By Cameron Kerkau, Staff Reporter.
“Güeros” was shown on Jan. 30 at the Delta Planetarium as the first of a series of films being presented by the Hell’s Half Mile Film & Music Festival early this year.
Written and directed by Alonso Ruiz Palacios, Güeros first appeared at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival where it won the award for Best First Feature. Over the past two years it has played at multiple festivals where it has claimed a total of 20 awards and 11 nominations.
The film stars Sebastián Aquirre as Tomás, a troubled youth who is sent away to live with his older brother Sombra, played by Tenoch Huerta, and Sombra’s roommate Santos, played by Leonardo Ortizgris, during the 1999 student strike at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The strikes have disrupted Sombra and Santos’ classes and when Tomás finds them, they’re biding their time in their filthy apartment, smoking cigarettes, stealing electricity and discussing the nuances of the term “continental breakfast.” However their lives become much more exciting when the brothers learn that their father’s favorite musician, Epigmenio Cruz, is dying and they decide to find him to pay their respects.
One of the first things that I noticed about this film is its use of sound. While other movies tend to neglect the artistic possibilities that sound presents, Güeros embraces them. Radio distortion is used during scene transitions to portray the uncertainty during this time in Tomás’ life and in Mexico City. When Sombra has panic attacks, all noise but his breathing is drowned out, and whenever a character is listening to Epigmenio Cruz’s music, everything is silent except for the churning of the cassette tape, leaving the actor’s reaction as our only perspective of his music. These techniques are used effectively throughout the entire film.
Shot in black and white and influenced by the French New Wave cinema of the 1950s and 60s, “Güeros” is about a lot of things. It’s a college love and coming-of-age story which deals with the political unrest and the social climate of Mexico at the time. It’s about the difference between living and existing, and it also becomes about itself. The film is occasionally meta in the most casual of ways. These scenes are some of the funniest, but they also make the film feel genuine. As if the filmmaker is saying, “Yes, we all know it’s just a movie, but that doesn’t make these experiences less authentic, it doesn’t make this Mexico less real.”
Güeros is an artistic accomplishment that will satisfy the casual movie-goer and the cinema fanatic alike.
If you missed it at the planetarium, you’ll have another chance to see it at the Flint Institute of Arts on Feb. 19.
