Cinema

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.

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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.

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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. 

Ignacio Durán Loera talks to Elizabeth Mistry exclusively for Mexicanwave about the making of a modern classic…

WIN a copy of Como Agua Para Chocolate on DVD…

For many cinema-lovers, the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema was back in the 1940s and 50s, when stars such as Maria Felix appeared in movies such as Doña Bárbara and La Escondida.

But for producer Ignacio Durán Loera, who was director of the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (Mexican Film Institute, IMCINE) from 1988 to 1995, the 1990s heralded a new era of film making in Mexico that has continued to this day.

Durán produced a string of hits including Solo Con Tu Pareja (1991) but his best known and certainly the most commercially successful he worked on was the 1992 smash hit Como Agua Para Chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate) – which will be released for the first time on DVD in the UK on 19 September.

A critical and commercial success not only in Mexico but in all markets, it became the highest grossing foreign film ever in the US. But he very nearly lost out on the chance to be involved and, as he recounts, the title has a particular resonance for him.

The film was based on the novel by Laura Esquivel (who was then married to the film’s director Alfonso Arau) and the title comes from a popular Mexican dicho - a saying – that alludes to how one feels when passions run high; ’hot’.

More recently Arau directed Zapata, with Alejandro Fernández as the lead

And it was hot water that Durán almost found himself in back in 1989 not long after he had joined IMCINE.

“One day my wife came to me and she said ‘this is a book that you should read. It would make a beautiful film.’

Of course I left it on my night table and forgot all about it. Then, about three months afterwards, we were watching TV late one night when the announcer of a very popular programme said that Gregorio Walerstein was going to start filming Like Water For Chocolate.

Well, my wife gave me that terrible look and I read the book that same night.

Next morning I said to her “Yes darling, you were right it would make a helluva film.”

And the Gods were smiling upon me because that same day, I was in my office [at IMCINE], at about 10 o’clock in the morning when my secretary said that Alfonso Arau was here with his wife…”and he wants to see you.”

Alfonso and Laura came in and he said to me: “Nacho, yesterday Zabludovsky gave out some very very wrong information. I am not going to make the film with Walerstein, I want to make it with you.”

And I said, “Alfonso, you are not leaving this room without a provisional agreement”, so we signed there and then.

Before we started shooting I didn’t know Laura very well. But she invited us to their home and she gave us a feast - she prepared the menu from the film - and it was incredible. The dish I remember most was the one with the petals.

We started shooting in 1990 and almost all of the film was shot on location, around several haciendas in Coahuila (near Ciudad Acuña and Piedras Negras) and in Chihuahua.

The budget was about $1.2 million. It wasn’t terribly expensive, about $300,000 more than other films we’d done. Solo Con Tu Pareja had cost about $800,000.

But the shooting was very difficult. Laura got sick; she had to be taken to hospital across the border. It was a terrible pressure on Alfonso, but we were lucky to have (Emmanuel) Lubezki the cinematograher - he made a very important contribution to the film.

Eventually they went back to Mexico City where Alfonso was trying to edit the film on a new system - Avid. At the time, there was only one machine in the whole of Mexico - in the studio at Churubusco.

That was a very tricky time. I remember he called several times to say he was having a bit of a problem… but then he finally told me: “The film is finished.”

I went to see it in the screening room at Churubusco. Just Arau, Laura, myself and a couple of other people.

At the end of the screening I said to him “Dejeme darte un abrazo” – let me give you a hug – because this is the best film that you have ever made. I was very touched by it, and I told him “this will bring you great satisfaction.”

I knew immediately that this was going to be a stepping stone for Mexican cinema. And it came at a very, very convenient time; at that point in the administration, we had only produced a handful of films.

What I hoped of course, is that it would make a very loud splash in the international market. We went to Cannes and I remember when Alfonso told me he had talked to Miramax - to Harvey Weinstein, whom I later met.

There are a handful of films that played a tremendous role in the so-called renaissance of Mexican cinema; La Mujer de Benjamin, Solo Con Tu Pareja (directed by Alfonso Cuaron), Bandidos and Como Agua Para Chocolate.

These movies heralded a new generation of very able film makers such as Alfonso (Cuaron, who went on to make Y Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and Luis ( Estrada, director of Bandidos and La Ley de Herodes).

But Como Agua Para Chocolate was very special. I am very very proud of that film.”

Like Water for Chocolate on DVD is available from the Arrow Film website

© 2005 Elizabeth Mistry. All rights reserved.

Competition

To mark the release of the DVD in the UK, distributor Arrow Film is offering the chance to win a copy of Como Agua Para Chocolate worth £15.99

To enter the competition (UK only), email your answer to the following question to editor @ mexicanwave.com by 15 September 2005.

Question: What is the name of the seasonal Mexican dish that represents the country’s flag?

The film will be based on Gibson’s own screenplay. He will also direct (but not star in) the film, to be called somewhat apocalyptically… “Apocalypto”.

Intriguingly, ‘characters will speak “an obscure” Maya dialect’, as the BBC rather annoyingly puts it. Of course, Maya dialects are still spoken as a primary or secondary language by at least 3 million people in the region.

Casting of Maya local to the region of Mexico where Gibson will begin shooting in October is apparently already underway.

The ‘story’ details remain very scarce. However, Gibson has already begun pre-production and has chosen a number of as yet unknown locations ahead of an expected summer 2006 release.

I have put out my antennae to discover whether permission has been sought to film at any of the great ancient Maya sites such as Palenque, Chichén Itzá and Tulum.

Carlos Nakasone, Director of the Quintana Roo Film Commission, told me that his office were trying to get in touch with Gibson’s company, Icon Productions.

I am willing to wager that the film will recreate the life-and-death spectacle of the Mayan ball game. That should be better to watch than Quidditch!

Filmed over 5 weeks in the summer of 2003 and shot in black and white, Duck Season (Temporada de Patos) is set in a stark apartment block in the city-within-a-city Tlatelolco district of the capital.

It’s Sunday, 11 o’clock in the morning. Flama and Moko are fourteen and childhood friends. To survive another boring Sunday, they have everything they need: the place to themselves, an Xbox, soft-porn, Coke and pizza delivery.

Unfortunately, the electric company, their neighbour Rita (Danny Perea), Ulises the pizza delivery guy, eleven seconds, the Real Madrid-Man U football game, a chocolate cake and a kitsch duck painting are ruining what was shaping up to be a great day.

But the real problems are slowly revealed: divorcing parents, loneliness, the confusion of love and friendship between teenagers as well as a grown-up’s frustration of life.

Director Fernando Eimbcke wanted to make a movie about adolescents “out of respect for their constant need of searching, for their rejection of what is established, for their abandon, their energy, and because adolescents may not know what they want, but they know very well what they don’t want.”

Duck Season is released in selected cinemas across the UK on 11 March.

The indefatigable Eva Tarr Kirkhope, the passionate and peerless Cuban Queen of Cinema, brings back the Latin American Film Festival for another year. A week of new feature and short films reflecting the energy and diversity of the continent starts on Friday 12 November at the Curzon Soho.

Please support it – we sure did miss it last year.