As Julio orders another rum and Coke at the bar, Luisa glides by, all in white, her beauty and sophistication captivating Julio’s gaze. This tension between the adolescent primordial desires of Tenoch and Julio and that of the adult world and travel is evident at the wedding where they first meet Luisa. The camera (and audience) trespass across the figurative border of Ana’s doorjamb, not exiled as much as visually disinterested in the copulation to come. He continues, “Or any gringo backpackers,” to which she replies, “Gross!” Though the audience is rooted in the confines of Ana’s messy bedroom, Cuarón is already asserting a notion of place and travel, home and otherness.Īs the couple callously jokes about ethnic groups with whom Ana will not engage with sexually, ranging from “Irishmen” to Tenoch’s father, the camera creeps out of the room as stealthily as it has crept in. After climaxing, Tenoch instructs Ana, “Promise you won’t fuck any Italians” while she is away for the summer in Italy. Utilizing a shaky handheld camera, the scene starts with the lens tracking into a room as Tenoch has sex with his girlfriend Ana. In the very opening shot of the film, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki renders the audience as voyeur. And it is the beach (the mysteriously allusive and biblically named “Heaven’s Mouth”) that becomes the central destination and geographical focal point of his fourth feature film, Y Tu Mama También (2001). Cuarón moves between borders, subject matter, and style as ceaselessly and comfortably as a wave combing the beach. From sci-fi, to Hogwarts, and from sex comedies to a children’s story, this director is as stylistically hard to pin down as he is deliberate in the projects he chooses to direct. Both of these films feature highly stylized mise-en-scene, from the luscious costumes, sets, and artwork ( Great Expectations includes a myriad of paintings and charcoal portraits by Italian painter Francesco Clemente) to his motif of sea green.Ĭuarón’s acute attention to detail and his narrative, temporal, and spatial fluidity, often allow his feature films to feel recurrently new, fresh, and unexpected-he is not a classic auteur of the Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock, or Martin Scorsese ilk. After that first bowwas met with resistance in his home country (a tragicomedy about a playboy whose nurse fakes his positive AIDS test), because the Mexican government refused to distribute it, Cuarón’s filmic excursion to America resulted in A Little Princess (1995) and Great Expectations (1998). ![]() Since his directorial debut Sólo con tu pareja (1991), Alfonso Cuarón has straddled different countries and genres.
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