Special Guests 2007
Alfonso Cuarón
Visionary Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón has charmed Hollywood, Mexico and Europe with his relentlessly inventive and impeccably achieved films. But besides working in industries across the world, he has proved to be one of the most versatile storytellers of his generation –covering the spectrum of genres, with elegantly crafted family films like his break-through feature, a screen adaptation of the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess (1995), or the stylized third installment in the Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) to box office hits like the sexy coming-of-age pic Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001), and most recently, the dystopic near-future epic Children of Men (2006).
Despite the pronounced stylistic difference between the films, Alfonso Cuarón’s works coincide in their express desire to establish a connection with the new generations—that is, each one of the filmmaker’s creations seeks to capture something of young people’s experience of the world, whether through the enchanting story of a little girl, the dark fantasy world of Harry Potter, the misadventures of two young upper-class boys or the nostalgic anti-hero roaming a post-September 11th biotechnocratic world, plagued by xenophobia and civil turmoil. It is as if the driving force behind each of Cuarón’s ventures is to awaken a critical consciousness among his young audiences—to offer cinema as a powerful tool for scrutinizing, exalting, reshaping and reframing an existing reality.
Y tu mamá también, featuring ebullient performances by Gael GarcÃa Bernal and Diego Luna, conquered audiences with its vibrant portrait of teenage lust for life, and tackled prudishness on both sides of the border with its explicit treatment of an unrestrained eroticism. But alongside the cheerful buddy road- movie fare, a dark theme emerges on the margins of the film. In the glimpses of images that pass through the windows of the boys’ car, allegories of Mexico’s socioeconomic crisis flash–mimicking the spontaneous consciousness of the adolescent protagonists, but impressing their own truths onto the story’s powerful social commentary. In Children of Men, perhaps visually, the polar opposite of Y tu mamá también, with its bleak, fatalistic representation of the world in 2027, Cuarón uses a similar device: frames within the frame offer images that constantly allude to the iconography of late-capitalist, war ravaged society: the oh-so familiar images of wailing women, refugee camps, mutilated bodies that have been hammered into our brains by the mass media. Scenes which, in our everyday lives flash on TV screens without arresting our gaze, here, like the micro-movies sliding across Y tu mamá’s car windows, awaken us to our increasingly mediated social experience. In Children of Men, the camera is constantly floating, activating the antagonistic relations between the characters of this sci-fi parable and an environment that is as volatile as the men who populate it. For Cuarón, in the flicker of the images is the moment of truth and the possibility of change.
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