Attribution: Fernando de Sousa from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A Road to Nowhere: Film Review of Gueros
By Geoff Carter
Available on Netflix
Cinema is the best of all visionary worlds because it incorporates so many elements of all the other artforms. It is a visual art. The frame can be as carefully composed, lit, and balanced as a Rembrandt painting (see Kubrick’s beautiful masterpiece Barry Lyndon), as carefully tinted and stylized as a work of Lichtenstein’s (see Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City), or the production can be as fantastic and otherworldly as another dimension (see Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings).
It is a narrative art. It can tell everything from swashbuckling adventure stories (Indiana Jones) to deeply internalized personal experiences (Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival), to disjointed, fragmented, and even surreal narratives (Robert Egger’s The Lighthouse).
It is a theatrical medium that has translated some of the world’s best dramatists to the silver screen (see Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, Robert Wise’s West Side Story, and Elia Kazan’s Streetcar Named Desire).
Because it is also a photographic medium, film can be a mirror reflecting our own reality. It can expose social injustices and disparities in either subtle or obvious ways (see Jordan Peele’s Get Out, or Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird) or portray our world with journalistic accuracy (see Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz or The Maysles Brothers Gimme Shelter).
Film is also, in the rhythms, cadences, and visual melodies of its editing—or montage, is very similar to music (see Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds or Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing). This is perhaps the most subtle quality of film but also one of the most important.
In short, film can pretty much do it all—but, probably most importantly, it is eminently accessible; everyone, on some level, can understand a movie.
Alonzo Ruizpalacio’s film Gueros, a picaresque tale that follows three aimless teenagers in their quest around Mexico City to find the legendary—and dying—folksinger Epigmenio Cruz before he passes away. The film is shot in a soft, almost faded black and white, giving it a surreal almost dreamlike feel. The opening credits offer the definition of the title guero: an unfertilized egg or a weakly pale man. The film then cuts to an opening shot of three oval objects floating in a round container. My first impression was that they were egg yolks but then, when Tomas (Sebastian Aguirre) reaches in and grabs one, they turn out to be water balloons—a prank waiting to happen.
In a device used throughout the film, Ruizpalacio cuts away to a completely different scenario—a young woman who is hurriedly getting prepared to leave while dealing with a squalling infant—and links it to the main story. After the woman gets out on the street, we see Tomas and a friend dropping a water balloon. After it lands on the baby, his mother decides to send him to live with his brother Fede, better known as Sombra, (Tenoch Huerta Mejia) in Mexico City.
Tomas arrives at Sombra’s ramshackle building to find a darkened and seemingly abandonded apartment. No one is home. Tomas stumbles about in the complete darkness and crashes on the floor. He awakes to find Sombra and his roommate Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris) sitting at the kitchen table. The two are students at the UNAM but are not attending because of a student strike which has blockaded the entire campus. They do little except lounge around their apartment. Their electricity has been cut off, so they filch power from the gullible daughter of a downstairs neighbor. Sombra notices Tomas is still listening to the Epigmenio Cruz (“my father said he once made Bob Dylan cry”) cassette their father had given them. In a touching scene, the three listen together through a set of headphones, enthralled by the music.
When Tomas reads Cruz is dying, he tries unsuccessfully to motivate the other two to see the folksinger before he dies. Santos and Sombra refuse to move, and Tomas storms out. But when the downstairs neighbor discovers the two stealing his electricity, he chases them and starts to beat up Sombra, who is saved by Santos. The two flee, picking up Tomas along the way. Thus begins their journey. Thus begins a road narrative not, in tone or thematic contnet, unlike Easy Rider.
Divided into chapters describing parts of the city, the film follows these young men as they first go to a hospital to treat one of Sombra’s panic attacks, get a lead on Cruz’s whereabouts, and then get lost on their way to the zoo, where the singer works. They are accosted by a gang of toughs, escape, and eventually end up at back at the University where they meet up with Ana (Ilse Salas) one of the strike’s leaders and Sombra’s sort-of girlfriend. They hang out, eat, go to a film preview full of high rollers and sophisticates, and continue in their quest to find Cruz.
The tone of the film—and the entire adventure—has a feeling of randomness and unpredictability, like a dream. Everyone simply takes things as they come. When a storeowner is accosted at closing time by a group of unruly students, it is Santos who (in another of Ruizpalacio’s seemingly disconnected narrative shifts) surprisingly comes to the aid of the owner, nearly causing a fight. When a boy throws a brick off a pedestrian bridge that hits Santos’s car, breaking the windshield and nearly injuring Ana, Santos and Sombra chase down the boy only to discover that they are outside of Epigmenio Cruz’s hangout. Serendipity is everything.
The sequence draws an interesting parallel to the beginning of the movie when another boy pulling a prank drops a water balloon on a baby. That results in a complete change for him. The dropping brick results in another change—the closure of their quest to find Cruz. Ruizpalacio’s narrative is circular in every sense. The group travels in a circle around Mexico City, they never seem to get anywhere, except by accident, and seem governed by forces beyond their control. Their independence, their identity, seems grounded in refusing to succumb to these forces.
Yet—except for Ana—these kids are hardly rebels, except maybe rebels without a clue. Sombra and Santos continuously exhibit a sort of passive aggressiveness, and it turns out their apathy is both their spear and their shield. Tomas, on the other hand, is so impassioned by the music of Cruz, he shames his brother and Santos into doing something about finding him.
Gueros is a road picture, a very subtle comedy, but it is at its heart a beautiful and tender character study. Sombra’s relationship with Aurora, the girl who lives below them—and from whom they filch electricity, is both funny and touching. When Ana holds her hands over Sombra’s face to surprise him at the zoo, the audience feels a flash of quiet intimacy that is usually too small to be caught on the big screen.
Gueros is a surprising movie. It flows as deliberately as a river over its characters as well as the audience. Sombra, Tomas, and Santos are the flotsam flowing along this river. The do not fight the current. They are good and decent kids who are letting life carry them along. They are a lost generation that sort of wants to be lost.
Gueros shares a number of similarities to some of the early French Impressionists and the works of French auteur Robert Bresson. This movie, like a piece of music, draws the viewer in. They are forced to internalize the emotions, to feel the current pulling them along. It is a wonderful, magical, and sometimes harrowing trip.