universal. This movie, then, doesn't just make you feel for Dr Stone's quest for survival and meaning, but does so in a way that can make you think about your own as well. That's what a great movie has the power to do.
Guillermo del Toro: Pan's Labyrinth
While each of these directors have multiple movies I am a fan of, del Toro gave me the biggest trouble in trying to choose my favorite. It took me a while to choose between Pacific Rim and this movie because I enjoyed them in very different ways. The former was a critically underrated movie that had quality characterization, an intricately crafted world, and a lot of heart. The film also had a woman of color in a leading role (how sad is it that this is so rare it warrants being mentioned?). I think that if the movie had just given proper emotional weight to the deaths that occurred, it might have been on here instead.
Pan's Labyrinth is a very different film from Pacific Rim in almost every way, except for the fact they both use fictional fantasy creatures of del Toro's own design (with plenty of outside inspiration, of course). In this movie, they are used ambiguously. You never quite know if they are really there, or if the child is using her imagination as a coping mechanism to help deal with all the horrors she is experiencing. In Pacific Rim, on the other hand, the fictional monsters represented, uhh... global warming? And how we can solve it with giant robot punches? Aw yeah.
The film takes place in Spain after the Spanish Civil War that lasted from 1936 to 1939. It follows the young girl Ofelia, whose pregnant mother Carmen has recently married a captain in the fascist Franco military. The movie has three different wavelengths, if you will: Ofelia struggling against her awful new stepfather, Ofelia going on a series of adventures given to her by a faun that she was led to by a fairy, and a bigger plot about political resistance against the fascist Franco government by their housekeeper Mercedes and several other characters. This is a lot to balance and one movie, but del Toro manages to pull it off.
What is remarkable is that del Toro not only pulls off this ambitious balance, but he synthesizes them together well, too. These three different aspects of the movie are interconnected, and that's what makes them work so well. As mentioned above, you are never completely sure if the mythical creatures are real or a product of Ofelia's imagination. No one other than Ofelia sees the creatures or any of the magic that is supposedly going on. There is a confrontation between her and her stepfather involving her pregnant mom and a mandrake root that makes you wonder if the creatures and their magic are real, but there is no way to be certain.
Those two elements are also woven into the greater story about resistance against Franco fascism as well. Certain plot events push forward events in Ofelia's own personal life, and vice versa. This especially becomes true towards the end of the movie, though I won't spoil anything. Suffice it to say, things escalate severely and, as you can probably imagine, not everyone makes it out alive.
This movie has often been called an adult fairy tale, and I can't think of a better way to describe it. While this film might not try to tackle themes as ambitious as dignity in the face of death or trying to find meaning despite our insignificance in the cosmic sense, it creates an intricate, skillfully woven plot, immersive world, great use of tension, and contains quite a few heart felt moments. In his Great Movies review for the film Spirited Away, Roger Ebert said that "movies made for everybody are really made for nobody in particular", and that "movies about specific characters in a detailed world are spellbinding because they make no attempt to cater to us; they are defiantly, triumphantly, themselves." There are few films that are as spell-binding and uniquely itself as Pan's Labyrinth.
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