Mexico

MIDNIGHT FAMILY: an all-night race for pesos

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Luke Lorentzen’s MIDNIGHT FAMILY. Cuurtesy of SFFILM

In his gripping documentary Midnight Family, filmmaker Luke Lorentzen takes us on ridealongs with an all-night ambulance crew in Mexico City. It’s even wilder than you may expect.

Midnight Family is set in an absurd situation with life-and-death stakes. We learn right away that there are only 45 government-operated ambulances in Mexico City, a metropolis of 9 million. The rest of the ambulances are private and mostly independents.

Competition is cut throat. The private ambulances listen to police scanners and then TRY TO OUTRACE each other to the scene. One of these independent ambulances is the Ochoa family’s business.

Fernando Ochoa is the head of the family, and he collects the ambulance fee from hospitals and patients. His 17-year-old son Juan is the voluble front man and driver, who careens them through the Mexico City streets at alarming speed. The Ochoa’s colleague, the even-tempered medic Manuel, rides in the back. The youngest Ochoa son, pudgy, Ruffles-devouring 10-year-old Josue, rides along as a gopher. BTW there are no seat belts in the back.

The private ambulances operate in a shady world of semi-formal licensing, so they can always be shut down arbitrarily by the cops. Indeed, we even see the Ochoas arrested while trying to take a patient to the hospital. It’s common for the police to extract bribes from the vulnerable ambulance crews.

There is an incentive to steer patients to the private hospitals that will pay the ambulance crews, so their business is, by its nature, often a hustle; there are some instances of ethical ambiguity. Aiming to depict a “wide spectrum”, Lorentzen balances life-saving heroics with the more sketchy moments. Getting payment out of a grieving family when the loved one dies on the way to the hospital is, well, awkward.

Here is the Ochoa’s business model. Ideally, they get paid about $250 to deliver a patient to a private hospital. They deduct the cost of gasoline, medical supplies and police bribes, and then split what’s left four ways. If a patient can’t or won’t pay, if the vehicle breaks down, or if the cops shut them down – the Ochoas are out of luck.

Luke Lorentzen’s MIDNIGHT FAMILY. Cuurtesy of SFFILM

Fernando is silent but expressive. Carrying an alarming belly, he stoically juggles an assortment pills to treat his chronic illness. The loquacious Juan is a born front man, and basically provides play-by-play commentary throughout the film in real time. We see him downloading the previous night’s drama over the phone to his girlfrend Jessica and, by loud speaker, directing other Mexico City drivers out of his way.

Fernando and Juan sleep on the floor of a downscale apartment, and they never know if they’ll make enough money for tomorrow’s gasoline. It’s an incredibly stressful existence. How resilient can they be? Is there any limit to the stress they can absorb? As Lorentzen himself says, this is “a world where no one is getting what they need”.

I saw Midnight Family at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), which included an in-person Q&A with Lorenzen. Lorentzen spent 80-90 nights with the crew. About 70% of the film comes from the last three nights that he rode with the Ochoas.

Midnight Family joins a mini-genre of rogue ambulance cinema. The very dark Argentine narrative Carancho stars the great Ricardo Darin as a LITERALLY ambulance-chasing lawyer. In the Hungarian dark comedy Heavenly Shift (I saw it at the 2014 Cinequest), an outlaw ambulance crew gets kickbacks from a shady funeral director if the patient dies en route to the hospital.

Midnight Family is just concluding a run at the Roxie in San Francisco. I’ll let you know when it’s streamable. Midnight Family is one of the nest documentaries of the year, and on my Best Movies of 2019.

ROMA: exquisite portrait of two enduring women

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Yalitza Aparicio (second from left) and Marina de Tavira (center) in ROMA

In the powerful and sublimely beautiful Roma, Cleo is the cheerful and ever-on-duty domestic servant in the Mexico City home of Sofia, her doctor husband, their four kids and Sofia’s mother. Sofia’s upper middle class family are light-skinned gueros and Cleo is indigenous. Sofia’s husband leaves her, and she tries to hold her household and her emotions together without letting on to the kids.  Sofia and Cleo’s relationship changes and is forged closer when each faces a personal crisis.

That distillation of the story doesn’t begin to capture the profound depth of Roma.  Despite their differences in race and class, Cleo and Sofia are in the same situation – facing life’s travails and the responsibilities of family without any help. They are isolated and they must find ways to endure.

Cleo (Yaritza Aparicio) encourages and nurtures the imagination of the youngest child, Pepe. She is playful and adored by the children.  This is Aparicio’s first acting gig; she was chosen from among 3000 candidates for the role.  Sofia, who is balancing on a knife-edge throughout the story, is played by veteran actress Marina de Tavira, who found Sofia’s story to be the same as her own mother’s. These are two wonderfully authentic  performances.

Roma is written, directed and edited by master filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien).  This may be his masterpiece.  Cuarón won two Oscars For Gravity, in which he conveyed the terrible and unforgiving enormity of outer space. In Children of Men, he created one of the longest, most intricate and compelling action shots in cinema history.

Shot in glorious black and white, Roma is packed with amazing set pieces, both with long static shots and even longer tracking shots.  There’s a nighttime tracking shot that follows Cleo through several blocks of a bustling Mexico City downtown street.  In another extended single, dolly shot, the camera follows characters from the beach into the surf, beyond the surf break and then back to shore.

Emergencies in the surf of a beach resort and in a hospital are among the most harrowing movie scenes that I’ve seen this year – even more intense than  climactic scenes in thrillers.

As heartbreaking as Roma can get, there’s a great deal of humor here.  Much is centered on the family dog and his massive production of excrement.  There’s also the repeated ordeal of an oversized Ford Galaxy inching its way into an undersized car park.  A rural hacienda contains some very unusual wall decorations.  And there’s an unexpected and remarkably inappropriate naked martial arts performance.

According to those who would know, Roma is an evocative time capsule of Mexico City at the beginning of the 1970s.

The characters of the mom and the domestic, along with the events – the riot, the forest fire, the earthquake, etc. – are recreated from Cuarón’s most vivid and enduring memories of his own childhood. It’s a deeply personal and individual story, but one which is universal –  that of women carrying on without the support of (and even despite) the men in their lives.

I saw Roma at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October at a screening with Aparicio, de Tavira and producers Gabriella Rodriguez and Jonathan King.  Cuarón shot the film in sequence over 108 days and only showed the cast the script one day at a time, directing them to “surrender” to the story.  Rodriguez confirmed that the family sees Marooned at the movie in a nod to Gravity.

Roma takes its title from the family’s neighborhood in Mexico City.

Roma will be released in New York, LA and Mexico City theaters this weekend and will open more widely on November 29. Having been financed by Netflix, it will stream to Netflix subscribers on December 14.  This is one of the year’s very best films, and it will receive multiple Oscar nominations.

MUSEO: portrait of alienation in the form of a heist

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MUSEO

The true life Mexican heist film Museo is really a portrait of alienation – and immature alienation at that. It’s about a young middle class guy in a third world country, and he has first wold problems; his prospects are not unlimited, but he’s way better off than his less educated compatriots. So he and his weak-willed buddy pull off an audacious art theft.

Unusually, and perhaps uniquely, among heist films, hardly any time is invested in assembling the team (here it’s the guy and his buddy) or in the heist itself. The guys steal the most famous ancient Mexican artifacts from the National Museum, essentially the heart of the nation’s heritage. The theft becomes a sensation that dominates the national zeitgeist, triggers an all-out manhunt and a political scandal. How could this have happened?

Of course, there can’t possibly be any buyers for such high visibility objects (just like in this year’s other real life slacker heist film American Animals). Most of the film is figuring out what to do next – and good options are non-existent.

The protagonist is played by the fine actor Gael Garcia Bernal. Unfortunately, this character really isn’t that interesting; I think that is because his alienation is based on petulance and not on rage (see the great Jack Nicholson ragingly alienated roles of the 70s).

Museo does a good job of evoking the Mexico City and Acapulco in the mid 1980s. But without the central thrill of a heist, we are left with an unsympathetic protagonist and his predicament, and that’s really not enough for a two-hour movie. I saw Museo at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

Stream of the week: BRIMSTONE & GLORY – people who blow stuff up

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BRIMSTONE & GLORY

BRIMSTONE & GLORY

BRIMSTONE & GLORY

Life in Tultepec, a city of about 90,000, just north of Mexico City is dominated by the main local industry – fireworks manufacturing.  That’s the subject of the documentary Brimstone & Glory, which is alternatively jaw-dropping and visually amazing.

The overwhelming majority of Mexico’s fireworks are handmade in Tultepec.  Brimstone & Glory traces the townspeople’s march toward their annual National Pyrotechnic Festival. At the festival, giant toros are set afire as they roll blazing down the commercial streets.  People actually dance within a cacophony of fireworks.

This may not sound entirely safe to you.  Indeed, Brimstone & Glory takes us into the pre-festival training sessions, where paramedics review their triage protocols.  During the festival, we’re in the medical tent as the actual injuries flood in.

One of the festival highlights is a competition with 75-foot high towers embedded with fireworks.  As a lightning storm approaches, one guy climbs the metal tower to repair some wind damage.  It’s clear that Mexican safety regulations, if they exist, are quite relaxed.   Brimstone & Glory is probably a fantasy movie for American personal injury lawyers.

Remember that the manufacturing is by hand.  Without comment, Brimstone & Glory observes an old fireworks craftsman working with three digits left on one hand and none on other.

Brimstone & Glory follows one local kid, the boy Esau (“Santi”).  Everyone expects him to follow in the family fireworks tradition, but his own feelings about fireworks are very ambivalent.

Cinematographer Tobias von dem Borne and director Viktor Jakovleski deliver a feast for the eyes, as you can tell from the photos above.  Slo mo is used very effectively, and the night photography is very special.

Brimstone & Glory can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime), iTunes and Vudu.

COCO: the splendor of authenticity

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COCO

Pixar movies are known for their exquisite animation.  Pixar movies soar when they have excellent stories (the Toy Story trilogy).  Coco, Pixar’s moving and authentic dive into Mexican culture, soars.

Set in Mexico during Dia de los Muertos, the boy Miguel longs to become a musician, an avocation his family forbids because a musician ancestor once abandoned the family.  He tries to follow his passion, but becomes trapped in the world of the dead.  He must get the blessing of a dead family member to return to the living.  Just when we think we know the score, there is an unexpected plot twist.

The colors of the Mexican town in daytime perfectly capture the look and feel of Mexico.  But the scenes in nighttime and in the world of the dead, explode on the screen, and it’s hard to decide which is the most spectacular.  There’s an overhead shot of the town cemetery on the night of Dia de los Muertos, with the glow of candles from every grave.  The worlds of the living and of the dead are separated by a bridge of flowers made out of marigold petals.  And then there’s Pepita, a giant winged panther in the world of the dead.

The exploration into Mexican culture is authentic because it is so firmly anchored to the Mexican sense of family.   There are no stereotypes here, and all of the characters look far more Mexican than do many faces on Spanish-language television.  There are many inside chuckles, such as the character of Ernesto de la Cruz perfectly capturing the Mexican singing movie star of black and white films.  There is, of course, the focus on the Mexican version of Dia de los Muertos with its ofrendas and criaturas. 

COCO
Courtesy of ©2017 Disney•Pixar. All Rights Reserved.

The three main adult characters are superbly voiced by Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt and Alanna Ubach.  We also hear the voices of Edward James Olmos, Cheech Marin and Luis Valdez.  The only decidedly non-Latino voice talent is John Ratzenberger, who has still voiced a character in every Pixar film.

Emotionally moving, culturally authentic and visually stunning, Coco is splendid in every way.  Coco is the best Pixar film in years and one of the best movies of the year.

Cinequest: THE LIFE AFTER

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THE LIFE AFTER
THE LIFE AFTER

In the Mexican drama The Life After, two brothers are raised by a very unreliable single mom.  When she disappears and leaves them on their own, they go on a road trip where the emotional damage she has wreaked on them is exposed.   It’s well-acted and well-photographed, but grim and slow-paced.  Ultimately, I’m just not convinced that this story needed to be told.