After the breakthrough of Amores Perros, what's next for Mexican Cinema? - Mexico City Journal - Industry Overview

Film Comment, July-August, 2001 by Leonardo Garcia Tsao

By contrast, Marysa Sistach's Violet Perfume (Perfume de violeta) confronts the problem of rape through the moving friendship between two lower-class teenage girls who develop the kind of deep bond that can only come from camaraderie and non-sexual infatuation. After one of them is raped, her shameful silence breaks their mutual trust with tragic results. Shooting in handheld Super 16mm, blown up to 35, Sistach goes for a documentary directness that avoids any trace of sensationalism: the rape scene is a model of restraint. She presents it as one more everyday violent occurrence in the big city. The plot feels as though it's actually happening as it unfolds and the final twists never seem like melodramatic contrivances.

Sistach is one of a number of women filmmakers who have staked out territory in an industry that remained male-dominated well into the Eighties. The 21st Century has begun with films by Marcela Arteaga (Memories/Recuerdos), Marcela Fernandez Violante (Snakeskin/Piel de vibora), Eva Lopez Sanchez (Francisca), Maria Novaro (Without a Trace/ Sin dejar huella), Dana Rotberg (Otilia Rauda) and Guita Schyfter (The Faces of the Moon/Las caras de la luna). Not bad for the country that put the "his" in machismo.

As a new generation of filmmakers is busy establishing itself, many of the veteran directors I mentioned in the 1985 article remain active. At the time, Arturo Ripstein was coming out of the worst slump of his career. That same year he hooked up with gifted screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego, and made In the Realm of Fortune (El imperio de la fortuna), starting a streak of inspired films: ten distinctly personal works, sordid stories of doomed love and memorable losers set in Ripstein's hermetic world of dark shadows and mirroring surfaces. His two latest offerings, Such Is Life (Asi es la vida, 00) and The Ruination of Men (La perdicion de los hombres, 00), were shot on digital video. Besides its economic advantage, the new technology allowed the director to reinvent his style in a bolder, even playful manner. Such Is Life is an inventive rethinking of the Medea myth updated to a rundown Mexican neighborhood, while The Ruination of Men switches genres and goes for black comedy with absurdist overtones.

As the saying goes, Ripstein is a prophet without honor in his own land. With the exception of his 1999 No One Writes to the Colonel, which had the literary prestige of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's source novel to coast on, none of Ripstein's other films have done any business in Mexico (his 1991 film Woman of the Port has still yet to be released). And critical response to his work is much more enthusiastic in Europe and South America; Mexican critics tend to be hostile toward Ripstein's films, either misreading his intentions or oozing bad will. (Amores perros also received most of its negative reviews in its own country, resulting from the strain of self hatred running through the Mexican press.)

Another figure in the Mexican cinema old guard, Felipe Cazals, came out of retirement last year to direct His Most Serene Highness (Su Alteza Serenisima), a gloomy account of the final days of General Santa Anna, best known as the president who lost half of Mexico's territory to the U.S. in 1847. Shot with the masterful sense of space that is Cazals' trademark, the film's incisive depiction of a decaying form of power that refuses to acknowledge its own end is particularly relevant in light of Mexico's current political events. Jaime Humberto Hermosillo's recent, sporadic output has been disappointing: Esmeralda Comes by Night (De noche vienes Esmeralda, 96), a contrived comedy about a passionate woman who expresses her freedom through polyandry, and his latest effort, Written on the Body of Night (Escrito en el cuerpo de la noche), an extremely theatrical melodrama about a wannabe filmmaker's coming of age.