The Pursuit of Purpose in Gueros

Director, Alonso Ruizpalacios, was born in Mexico City in the late 1970s and grew up in the Distrito Federal area. The burgeoning writer/director worked on a number of short films and television series’ before his breakout movie, Gueros, was released in 2015. He has since gone on to direct Museo (2018), a film starring Latin American film icon, Gael Garcia Bernal.

A film about a group of misfits that exist on the fringes of both the political sphere and the physical sprawl that is Mexico City, Gueros received a strong critical reception in the mainstream press, with The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calling it a “very smart debut”.

Alonso Ruizpalacios speaking at a news conference for Museo

The film begins with our young protagonist, Tomas, dropping a water balloon on a woman and her child from the top of a building. He then flees the scene of the crime and is eventually caught by his stressed-out mother who decides to send him to live with his brother, Sombra, who lives with his housemate, Santos, in Mexico City.

Living a life of impecunious lethargy, Sombra and Santos, waste their lives slumming around the city trying desperately to both pass the time and discover the mysterious meaning behind the ‘continental breakfast’ – they even steal electricity from the flat below them in extremely creative ways. Such is their lacklustre attitude that when Tomas asks, “Why don’t we just go out?”, his older brother replies, “Why? We’ll just end up back here.”

These characters are truly lost and at the core of their disenfranchised self-loathing is the student strike occurring at the university. Set in 1999, the film explores the colossal student occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) which is the largest educational institution in Latin America.

The strike is a divisive force composed of a number of competing factions, many of which have a very different idea of how they want their demands to be met. Both Sombra and Santos are “on strike from the strike”; they worry about their upcoming theses’ and Sombra is even prone to having panic attacks. Away from these mass demonstrations of political will, our characters are merely shades or silent silhouettes living in one of the city’s towering skyrises. Sombra’s name even means “shadow” in Spanish.

However, throughout the course of the narrative, all of our central characters discover some kind of meaning in their lives and find an alternative to the marginalised alienation of growing up and becoming an adult.

The Absence of Kinship

From One Hundred Years of Solitude to Roma and even Fever Dream, there’s a recurring theme in many of the Latin American works I’ve looked at so far – the resilience of family ties in the face of social and economic hardship. With Gueros, however, there is a distinct absence of kinship that can be evidenced in almost all of the central characters.

Having been expelled from Veracruz by his mother, Tomas finds himself in a similarly distanced relationship with Sombra, who is being paid to look after Tomas for a short time. From the outset, Tomas is a financial gain to Sombra and nothing more.

In a similar way to Tomas, Sombra is also distant from his mother, a character he rarely keeps in touch with. Instead, he has forged closer relationships with his friends and has become enamoured by fellow student and vocal strike activist, Ana.

At first, Tomas finds it difficult to settle into a world in which he is far too young to really understand, but he soon becomes an integral part of the journey. Initially angered by the economic nature of his relationship with his older brother, Tomas soon begins to see Sombra as what he truly represents – a manifestation of what is to come for a man who is inherently distant from his own family. Sombra and Tomas are very similar characters detached solely by age.

A Panacea for Apathy

Indifferent, uncaring and politically apathetic, it would be an understatement to say Sombra and Santos are in a slump at the beginning of the film. Joined by Tomas, the trio spend the first part of the film making their way around the city in a series of out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire escapades which involves a fantastically shot panic attack scene and a hairy moment with a gang of thugs.

Tomas (left), Santos and Sombra

It is ultimately Tomas’ love for cult Mexican folk singer, Epigmenio Cruz, that eventually initiates the trio’s journey. Unable to return to their flat out of fear of their infuriated neighbour, the boys begin a journey to find the folk star, who is rumoured to have been so talented he even made Bob Dylan cry.

Their quest to find this Mexican icon is derailed slightly by the student strike and occupation of UNAM. For these young men, education is at the heart of everything and the strike is a constant reminder of the lack of that instruction. While in many ways positive, the strike represents a certain stagnation where the youth are forced away from their enlightenment.

However, it is through this digression that Sombra reunites with Ana and she joins the group’s search for Epigmenio Cruz. Ana, an embattled political protester at the forefront of the march, helps to bring Sombra and Santos back into the fray and imbues them both with a lifeline back into political motives behind the strike.

Ana, speaking at the student occupied UNAM

With their spiritual journey coming to an end, the group finally find Epigmenio Cruz, who sits alone in an unremarkable bar drinking pineapple juice and chain-smoking cigarettes. Tomas asks the legendary musician to sign his cassette, but Cruz bats it away without saying much. Sombra then goes into a long monologue about the impact of Cruz’ music and the meaning it has provided them, but by the time he finishes, the old man has fallen asleep.

This moment perfectly reflects the characters’ journey throughout the narrative. Cruz’s lethargy is a like-for-like reincarnation of the apathy conveyed by both Santos and Sombra earlier in the film. But, our characters can no longer identify with their hero for they have found meaning in their lives and are no longer afflicted by the malaise of disinterest.

Gueros & the Film Industry

“Fucking Mexican cinema. They grab a bunch of beggars, shoot a film in black and white and say they are making art films. And the directors, not content with the humiliation of the conquest, tell the French critics that our country is full of pigs, diabetics, sell-outs, thieves, frauds, traitors, drunks, whoremongers, people with inferiority complexes and the precocious.”

Inherent within Gueros is a commentary on Mexico’s well-established film industry. In the passage above, Sombra succinctly speaks out about the nature of Mexican cinema. This is perhaps is Ruizpalacios making his thoughts known about how Mexican directors convey an image of the country to the international community and why all things conveyed should be done so with a level of respect and responsibility.

Something of a hybrid film made up of different elements of Mexican cinema such as Y Tu Mama Tambien and Roma (which of course came out years later but is humorously relatable to the quote above), the movie also takes inspiration from cult movies such as Withnail & I, and Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.

However, while Gueros certainly appears to be another masterpiece of modern Mexcian cinema, at its core it strives to deconstruct and scrutinise the industry for which Mexico is so famed.

The film’s title refers to the slang used in Mexico and other parts of Central America towards people of a fair complexion. It also denotes eggs that are lost during incubation and is used derivatively as an insult to imply sickliness.

In many ways, that’s what Ruizpalacios’ first film really is to the wider world of Mexican cinema – a well-crafted, well-shot and well-written insult to the Mexican film industry. It is in its moments of poverty, ugliness and overriding apathy that it brings about moments of easy-going clarity, simplicity and truth.

While Mexican cinema is certainly booming, the film’s lasting message is that directors shouldn’t get carried away in portraying a land and a set of ideas not wholly representative of the truth.