I really liked the much praised Mexican movie Roma from a couple of years ago, and in my comments about it here, I noted the very distinctive and convincing (for want of a better phrase) sense of place it achieved (in its case, Mexico City in 1971.)
Last night I watched another Mexican movie on Netflix I'm No Longer Here, and again I was blown away by the direction and sense of place it gave.
Set only a decade or so ago, it cuts between the poor parts of the Mexican city Monterrey and a pretty seedy looking Queens area in New York. I had never heard of Monterrey before, but it's a distintive looking city because of the mountains surrounding it, and here it is on the map:
It is an arthouse-ish flim, which as I described in my Roma post, means you should expect more a "slice of life" story than much of a narrative arc.
But it's so interesting. I had not heard of cumbia music as such, but it is a key feature of the film, which indicates that there are youthful dance gangs in Monterrey who do not do much more than hassle their fellow school students for money to buy cumbia music and get into weirdly distinctive fashion. For a kind of gang, the one in the film seems quite innocent. But gang related conflict and violence still happens in the movie, and our hero has to move out of country and try and find his way living in Queens.
Here, the background to the setting is better explained at the start of this review:
With flashy dance moves and
even flashier hairstyles, the Cholombiano street culture of Monterrey,
Mexico exists at a cultural crossroads. Patterns of migration and
commerce have brought together this subculture’s preferred genre of
Colombian cumbia, the laggy mixes of Mexico City’s sonidero DJ style and the oversized garments of West Coast cholo fashion into this northeastern Mexican city.
It is in Monterrey where sounds and culture which have captivated the
rest of Latin America have risen up from. The Avanzada Regia movement
which took over Monterrey during the mid 90s laid out a blueprint for
electronica, alternative rock and hip hop in Spanish to spread into the
Spanish-speaking mainstream, at home and abroad. The corrido tumbado
movement, currently setting Mexican regional stations ablaze, might riff
closer to Sinaloa and Sonora-style folk ballads, but draws its core
from German polka and Texano influence hailing from Monterrey over a
century ago.
But unlike the many popular sounds and trends which spawned in this
city, the cholombiano way of life remained contained in the city’s
marginalized communities. In Ya No Estoy Aquí (I’m No Longer Here)
we are treated to an exploration of place and belonging through the
experience of Ulises Samperio (Juan Daniel Garcia), a cholombiano
displaced from the his home in the middle of an intensifying turf war
triggered by the Mexican war on drugs of the 2010s.
Monterrey as a centre of cumbia music in Mexico is was also discussed in this Vice article from 2018 (which also gives the impression that the city as a whole is pretty seedy.) As for the style of dancing to it, my son perceptively noted that its sort of similar to what Cab Calloway does on stage sometimes.
Anyway, I think the most remarkable thing about the film is the direction - there is not a lot of camera movement, but instead it's nearly all exquisitely composed shots in which the action happens (sometimes with the actors or objects moving in and out of the framing.) I love a fancy moving camera as much as anyone, but this shows how fantastic a movie can look with a stationary camera most to the time, but with great care for composition of every single shot.
Once again, a movie set in Mexico has made me strongly wish that I could visit there - if only it felt safe enough. I'm drawn to Asia enough that I like to joke that it's probably because I must have been East Asian in a past life; but if that's true, I am starting to assume there must be a Mexican re-incarnation in there as well.
