Güeros

There’s an embar­rass­ment of rich­es on offer in Alon­so Ruiz­pala­cios’ stag­ger­ing­ly accom­plished debut fea­ture, Güeros, a Loony Tunes-lev­el irrev­er­ent sight­see­ing tour of Mex­i­co City whose appar­ent over­tures towards a cer­tain type of arty, indie cin­e­ma are deliv­ered with tongue lodged in cheek.

Even though the game Ruiz­pala­cios is play­ing is one of arch self-aware­ness, the coup here is that while he’s fever­ish­ly decon­struct­ing and mock­ing cer­tain for­mal and tonal clichés, he also man­ages to attain a lev­el of sin­cer­i­ty on top of all the tom­fool­ery. It’s a bold act of acer­bic cinephile plate-spin­ning that Joe Dante in his hey­day could man­age – wink­ing with one eye, look­ing long­ing­ly into the mid­dle dis­tance with the other.

The sto­ry is catal­ysed by teen Tomas (Sebas­t­ian Aguirre) get­ting boot­ed out of his house when acci­den­tal­ly drop­ping a water bomb from the roof of his apart­ment build­ing on to the face of a cry­ing baby. He hooks up with his broth­er Som­bra (Tenoch Huer­ta) who has giant side­burns and suf­fers from ago­ra­pho­bic pan­ic attacks. News that one of their child­hood heroes – a trou­ba­dour who, as leg­end has it, once made Bob Dylan cry – falling seri­ous­ly ill, leads to an adven­ture out­side and around town, the goal being to get a val­ued tape signed by this musi­cal genius before he shuf­fles off.

Yet this sin­gle-serv­ing mis­sion swift­ly fans out into an After Hours-style state-of-the-nation runaround in which the broth­ers, along with room­mate San­tos (Leonar­do Ortiz­gris), amble around, prank­ing, jok­ing, chat­ting, bick­er­ing, and enter­ing into cod philo­soph­i­cal dia­tribes which often fall to pieces (hilar­i­ous­ly) before the point is made. En route, the team pick up Sombra’s wide-eyed ex, Ana (Ilse Salas), and it’s easy to see from the off why they are no longer an item: where Son­bra is unfo­cused, scat­ter­shot, impul­sive and iron­ic, Ana is hyper artic­u­late and force­ful, a polit­i­cal fire­brand who wants to effect change as a stu­dent rev­o­lu­tion­ary, not doss off and offer unheard com­men­tary from the safe­ty of the sidelines.

Plot-wise, this might almost read like a Mex­i­can riff on Fer­ris Bueller’s Day Off, but the real­i­ty couldn’t be fur­ther from this. This is more in the spir­it of Godard’s Bande à Part, or Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. And not just in its scin­til­lat­ing explo­ration of stunt­ed youth and meta slack­er­dom, but the way it con­scious­ly con­tex­tu­alis­es the actions and emo­tions as stir­ring­ly cin­e­mat­ic, scat­ter­ing moments of bliss­ful poet­ry along the wind­ing road.

The film is shot in black-and-white, in Acad­e­my ratio, and Ruiz­pala­cios instils the mate­r­i­al with a sat­is­fy­ing lev­i­ty by plac­ing empha­sis on the beau­ti­ful­ly banal – Ana putting on her lip­stick gets its own minia­ture jump-cut flour­ish. This is a major­ly impres­sive work, par­tic­u­lar­ly for a first fea­ture, and if Ruiz­pala­cios can make some­thing even half as impres­sive for a fol­low-up, it’d like­ly be bet­ter than 90 per cent of the stuff that makes it to our screens.