Cha Cha Chá Films: Three Mexicans with a Global Scope Come Together

Biutiful (2010), a contender for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, brings together three eminent film directors: Alejandro González Iñarritu as the director, co-producer and scriptwriter and Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro as co-producers. Starring Javier Bardem and filmed in Barcelona, Biutiful is a late sequel of Iñarritu’s Death Trilogy, which comprises of Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006). And it is also a continuation of his aesthetic, an aesthetic of accidental violence that unites and disrupts the lives of seemingly perfect strangers. The story centers on Uxbal, a lonely drug dealer who is trying to clean up his act and maintain his sanity, as he struggles to ensure the future of his children and make it in a poverty stricken neighborhood. His life, however, becomes even more complicated when he is confronted by an old friend from childhood, who is now a policeman.

But Biutiful is not the first collaboration between Iñarritu, Alfonso Cuarón and del Toro, who jointly own the production company Cha Cha Chá Films and who have been friends for decades. Although their interests are rather different, Cha Cha Chá has committed to produce at least five films in both Spanish and English, as part of its contract with Universal Pictures and Focus Features. The first one of the series was released in December 2008 and it was a comedy. Rudo y Cursi , directed by Alfonso’s brother, Carlos Cuarón, deals with the Mexican professional soccer league. Two brothers from a poor Mexican village, who are played by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, fight one another to be selected as professional soccer players in Mexico City. The film is a crowd pleaser, but also a bitter satire about the lives of the rich and famous and a sad reflection on the war between two brothers, which obviously has deeper meanings in the context in which it was produced. Although I personally did not dislike it and it did make me laugh, I am expecting much more from the three amigos, particularly from their third film.

Their third joint effort, called Saturn and the End of Days, is expected to be released in 2011. Details about the movie are not out yet. However, online sources (www.beyondhollywood.com, www.slashfilm.com ) cite del Toro, who revealed the storyline at the 2008 New York Comic-Con. This “ perhaps final, little movie about childhood and horror” of del Toro’s will focus on a boy named Saturn, who watches a movie about the end of the world while walking to and coming back from the supermarket. An unexpected theme again, which is not surprising of del Toro.
“It’s like, what would happen if the Apocalypse was viewed by you [while] doing errands. You go back and forth and nothing big happens except the entire world is being sucked into a vortex of fire. ” The director went on to say: ” In small movies you have much more control. If I say this is the design of the fawn and the girl is going to do this or do that, that’s me. In Big Hollywood movies, you get a 50-page memo. It’s horrible. Independent film making is like drawing a comic book, the Hollywood movie is like having five hands holding your hand while you’re drawing the comic book.”

Del Toro’s remarks about Hollywood and independent film making bring me to my main question. Where exactly do these three immensely talented directors fit in? On the one hand, some of their films were blockbusters, and were widely acclaimed by Film academics and critics. On the other hand, their unique interests and means of expression set them apart from the rest of Hollywood, but no longer grant them a place among obscure and unheard-of indie directors. Third, but not least, they are all Mexicans who deal with universal themes: violence, selfishness, childhood, horror, war, accidents, the psychological limits of human beings. When they do place their films in a specific time and place, it’s almost never Mexico or not only Mexico. And it often times is the US, for that matter.

We tend to categorize movies and directors, but under what category should these three names be mentioned? Mexican directors, Hollywood big names, special interest indies who were ”corrupted” by Hollywood? And should we even try to categorize them at all, given the scope of their work? One thing to bare in mind, though, is that, in spite of their success and with a few exceptions, all three have remained true to their original interests and themes. Iñarritu is still making films about the interconnectedness of a violent world that is fraught with accidents. Guillermo del Toro is still the horror genius, making films inspired from the comics that he himself draws. And Cuarón, who shares a bit of Iñarritu’s and del Toro’s themes, goes back and forth between sex and violence, childhood and violence and sci-fi. The above description of their themes is by no means complete, nor am I trying to be reductive. Rather, I want to underline the fact that they adhered to their original themes, which goes to show that truly talented directors who are honestly passionate about certain topics can make it in Hollywood without having to ”fit in” thematically. And that categorizing these three directors is an impossible feat, just like rejecting them for being too popular and too acclaimed is absurd. They are simply brilliant. Period.

We shall see what the future brings for Cha Cha Chá Films and for the three amigos. I was not impressed by Rudo y Cursi, but Biutiful and Saturn.. sound promising. And what is even more promising is the collaboration between these giants of Mexican and International Film, who have such different approaches to form and content. There is a slight chance that the result of their collaboration could be a disaster, a clash of very powerful and well defined styles. However, I don’t think that will happen. And I expect at least another film as brilliant as Amores Perros to come out of Cha Cha Chá Films.

Stephanie Grace and Racism in the Upper Echelons

For several days now, the name of Stephanie Grace has left anonymity only to become notorious. Why is that? Stephanie Grace is a 3rd year student at the Harvard Law School (HLS). And one night over dinner she had an argument with some colleagues, in which she expressed her opinion that African Americans are genetically predisposed to being less intelligent than white Americans. After dinner, just to make sure she made her point clear, she sent an email to her friends reinforcing her beliefs. The email was later forwarded to the association for African-American HLS students. And that's when the shit hit the fan. And that's when Harvard took it personally and her name became a synonym for racism in the upper echelons.

My two cents about this: I am divided with respect to the scandal. No, I am not racist nor do I think Grace is right. But must we watch out for everything we say, even in a personal email that was not initially intended for the larger public? In any case, public shaming is not the way to convince her, and dialogue might be a better option here. Also, this racist woman has now become the scapegoat for everything that HLS has not done to stop racism until now. Stephanie Grace is just one of the many racist Americans, and one of some racist Americans who attend Ivy League schools and other prestigious institutions. Let's have the issue out in the open, get a dialogue going about discrimination and try to convince these people that they're wrong. If we repress freedom of speech, we will allow racism to continue at the same scale but on a more secretive level, and maybe turn into something worse.

Clearly, there are still unresolved issues in the texture of the American society- and of any diverse society, for that matter. Racism, sexism and other types of discrimination are among these issues. And clearly, the way they've been dealt with up until now, which has been to pass a law and then turn them into taboos has not solved the problem. We need to be a little more thick-skinned and accept a dialogue about them, even if some might be offended by the opinions they hear. We might be able to change some minds with the right arguments. We cannot afford to avoid addressing discrimination any more.

Written Architecture: the Rise and Fall of the Ideal City

This is the English version of an article to be published in Humanize Magazine, a bilingual (Spanish/ English) magazine about the arts in general and indie arts in particular. Check out the website, it's awesome.

www.humanizemag.com

And here goes the article:

The exhibition hall at the Fine Arts Circle in Madrid was dark, and only the artifacts were well lit as if to put even more emphasis on something that stands out anyway. That something was mock ups of buildings and cities described in famous works of world literature, starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the One Thousand and One Nights and Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, on to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and up to Clarín’s The Regent’s Wife, Emile Zola’s Travail, Kafka’s The Castle and Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles. Curated by Juan Calatrava from the Technical School of Architecture in Granada and by Winfried Nerdinger from the Technical University in Munich, the exhibition Written Architecture is visiting Spain after a very similar version, Architektur wie sie in Buche steht, was presented in Munich in 2006.

The project is a dialogue between text and matter, between books, quotes and architectural models. Each model is accompanied by an early edition of the book it refers to. In addition to that, the walls of the gallery are replete with quotes from some of those books, turning the visit into a holistic experience of reading ideas and descriptions and then seeing their material execution. As if to make matters even more complicated, each mock up was created by a different architect or student of architecture. The dialectic format and the fragmentary approach reveal great humbleness and thoughtfulness on the part of the curators. Had the exhibition consisted only of mock ups, its purpose would have been too wide. After all, how do you encompass almost three millennia worth of writing and simply exhibit the architecture described in it? And how do you cast a judgment or a conclusion in a project like this? The answer is: you can’t. And Written Architecture doesn’t do that. Written Architecture poses questions, brings the texts to life in a new light and lets the visitors decide what their take home messages are.

There is nothing new to the concept that literature has an influence on all areas of society; that it has initiated, altered and did away with doctrines and ideologies. After all, Sigmund Freud himself claimed that he got his early ideas about psychoanalysis from literature. However, Written Architecture displays a different sort of literary influence, because it departs from the text, filters it through another artists’ consciousness and then turns it into a palpable production. Thus, each architectural model is a work of art based on another work of art. And this is what I find so innovative about this exhibition. It creates a space that brings together literary and scientific (architectural) imagery, a stage where both literature and architecture are protagonists in an unresolved dialogue.

The thing that struck me the most was the divide between earlier architecture and what comes after the 16th and 17th centuries. Up until this time, most mock ups display carefully organized cities and structures, with radial or rectilinear streets and clear centers. These represent the architecture of power of the Antiquity and the ideal cities of the Renaissance, all panoptical structures in which the center controls and watches over the peripheries. These were cities with Christian, Mesopotamian or Greek gods watching over them. This is Plato’s Atlantis, Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas solis (The City of the Sun) or Filarete’s ideal city, Sforzinda, described in his Treatise on Architecture (1463).

After the 16th-17th centuries, the age of Protestantism, what follows are godless cities and structures. Starting with the mock up of John Milton’s pandemonium from Paradise Lost (1667)- which was an obvious reference to Solomon’s temple and depicted the dangers of allowing the demons of knowledge to interfere with faith, to the model of Emile Zola’s desolate industrial city in Travail (1901) and the prison-cell representation of Umberto Eco’s abbey in The Name of the Rose (1980), modern literature inspired a dread of organization and hierarchy in architecture. Centers and grids become claustrophobic and life in such spaces is unbearable. The architecture of the past is now a utopia or a dystopia, subject of futuristic novels such as Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943), Ernst Jünger’s Heliopolis (1949) or Jules Verne’s The Begum’s Millions (1879).

So what about us, cosmopolites living in today’s major cities? What kind of a city is Madrid nowadays? Its imposing beauty and organized chaos is reminiscent of a different age, with an unquestionable god and a well defined hierarchy of powers. However, its new inhabitants turned religious buildings into art centers and built botanical gardens in train stations. I shall leave you with the question that crossed my mind upon leaving the exhibition. To what extent are we changing the old urban architecture and how much does it actually dictate how we live our modern lives?

Adaptation

It's been a long time since my last post, but I decided not to give up this blog altogether. Since I last posted, there was Halloween, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and Valentine's Day and 1st and 8th of March which are celebrated in Romania as the arrival of spring and women's day. It seems like winter's back though, so much so for the arrival of spring.

Anyhow, this is not a lame post about what I haven't written, but rather about what I have done lately, most of which has to do with film. The other day, I went to a screening of Carlos Saura's latest movie, Io, Don Giovanni. The film was ok, his speech was short and then he vanished. He didn't take any questions. I was a little disappointed, after all I was dying to meet him and talk to him after the movie. He left right after the movie started though. Ah well..

I have been watching my all time faves again: Requiem for a Dream, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And then I discovered Being John Malkovich. And Adaptation. Boy, is the latter brilliant. I was captivated right from the opening credits by the self talk that one can hear in the background. It sounded pretty much like anyone else's self talk. And mine sometimes. The protagonist, Charlie Kaufman, is a man who clearly lives in his head a lot. He is shy and self conscious and brings himself down all the time. Nonetheless, he is the talented screen player who wrote the script for Being JM. What I like best about this movie? How real it seems and how it tries to avoid cliches in a very Don Quixote-sque manner. Of course it doesn't manage to do so all the way, but neither does Don Quixote. The scenes that I liked best were the ones about the pollination of flowers; and his sexual fantasy with the author of the book he's trying to adapt, Susan Orlean. The latter goes like this. He can't sleep or write, he's lying in bed and looks at Susan's picture on the back of the book. And then he dreams they are making love. It's a cliche, but I like this metaphor of creation: book and screen play coming together. However, unlike the pollination of flowers, this scene is cut off by his self talk. The human brain yet again interfering with creation. Instead of doing what we are supposed to do and let the world recreate and renovate itself, like nature does, the human brain interferes with this process, generally with disastrous results.

I didn't like the ending, but overall Meryl Streep and Nicholas Cage contribute to a wonderful performance. I loved one of the quotes from the book The Orchid Thief, which I am of course going to buy and read now, mentioned in the film. "There are too many people and ideas, too many directions to go. I am starting to believe that the reason why it is so important to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size." How true! One can't take on the whole universe. But then how does one find something one cares passionately about?