October 2005

Gael García Bernal will talk about his career to date on 30 October 2005 – 14:00 at the National Film Theatre, London

Rejection, religion and revenge make a powerful combination when Mexican-American Elvis Valderez arrives in town looking for the father he never knew at the start of The King.

Gael Garcia Bernal in The King

In his first major English-language screen role, Bernal (working with British director James Marsh) brings a plausibility to a complex role.

But his father (William Hurt) has moved on and doesn’t want a relationship.

Now a ‘born again’ Pastor at the local Baptist church, he can’t - or won’t - face the results of his actions twenty-one years previously.

Rather than embrace his firstborn, his reaction is to warn him off - and to stay away from his half brother and sister, the children from the Pastor’s marriage to Laura Harring’s perceptive mother.

But while Elvis - who has just been honorably discharged form the US Navy – may have been the very model of a modern sailor (he still practises his drill alone in his motel room and shows a frighteningly impressive ability to ‘tidy up’), he nevertheless pursues an ungentlemanly, incestuous relationship with his sister who has no idea that the newcomer is already so closely linked to her.

Garcia Bernal is a study in how good intentions can metamorphose into something altogether much more disturbing.

As he becomes gradually more involved with Malerie (Pell James) it is hard not to think ‘surely this has to stop somewhere?’ but the chain of events sparked by one man’s decision has been set in motion.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Mexican writer/director Carlos Reygadas’ new film Batalla En El Cielo (Battle in Heaven) opens this week…and it isn’t for the faint hearted.

Set in the same contemporary Mexico City as Amores Perros, Reygadas uses novice actors to tell the story of Carlos, a driver for a high-ranking military officer, and his wife who kidnap a baby from a neighbour.

The child dies and Carlos confesses to his boss’ daughter (played by Anapola Mushkadiz) who works as a prostitute from a discreet ’boutique’ in one of Mexico City’s most expensive neighbourhoods.

Reygadas’ film is a visceral portrayal of a man in crisis. As we see the city around him through his eyes - Reygadas’ huge, lingering panoramas take in all the rooftops and scenes that busy city-dwellers ignore or take for granted - we see the painfully slow internal collapse of a man whose motives remain unclear.

The graphic sex scenes at the start of the film may disturb many people - it caused even more of a stir when Reygadas cut them when the film was shown at the Morelia International Film Festival recently “just to piss people off”, he told Mexicanwave - but the brutally harsh realities of life in the megalopolis - at least as Reygadas sees it - linger long after the credits roll.

* * * * *

And finally…

Amat Escalante may not be quite so well known as Reygadas but Escalante, who worked as Reygadas’ assistant director on Battalla En El Cielo is hoping that his own feature, Sangre, will also go down well with Mexican film fans.

Sangre, the story of an ordinary man with a sexually demanding wife, will also show at the London Film Festival on Wednesday 2 November at 16.15 and Thursday 3 November at 18.30.

EM

Screenings of The King will be at the Odeon West End, Leicester Square, London on 28 October at 15.30 and 29 October at 18.00.

Battle in Heaven…opens at the Curzon Soho, London on 28 October. 

The 33rd Festival Cervantino’s final weekend here in Guanajuato was a blowout across the board.

While bar and cantina owners cowered in the back of their establishments as the serious drinkers moved in Saturday night, and hard-core punk and heavy metal headbangers took over the normally bucolic Plaza Baratillo until deep in the night, in the better-behaved venues it was a spectacular finale of theatre and concert and dance performances from Italy, Japan, Spain, Quebec, the USA, Germany, Bulgaria, Austria, Poland and Chile in the city’s theatres, churches and concert halls.

Sunday morning broke warm and quiet. Departing festivalgoers wended their way among a few desultory leftover drunks flopped in the sunlit plazas while church bells summoned those inclined to early Mass.

Already the festival is being judged a huge success, having staged 194 performances, 368 artistic functions in all – workshops, conferences, art exhibits, and childrens’ events.

In a ceremony on Saturday a special award was given to elegant, handsome Ramiro Osorio, the festival’s director, who spoke tearfully of the enduring example of culture and the Cervantino in a fractious world where peoples and nations can’t seem to communicate very well.

The state governor, Juan Carlos Romero Hicks described Guanajuato as a city that “respira cultura” - breathes culture.

Fitting somehow that Day of the Dead displays would sprout up in these last Cervantino days. The earth turns brown now, the air dry as we enter the fallow months of the year.

On November 1st and 2nd, all over Mexico, a curiously festive dance of death will take place.

Here in Guanajuato’s Plaza de la Reforma, little puestos (stalls) already brim with thousands of astounding handmade alfeñiques, little sugar or chocolate objects, often in the form of skulls – some with personalized names – also animals, cars, houses, practically anything one could imagine.

In homes and public buildings, altars are erected to the dead: tall tables with four wands on each corner, candles, incense, photographs of the deceased – and a profusion of rich gold cempasuchil, the “flower of four hundred petals”, which we call marigold.

At dusk Sunday, festivalgoers were pouring out of town, some bearing signs offering to share rides back to Monterrey or Guadalajara for 100 pesos (8 euros).

Departing lovers huddled together with their backpacks along Avenida Juarez.

Walking across the half-deserted Plaza Baratillo in the early evening, a soft moon suspended above the fluted fountain, I came upon a local organ grinder pumping out a sad strain into the soft air.

After a three-week feast of international music and theater and dance, it was this this lone, wheezy performance, melancholic and sweet, that most seemed to signal festival’s end.

Beautiful, mysterious Guanajuato, city that breathes culture, had been delivered at last back to its residents and its slumbering mummies.

TC

TONY COHAN is the author of the bestselling travel memoir ON MEXICAN TIME (Doubleday/Broadway, Bloomsbury in the UK) and MEXICAN DAYS, to be published next May.

Los de Abajo will perform on ‘Later’ - Friday 28 Oct; BBC2

The Gods must have been feeling skittish the day they created latin-punk-ska combo Los de Abajo.

Los de Abajo

And if they are still enjoying their handiwork, then the Mexico City-based band who packed out London’s Carling Academy in Islington last week are having even more fun.

Imagine the big brassy stabs of salsa, flirtacious Cuban-style piano mixed in with the relentless drumming of an oversexed oompa-band and you have - more or less - an idea of the zany sound that only Los de Abajo can carry off.

Touring in support of their new album, ‘LDA v The Lunatics’, they are a consumate live ensemble.

They reach out to the audience from the start, rewarding them with formation pogoing during the set which includes the reworked 1982 Fun Boy Three hit, ‘The Lunatics Are Taking Over the Asylum’ and the moving ‘Resistencia’, which must hold the distinction of being the first pop record to feature a senior member of the Zapatista High Command, in this case a sampled recording of Commandanta Esther.

And while guitarist Vladimir Garcia says that none of the band is a member of any political party, it is clear that la politica is present in much of their work.

The band’s core member’s met as high school students and soon discovered they shared a common musical and political values says Garcia whose mother is the well-known journalist and womens’ rights campaigner, Sara Lovera.

“Our parents were involved in the campaigns and movements of the 60s and 70s and we grew up listening to Ruben Blades (the Panamanian singer who is now a politician) and a lot music from the north of Mexico.

“And of course the Zapatista uprising of 1994 was a wake-up call for our generation. It touched us profoundly - the struggle for rights, not just for indigenous people in Mexico but oppressed people everywhere.

“When the Zapatistas marched from Chiapas to Mexico City, we had a very good meeting with Subcomandante Marcos.

“When we decided we wanted to use the sample of Esther we sent a message asking for permission…you never know if it gets through or not, but we think they would be fine about it so we went ahead.”

Living la vida Mexico – The Independent

Named Los de Abajo (The Underdogs) after one of first novels to chronicle the Mexican Revolution, by Mariano Azuela, the group worked with British producers Temple of Sound to record the new album in the Mexico City earlier this year.

For Neil Sparkes, one half of the Temple of Sound team, the project was an “incredible experience. It was my first visit to Mexico and now I’m hooked [ed - aren't we all!].

“Once we arrived, all our preconceptions went out of the window.

“We spent a lot of time - about two weeks - rehearsing and going over material before recording in a studio belong to Pepe Aguilar.”

Sparkes also found himself on stage playing before huge crowds at two benefit gigs in support of presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who successfully fought off an attempt to impeach him earlier this year.

“It was a really exciting time to be in Mexico we will definitely be working there again in the future.”

EM

Steve Bridger adds…

LDA v The Lunatics is out now. Listen to the whole album – free (click on “Audio and Video”).

Los de Abajo are set to perform on ‘Later’, to be broadcast on Friday 28th October, BBC2, at 23:35, where the band will be joined by orginal Fun Boy Neville Staple and Dennis ‘Bad Bone’ Rollins for ’The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum’.

Tony Cohan writes…

Last weekend, weather for the Cervantino, after a drizzly (chipi chipi, as they call it here) week, turned appropriately gorgeous: bright sun, scudding clouds over the mountain peaks, and at night a full moon hanging so close over the city you could almost reach up and touch it.

Sunday night, departing kids and students, lugging their mochilas (backpacks) and roll-ons, clustered around the Plaza Baratillo to listen to a US/Brazil duo sing and play acoustic bossa nova fusion. (This weekend another youth invasion will hit for the festival’s climax.)

The little Baratillo, behind the more trafficked Jardin Union, is among my favorite Guanajuato plazas. Its fluted fountain, a gift from the city of Florence during the fin-de siecle reign of the dictator Porfírio Díaz, gathers around it flower, fruit and vegetable vendors, an armada of pigeons, louche students lounging on green metal benches in the sun or moonlight, an internet place, a cafe.

Residents of Alameda and Mexiamora, the two neighborhoods up the winding hill behind, thread their way among wandering tourists, Lonely Planets or Routards in hand.

The Baratillo, crisscrossed by life, is a plaza of artists and mystics, rich in myth. People say that fantasmas, ghosts, hover here; that La Llorona, Mexico’s weeping woman, makes nightly visitations; that a bruja, a sorceress who once resided on Callejón Ave Maria, a tiny lane just above the flower sellers, still presides from her present station in Las Momias, the mummy museum on the edge of town.

During the festival, the Baratillo has been hosting a cool hipster from Mexico City selling cutting-edge CD’s at the entrance to the Cafe Zilch, free music by the fountain – and, alongside the usual fiesta of street food, a woman hawking toothsome Argentine empanadas.

While nightly performances continue at the indoor sites, a movie screen has been mounted outside on the building at the foot of the university’s wide steps, and every evening a classic Mexican or foreign feature films plays for free.

A couple of nights ago, beneath a full moon, I sat on the steps among students and guanajuatenses watching Don Quijote, the festival’s patron figure, in Polish with Spanish subtitles.

A few afternoons back, ready to take a break from festival madness, we walked through the San Diego tunnel, emerging five minutes later at the base of a mountain and a neighborhood called Barrio Nuevo.

A steep winding walk led us to a district known as Mellado, far above the city. From there we stood atop the vast, brooding bulwarks of the Rayas mine and looked back across the valley to the city.

Leaning over a circular stone wall, I gazed down through a dark assemblage of old cables into the mine’s indiscernible bowels, where a team of young engineers was laboring to make Rayas productive again – we could hear the lumbering whine of its old winches – but barely breaking even.

Only four of Guanajuato’s original 34 mines now remain open, the rest brought down by revolution, mercury poisoning, and the collapse of world silver prices.

Afterwards we climbed a little further up to the beautiful, old, crumbing Mellado church, a little-known Guanajuato favorite of mine.

A trickle of UNESCO money has arrived to help them try and restore La Ultima Cena (The Last Supper), their prized mural before it disappears into dust.

The view of Guanajuato and the surrounding hillsides from the church’s ruined cloister took our breath away. Hard to imagine from that silent parapet the intense cultural fever sweeping the city below.

Four more days and night of festival.

TC

Almost.

Ed Fladung marks the passing of the rains with a post in his blog.

“Everywhere around me I can see the signs that the rain is done.

“The dust is creeping back and all of the locals have begun the process of clearing out the three months of intense jungle growth and I’ve started to see small brush fires which signal the beginning of the burning season.

“You can smell it in the air, the light smokey smell from a small burning fire, somewhere just out of sight.”

Nicely put, Ed. 

The Cervantino performances are spread around Guanajuato’s theaters, auditoriums, churches, and historical buildings, in themselves providing a living topography of the city and its history.

Teatro de México, 13 October

Drama troupes hold forth in the Teatro Cervantes up against a hill; intimate chamber music fills the thrilling, gilt-soaked Valenciana Church where wealthy mining families once came to pray; and in the vast old granary, the Alhondiga, site of the first revolt against Spain (up the street from the soaring Mercado Hidalgo, with its Eiffel-built spire atop), crowds gather this week to hear on successive nights the Beijing Opera, Orlando “Maraca” Valle’s Cuban jazz/salsa unit, and singer/composer/lyricist Izaline Calister, who sings in her mother tongue, Papiamentu (a blend of Portugese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English).

But no festival site is more astounding than the little jewel-box of a theater, the Teatro Juarez, right off the central Jardin Union.

A Greco-Roman opera house built during the extravagant fin-de-siecle Porfirio Diaz reign, of elements imported from Italy, France,and Spain, with statues of the theatrical muses atop, it hosted the great international opera stars of its day before falling on hard times for a while after the Revolution – even becoming a movie house after World War Two until popcorn (palomitas) and chicarrones threatened to ruin the plush velvet seating.

To me, the Juarez always brings to mind Werner Herzog’s film “Fitzcarraldo,” in which the German actor Klaus Kinski plays a man fanatically obsessed with bringing an opera house up the Amazon River to the remote town of Iquitos, convinced of the power of European art to transform and enlighten, tame the inscrutable dark - a bittersweet, ruinous conceit. Yet here is Fitzcarraldo’s dream, alive in Guanajuato.

Students and tourists cluster on the theater’s wide steps among its beefy columns, taking in the winter sun; while inside each evening, music and drama hold sway.

I’ve heard New York’s Kronos Quartet play Thelonious Monk here, Guanajuato University’s symphony orchestra tackle Shostakovich.

This week, an electronic/traditional Japanese unit called Rin will perform there, as will the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Cervantino streets and restaurants fall relatively quiet during weekdays, then build to weekend madness when hordes arrive from other parts of Mexico for the festivities.

Yesterday we took advantage of the lull to visit a rare, slightly more distant corner of this astonishing city. But that’ll have to wait until next time…

TC

The revels continue… with strolling street musicians in medieval costumes, Yucatan jugglers, and performances of groups from Nicaragua, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Germany, Israel, Cuba and Singapore - not to mention Mexico – this weekend alone.

Susana Zabaleta, 8 October

Every imaginable form of food, garment or craft is being hawked along the thronged streets, while in the little plazuelas (as the’re called here) international visitors sip and schmooze with locals.

In the Diego Rivera Museum (birthplace of the outsized artist, disowned by the city during his lifetime for committing the unpardonable sin of being a Marxist-Leninist), a thrilling new show of etchings by Mexico’s incomparable Mexican artist Francisco Toledo has gone up for the festival. 

Yet for all the high culture, it felt more like a whooping rock festival out on the streets late last night as cops had some young borrachos up against the wall of our house in the name of civic order.

Founded in 1972 by local writers, artists and actors in homage to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the Cervantino has grown into prime stop on the international festival circuit and a highlight of the city’s year.

Even Los Momias, the city’s famed mummy display, long a ghoulish postcard to send home, is eclipsed by this annual autumn artistic efflorescence.

Crumbling, operatic Guanajuato, with its heaped architecture and twisting medieval streets; its cool stone labyrinth of subterranean tunnels and great ruins from the silver mines that had endowed its patrons with centuries of wealth; its university, museums, churches and government buildings of pink and green quarried stone; its bookshops and student cafes - what a great place for a Cervantino.

Wandering down its serpentine lanes, past its worn tinted walls, across its little plazuelas feels like being inside a moebius strip.

Guanajuato is a walker’s city, most streets impassable by car. One little lane off the Plaza San Fernando is so narrow a barrel-shaped indentation had to be hewn out of a wall to allow burros to pass; another allows lovers to kiss across balconies.

Woven into a steep river valley, the city has all the packed interiority, the ruminative hallucination, of an Arab medina. Here, in a city where you are lost a priori, a writer with a terminal case of wanderlust can only feel at home.

Coming up this week: The Beijing Opera, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Japanese Butoh, and more.

TC

GUANAJUATO: Things are starting to heat up here for the annual Cervantino, Mexico’s biggest visual and performing arts festival.

For three weeks the old city’s theaters, churches, performance spaces, and plazas will brim with theater, dance, music and art.

Gala Yucateca

Wednesday, after speeches and ribbon cuttings on the steps of the resplendent Art Nouveau Teatro Juarez, the inauguration featured Yuzuru, a joint Japan/Yucatan event.

Down in the calles, cool international folk dressed in black murmur into cell phones, musicians in dark glasses slide past bearing their instruments, strolling minstrels trail wine-drinking revelers, and cops hover along the walls.

We are living inside a crescendo.

Last night at 8:30, a muted peal issued from the massive Compania church next to our house. Then answering bell rippled across the city’s rooftops as other churches joined in, rounding into a composition by the contemporary composer Carlos Vidaurri.

Today and tonight, a British theater troupe, Out of Joint, will terrorize the stage with a postmodern Macbeth set in chaotic contemporary Africa.

Things only promise to get wilder here in gorgeous, mysterious Guanajuato this weekend as as chilangos (Mexico City people) and young fresas (straights, yuppies) arrive to party in the midst of this cultural orgy.

To be continued…

TONY COHAN is the author of the bestselling travel memoir ON MEXICAN TIME (Doubleday/Broadway, Bloomsbury in the UK) and MEXICAN DAYS, to be published
next May.