In the opening scenes of Alonso Ruizpalacios’ Güeros, teen troublemaker Tomás (Sebastián Aguirre) pushes his luck too far, prompting his mother to pack him off to live with his college-aged brother Sombra (Tenoch Huerta). Unfortunately, this tale unfolds in Mexico City in the spring of 1999, when university students went on strike to protest steep tuition increases. Thus, Sombra and his roommate Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris) languish idly in their grabby apartment, mooching electricity from their neighbors. Tomás cannot tolerate such indolence, so when he learns that rock legend Epigmenio Cruz is hospitalized and near death, the trio is soon on their way across the capital to pay their respects. However, what begins as a fanboy whim gradually becomes a sprawling, two-day urban odyssey, with detours into the city’s criminal underbelly, elite cultural circles, and the tinderbox of radical student politics.
Shot in black and white with an eye for evocative, slightly absurd detail, Güeros’ most obvious touchstone is Jim Jarmusch’s early deadpan comedies about scruffy losers and their strange journeys (Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law). Yet director Ruizpalacios infuses his film with a more robust current of social realism than Jarmusch’s features possessed, not to mention a liveliness born of its Latin American setting and prickly politics. The script by Ruizpalacios and Gibrán Portela is dense with allusions to the 1968 student movement, as well as the enduring lines of class, race, and color in Mexican society. (A droll running joke involves all the characters who comment on the contrast between dark-skinned Sombra and the much lighter Tomás.) Nonetheless, the overall atmosphere of the film is melancholy rather than provocative. Güeros is that rare, remarkable work that conjures a time and place with splendid precision in order to educe timeless truths about the human yearning for identity and purpose.
Güeros will screen nightly at 7:30 p.m. on September 11–13 at Webster University’s Winifred Moore Auditorium. Admission is $6 (cash only).
