John Doe.

Last year's Sin Nombre kept getting spoken of, and I remember seeing it advertised all over the place here in London. But I remember the poster just didn't do anything for me. I'd been a bit out of the loop with what was getting hype, but I'd hear about the film, think of the poster... it never appealed to me. Finally, someone said something that got me thinking about it and I thought, what the hell. Give it a shot. And damned glad I did.

Cary Fukunaga's Spanish language debut film is set in Mexico amongst the gangs and clans. Violence is the way of the streets, and most of the characters we are introduced to engage in it, or want to engage in it. El Casper is a member, initiating young Smiley whilst trying to lead a double life with a girlfriend from the right side of the tracks who is suspecting him of infidelity due to the hidden nature of his thug life. When she confronts him at a meeting of the gang one of Casper's peers rapes her and accidentally kills her. Shortly after they are robbing attempted illegal immigrants on top of a train going through Mexico towards the border with the US when the same gang member talks of raping another girl. Casper's response isn't positive.


Smiley heads back to the gang to tell them of what has happened to be threatened due to not taking action at the time. To make up for it he promises to get Casper before he escapes to the States. Casper meanwhile has managed to befriend the girl he protected, and the two get off the train together before the police pounce on the illegals. They make it to the border, but Smiley awaits...


Visually the film reminded me heavily of City of God, with the colours and the vibrancy, especially when mixed with the underworld themes. And the general vibe of the film radiated similar energy - it's hard to really pin it down beyond the obvious similarities between the two thematically. Like City of God, Sin Nombre is a terrific film.


Fukunaga brings incredible depth of emotion and character to a number of characters who should essentially be unlikeable. Casper is conflicted, this is shown from the outset, but the solidarity of the gang members and their feelings over their land and their fallen comrades is incredibly touching and no less valid than similar feelings outside of the world of violence. Smiley especially should not, by rights, be a sympathetic character, with his overwhelming desire to become a killer and his pledge to seek vengeance against someone who was merely standing up against the threatened rape of an innocent girl. But you do feel for him, you feel for his youth, his naivety and his lost future. In twenty years he will be a hardened criminal with no way out, if he makes it that far, but right now he is someone with no idea what he is getting himself into, but throwing himself into the perceived glamour of the lifestyle with scary gusto.


Relative unknown Adriano Goldman provides the beautiful images that, it has to be said, do seem to be becoming a bit par for the course for this sort of Mexican film. Yes, they are stunning to look at, but it's not entirely original. Props to his work, however, and I look forward to his next collaboration with Fukunaga on the upcoming adaptation of Jane Eyre - something very different indeed. I also remembered loving the music, what I remember of it.


Future husband Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna EPd the film, which was produced by Amy Kaufman, who interestingly EPd Bernal and Luna's breakout film Y Tu Mamá También. A terrific effort all round, definitely worth checking out and one worth remembering. 4.5 stars.

What Kind Of Friend Is Always Hiding?

My love for Y Tu Mamá También is not a secret (look here and here), and as it kept popping up in those best of the 00s lists I had a craving to see it again. Plus, I think one film with Gael García Bernal is never enough.

By the time También came around, director Alfonso Cuarón had already helmed one Hollywood production: the moderately successful Great Expectations three years earlier. He has obviously since returned to Hollywood (or at least English-language productions) with the third Harry Potter installment and Children of Men. In fact, maybe the surprising thing is that he hasn't returned to Mexico, after También broke opening weekend box office records there.


This film, probably more so than Amores Perros, made Bernal known around the world (probably because he keeps getting nekked in it - how unfortunate...) Indeed, it is still his third highest grossing film at the US box office after the Brad Pitt/Cate Blanchett helmed Babel and the wildly acclaimed The Motorcycle Diaries. In También, Bernal plays Julio, young, and best friends with Tenoch (Diego Luna, who hasn't done too badly out of the film himself, though I believe he was the bigger star in Mexico going into production.) The pair meet the wife of Tenoch's cousin Luisa (Maribel Verdú), fresh in Mexico from Spain, at Tenoch's sister's wedding, where they inform them of their just-hatched plan to go to a beautiful, pristine beach known as Heaven's Mouth in the coming days, inviting her along with them.


Luisa shortly receives a call from her husband, away on business, informing her of his infidelity, and she phones Tenoch to take him up on the boys' offer. After madly trying to find a place that could pass as the fictional Heaven's Mouth, the boys pick Luisa up and they start off on their road trip, each dreaming of bedding the beauty.


The trip begins benignly enough, but quickly descends into fighting, aggravation, hatred, confessions of indiscretions with the others' girlfriends, and out and out hostility. Luisa gives up on them both, storming off on a deserted road, but they convince her to get back in the car on the condition that they give up on arguing and accept that what she says goes.

Because one picture is TOTALLY not enough.

Finally, they miraculously stumble across a perfect beach, and quickly all animosity seems to resolve itself, until the aftermath of their final night...


The film is an incredible study of friendship and of how it can go awry. A grown-up road trip about teenagers, it dares to mine emotional territory that so many other films of this ilk coming out of the studio system would never dream to go near. Sexuality in all its forms, death, drugs - it's all there for the taking. These two friends, with Luisa in the middle, who until then thought they knew everything about each other quickly come to realise that for two people from opposite sides of the proverbial track (Tenoch being rich, Julio being poor) there will almost always be things that the other can't understand. But beyond that, regardless of their class differences, there are so many things that human nature will dictate regardless. Jealousy and the havoc it can wreak on an otherwise unassailable bond is in the foreground here.


Luisa, nursing a secret, serves as a means to an end. By being older and wiser, she draws from them an attempt to prove themselves capable of understanding and relating to her, despite the attempts of the other to cut them down in a childish display of immaturity - whether lighthearted or not. Her willingness to surrender herself to the charms of the boys may seem initially cruel of her, like she is taking advantage of them to gain her own revenge, but when her secret comes out as the final scene of the film plays out you realise that she is not. Or if she is taking advantage of them, it is not from malevolence or vengeance or anything approaching it. She is as much a victim of the world they are all inhabiting as Julio and Tenoch.

How much do you want to be Maribel Verdú? About 4000 muches.

Bernal and Luna are superb in their roles. Every second of their friendship reeks achingly true, whether they are sharing a joint or screaming at each other. Verdú wonderfully inhabits Luisa, carrying off brevity when her face needs to be brave but rendering her heartache in private without a moment of artifice. Cuarón draws out the story, with a voiceover digressional narrative that could almost be out of place were its revelations not so beautiful and poignant, and plants you right in that car with them. The hand held camerawork from the CRIMINALLY UNDERRATED (you heard it here first... or at least most recently) Emmanuel Lubezki means that you actually are right there in the car with them, or at least running alongside.


Truly, nothing puts a foot wrong. The entirely diegetic score is not often there but always pitch-perfect, the crafting of the film (from editing to various on- and off-screen design elements) is spot on. 


It's rare, I think, that a film on the surface so light but underneath so deep comes along and plays like this one. The beauty and youthfulness holds hands and skips strongly along with the darker coming of age themes of the age of the boys and the secret of Luisa. It's 5 stars all the way, and after writing this I kind of want to go and watch it again.