Alfonso Cuarón (Mexico, born 1961)

Children of Men (2006)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

The principal attribute of Children of Men is its technical excellence. When technicality supersedes acting, character development, dialogue, and everything else, it can accentuate perceived flaws elsewhere, even if relatively high standards have been upheld in these areas too. This posed a problem for me when I tried to appreciate movies like Mad Max: Fury Road or City of God; I can’t say their technical proficiency was a detriment, exactly- that would be illogical- but it served to remind me that I wasn’t being drawn into the films, or affected by them, as much as I would have liked.

Children of Men doesn’t really fall into that ‘trap’, such as it is. For one thing, it has noticeably more breathing room than those other two movies- characters have time to sit and talk every so often, and these conversations can even be somewhat relaxed. This isn’t really a character piece- far from it, in fact- but its willingness to calm things down and provide intermission gives the impression of a rounded experience and offers balance to its high-octane action sequences. By contrast, the characters of Mad Max: Fury Road represented purely generic traits, irrespective of acting quality, and while the decisions made by Children of Men’s characters also somewhat serve plot convenience, as does unlikely happenstance, its more polyphonic approach make these aspects more digestible and less obvious.

This is another film which I saw around ten years ago and haven’t watched since. Unlike The Social Network, or The Dark Knight, I didn’t outright dislike it, but I didn’t think it was anything special, and I was surprised to see it on this list, especially in such a high position. It struck me as essentially a vehicle for the filmmakers to showcase their ability in crafting extremely long and impossible-looking single takes- a conceit later taken to even more ostentatious extremes by Birdman- and little else. I was also alienated by its idiosyncratic approach to storytelling, its willingness to kill off sympathetic major characters (in cruel ways, no less) and its dour, muted ending which I, quite palpably at the time, perceived as a significant let-down- I actually said out loud to myself ‘Surely they’re not just going to end the film there’. But as I’ve mentioned previously, you get older and you start to appreciate these sorts of techniques more, especially when so much popular entertainment can be characterised by its homogeny. The dystopian world created in the movie largely remains in the background, augmenting rather than overwhelming it, despite the magnificent technical aspects of its realisation. One understands that the film is not aiming to satiate typical fans of sci-fi or speculative fiction who may expect a world to be as involving and immersive as possible, potentially at the cost of character development. Lesser films may have also opted to use voiceover to spoon-feed the social detail of this setting to the viewer, in the process telling us that our main character is flawed, world-weary and booze-soaked instead of just letting us see it for ourselves. As it is, the film merely gives us a cross-section of this dystopia, set over a couple of days and refracted through the experiences of a relatively small group of people. It tells us simply what we need to know, and no more. This gives the impression of a piece which is brisk, quick and highly focused despite the aforementioned breathing room.

If I was to criticise it, I might mention that perhaps the film felt a little too dystopian, though that sounds silly, considering the very point of dystopia; almost like criticising a comedy for being too funny or a documentary piece for having too much authenticity in it. I just feel, however, that the film could have made the same points and had a similar effect without painting its world in tones that are quite as harsh as these. But this is, of course, nitpicking.

Recommended.

Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

Y Tu Mamá También opens in the middle of a sex scene. There’s no build-up, no undressing- we’re straight in, it’s already happening, with two teenagers naked on the bed and in full swing. It goes on for a minute or so- we get to see the girl’s pert young breasts bobble around and flashes of her pubis. Very soon after this, still within the first five minutes of the picture, a different teenage couple are due to go to the airport when the girl, pulling off her underwear, demands that they have quick illicit sex while her parents wait downstairs, at the door, with the suitcases. The boy unsurprisingly complies.

The girlfriends both leave on holiday- their filmic presence turns out to be largely conceptual- and we are left with the guys. They are crude and puerile, and because the film seems to be making a point of how frank and unflinching it is, we see both of them naked in a communal shower, dicks swinging, and then we see them wanking, together, outside in the garden- God knows why when they’ve both got perfectly good bedrooms- and we see their globs of semen splat into a swimming pool.

What to make of all this? When discussing his 1996 film Crash, David Cronenberg said ‘One of the reasons people have said the movie’s pornographic is…a formal problem, it’s a structural problem. They’ve never seen three sex scenes in a row except in a porno film. Audiences don’t know how to react when you go to the second sex scene and then you go to the third sex scene- they laugh or they’re very uncomfortable. If they were watching a porno film, they would demand it- there they’re not interested in anything but the sex scenes.’ Because so few ‘regular’, non-pornographic movies choose to do this, it feels far more unusual- and decidedly needless- than it would be if a given film was doing a similar thing with violence. When Y Tu Mamá También throws sex at us the way it does, especially in its opening scenes before any mitigating context has been established, and then when its characters are so focused on sex in the interim periods between actually having it, this dynamic almost feels like an imposition. I looked away uncomfortably a couple of times, despite the fact that I was watching the film on my own, whereas- to use a movie that I just happened to watch recently as a rhetorical reference- when I saw The Proposition, I accepted that film’s carnage as just ‘one of those things’ and part of a far more standard and expected way to tell a cinematic story. I didn’t really question its content choices, whereas the proliferation of sex scenes in Y Tu Mamá También, generally more protracted than The Proposition’s relatively brief moments of violence and handled in a way that appears to be actively aiming for ‘raw’, decidedly vivid effects- does seem to provoke certain queries. Firstly, why is it exactly that violence- objectively less acceptable than sex- does not usually carry these same sort of discomforting qualities? The Proposition is a grim, blood-soaked thriller-western- I knew that before I watched it, and I knew that violence was going to be part of its raison d’etre. And I knew Y Tu Mamá También had a reputation for sexual explicitness before I watched it, but that barely seemed to be the point- I still felt startled by its outré, lurid vulgarity and complete lack of restraint.

These emotions lack logic, but there’s not a lot you can do about your own impulses other than examine them and admit when they might be a bit dubious. In any case, the next query feels something like of a cliché, but one is nonetheless compelled to address it: Is this material pornographic, and if it isn’t, where do we identify the point at which a film does become pornographic?

Emmanuelle?

Maybe. That movie seems as good a barometer as any, and by this yardstick, Y Tu Mamá También is not porn, just as Blue is the Warmest Color isn’t either. They may edge closer to porn than your average movie- far closer, I’d grant- but most characters in porn films don’t feel any narrative reason to drive through rural Mexico, and if they did, it wouldn’t be depicted at this sort of length onscreen. As Y Tu Mamá También progresses, it becomes much clearer that the film is dissecting its characters’ inner lives far more incisively than any porn movie ever would, including Emmanuelle, where eroticism is definitively the number one focal point of the piece, and its non-sexual content is ultimately just padding. By contrast, Y Tu Mamá También is just as much about teenage idiocy, amongst many other things, as it is about sex, and if it wants to portray puerile characters, then that’s its prerogative.

These points do not reflect my original attitude when watching the first half-hour of the picture. But it steadily becomes more and more substantial with each passing second, blossoming into a striking work of exceptional maturity and depth, directly mirroring the journey- literal and figurative- that our two main male characters undertake (spoilers ahead). They begin the film as idiots and end it as solemn, grave, thoughtful young men, probably embarrassed by their earlier behaviour and now dealing with a bombshell revelation that re-contextualises the entire film. There was in fact a secret movie, redolent of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, that was playing out at a subterranean level right under the viewer’s nose the whole time.

Says Roger Ebert: ‘ There are only two shots in the entire movie that reflect the inner reality of one of the characters. At the end, finally knowing everything, you think back through the film- or, as I was able to do, see it again.’ My guess- completely unsubstantiated, you understand- is that the first of these shots is when Luisa sits alone in her apartment, waiting for the boys to pick her up, and her demeanour is uncharacteristically sombre. With hindsight, we might even detect notes of outright fear in her expression as she apprehensively pulls on her cigarette. The other shot Roger talks about may be the one where she is crying in her hotel room, and when one of the boys walks in, she wipes her tears away and says she’s fine. In both instances, I originally put these events down to her husband’s infidelity and the breakdown of her marriage, which was some neat sleight-of-hand on the film’s part.

Elsewhere, the movie rides a certain cinéma vérité aesthetic that helps to make the film feel as real as one of the rocky dirt-roads down which our throuple take their battered, borrowed, brown old car. There is nothing to suggest the sort of technical mastery that Cuarón would go on to show in Children of Men and there are no apparent tonal or thematic similarities- I cannot, in fact, think of a single thing that would suggest these two films came from the same director. Nor would Y Tu Mamá También compel one to think that the logical next step for this filmmaker would be to helm a Harry Potter movie. Cuarón is, I suppose, showing the flexibility and range of his artistic palette with such varied output, but nonetheless, a look through his filmography- which also includes adaptations of Great Expectations and The Little Princess along with the mega-budget George Clooney/Sandra Bullock sci-fi Gravity, reads like some sort of schizophrenic fever-dream. 

In any case, as far as Y Tu Mamá También is concerned, I found it to be a bit of a rare treat- a movie that turned out to be much better than its opening act suggested, with moments of sun-scorched beauty and piercing poignancy that lingered on long past the end credits, and are still with me now, occupying my thoughts several weeks after I finished the film.

A triumph.