Léalo en español
César Díaz, the 2019 Camera D’Or winner (Our Mothers), returns to the theme of guerrilla warfare in his native Guatemala in Mexico 86, his second feature. Diaz intertwines the story with that of the country of his citizenship: Mexico, with production support from the country where he lives: Belgium. This international collaboration should have been an advantage for the production, but it seems to have also left its mark on some creative decisions.
The jingle for Mexico’s World Cup was “Mexico 86, where the fun lives, Mexico 86, the world united by a ball.” This championship triggers the action of Mexico 86, when the repressive Guatemalan military leaders are invited by the Mexican government to the opening ceremony, to the indignation of human rights activists.
Guatemalan guerrilla fighter María (Bérénice Bejo, The Artist) lives in Mexico City, working as a proof reader at Proceso, a political publication, while continuing her clandestine activities. Her 10-year-old son Marco (Matheo Labbé), whose father was a guerrilla killed by the military regime, has been living with his grandmother (Julieta Egurrola) in Guatemala since he was a baby. When his grandmother can no longer care for him, she takes him to live with his mother in Mexico. Despite the opposition of the guerrillas’ high command, María stays with the child, even though it increases the danger for both of them, until circumstances force her to make a definitive decision.
Political cinema about Latin America, from Missing (1982) to Marighella (2019), shares a passion for a cause and the respect for historical facts even within fiction. The audience suffers along with the protagonists even if we know the outcome. Mexico 86 gives up much of the inherent passion of its story, perhaps to avoid being melodramatic. While sobriety is usually welcome in a story, it lowers the level of emotions necessary for this drama. Both the director and the protagonist are children of political activists and lived their respective childhoods in exile; this makes the film feel sincere, even if it is tempered.
The narrative perspective is that of the mother – the flip side of Clandestine Childhood (2011) – from the moment she leaves a baby a few months old, to her encounter with a virtual stranger ten years later. Bejo and Labbé are responsible for the film’s best scenes, those in which mother and son try to adjust to their cohabitation while protecting each other in the precarious life of clandestinity. The expected chase scenes cease to be stereotypical when there is a child among the persecuted and a woman who feels she has a duty to protect him. In Maria’s disjunction between “The Cause,” which aims to improve her country for future generations, and what she considers her duty as a mother – as well as in the unexpected ending – we find the passion that the film lacks at other moments.
It is unusual to adjust actual dates for a political story in film. On January 14, 1986, Vinicio Cerezo, the elected president of Guatemala’s first democratic government in decades, was sworn in. The elections were held thanks to international pressure and the denunciations made against the military by activists like the film’s protagonist. The Mexico 86 story could be real on that point: the magazine Proceso still exists, and even the actor who plays the editor is very similar to the real one.
But the armed struggle in Guatemala was obsolete by 1986, although activism and the fight for memory are still alive and well to this day, as the excellent documentary The Good Christian (2016) about the civilian trial of the genocidal general Efrain Rios Montt attests. In May 1986, if there was a government that should be questioned, it was that of Mexico and not Guatemala. The World Cup was far from being apolitical; Mexico’s President de la Madrid was booed at the opening ceremony for his poor handling of the victims of the earthquake that had occurred months earlier (never mentioned in the film) and for giving priority to a very commercialized celebration of the sport.
A year earlier, the repression in Guatemala was very strong, but Mexico 85 does not delve into the international scene. It has no jingle either.
Director, screenplay: César Díaz
Cast: Bérénice Bejo, Matheo Labbé, Leonardo Ortizgris, Julieta Egurrola
Producer: Delphine Schmit, Géraldine Sprimont, Anne-Laure Guégan
Production design: Pilar Peredo
Cinematography: Virginie Surdej
Editing: Alain Dessauvage
Sound: Bruno Schweisguth, Charles De Ville, Gilles Bénardeau
Music: Rémi Boubal
Production companies: Need Productions (France); Tripode Productions (France) in coproduction with Pimienta Films (Mexico) Menuetto (Belgium)
International Sales: Goodfellas
Showcase: Locarno International Film Festival (Piazza Grande)
93 minutes
In Spanish
