Mexican Subversive

In many ways, the competition at the Academy Awards this year was more intense than it has ever been in several years. There was the poignant Boyhood, which captured the very essence of contemporary childhood. There was a powerful film about a poignant occasion in the Civil Rights Movement. There was a beautifully-painted Ruritanian fable which examined the Holocaust with a comedic touch. There were dramas, powered with exceptional performances, about disabilities. There was a biography of a mathematician in the World War helmed by a gifted actor. And there was a war film about America’s most deadly marksman. Yet all these worthies were blown aside by the intense imagination of the Latin American filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu. The filmmaker’s Birdman, a seemingly less ambitious story when compared to its contenders, won all the top awards at the function. It won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography. It lost out in the acting department, but Emma Stone, Edward Norton, and especially Michael Keaton must have been overlooked by the narrowest of margins.

Birdman is Iñárritu’s crowning glory. Shot with sequences spliced together so cunningly that it gives the impression of being shot in a single take, the film— about a washed-up star, once famous for playing a superhero, now wanting to make a comeback in a Broadway play—is such a rich black comedy that you can’t tell what the gag is on. Could it be a satire on showbiz and the blockbuster culture, or could it be a rumination on a larger issue, on ambition, loss, failure, and maybe even suicide? You can’t even tell if the lead is gradually coming apart, or if he is part of a magical fantasy. There is an existential despair that runs through the film. And yet the movie is funny. And like the drumbeats that keep pulsating through the course of the film, the movie has a swagger you don’t otherwise see.

Iñárritu started his career as a radio station host in Mexico, and later started composing music for feature films. He burst on to the scene with Amores Perros, undisputedly one of the best Latin American films to come out in several years. The film had multiple nonlinear stories converging around a tragic accident, a technique many filmmakers around the world later employed. He followed this with two Hollywood films, 21 Grams and Babel, told in a similar manner of multiple narratives, all of which were nominated for Oscars. These films were followed by the Mexican film about human trafficking, Biutiful. When you watch these films, all of them on solemn subjects, you don’t think Iñárritu is capable of delivering a comedy like Birdman. In an interview last year, when speaking about the idea of Birdman, Iñárritu claimed that during the time of Biutiful, he felt he was getting too comfortable and safe in his work. He was losing his sense of humour. He told Variety, “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to let go of the ladder.’”

Iñárritu, along with Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro, have been instrumental in bringing about a renaissance of Mexican cinema. Born within three years of each other, they are, unsurprisingly, friends. While Del Toro has his niche in fantasy and horror, and has been able to expand his vision in the genre to Hollywood’s rigid studio set-up, Cuarón has been someone who can bring art house sensibilities to commercial blockbusters. After making his name with the popular Mexican indie Y Tu Mamá También , he has helmed projects as varied as the fantastical Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and the dystopian Children of Men to the box-office blockbuster Gravity. Now Iñárritu has announced his arrival with a hilarious satire. Could the three, like they did with Mexican cinema, change the very way American studios make films?

About The Author

Lhendup G Bhutia

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