One of the perks of the film festival model is its ability to nurture talented filmmakers. These potential auteurs work their way up from selective short film programs to sidebars, hoping to eventually enter the big-league competitions of the European Three: Cannes, Venice and Berlin. Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios fits this description to a tee; after cutting his teeth on lauded short films, the director left the Berlin International Film Festival in 2014 with a justly-deserved Best First Film prize for “Güeros.” Ruizpalacios returns to the Berlinale — in Competition, no less — with the Gael García Bernal-starring “Museum.” It’s an endlessly entertaining, challenging investigation of history that confirms Ruizpalacios’ status as the next big thing in Mexican cinema.
“This story is a replica of the original,” we are told at the outset of “Museum.” The film is a facsimile of a true story, shaped around the notorious 1985 robbery of famous Mayan artifacts from the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. The instigator is Juan Nuñez (Bernal), a 30-something career slacker who still lives with his overbearing parents. A buddy movie in the mold of Bernal’s breakout “Y Tu Mamá También,” his charolastra-in-arms Benjamín Wilson (Leonardo Otizgris) also has daddy issues, burdened by his gravely ill father. Their plan is to execute the heist—think a DIY “Rififi,” breathless execution and all — over Christmas, while the museum is closed for repairs. The true challenge comes after: how do the thieves fence the goods, which are some of the most recognizable pieces of art in Mexico?
The look and movement of “Museum” roots itself in the vitality of Mexican culture, setting the film apart from the tactile misery of Carlos Reygadas or Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s early work. Director of photography Damián García’s lensing is a 180-degree turn from his black-and-white effort on Ruizpalacios’ “Güeros,” imbuing this film with a color palette that draws upon the saturated hues of Mayan artifacts and the Acapulco locales in the second half. An early sequence in which Juan goads Ben into a William Tell routine — with a Rubix cube in place of an apple, a bow and arrow instead of a gun — announces the aesthetic like a swatch.
Editor Yibrán Asuad’s contributions are even more pronounced, making use of all the New Wave techniques he can muster: split-screen, irises, jump cuts and flashbacks are all fair game. The heist itself is a significant formal highlight, concluding with a montage of tentatively held mannequin poses set to the whirs and clicks of a slide projector. As was the case with “Güeros,” the influences are unmistakable but the delivery of these unconventional tricks is fresh and clever.
The cast is a healthy mix of name-brand stars in Latin American cinema — Bernal, of course, being the most visible, also picking up an executive producer credit — and holdovers from “Güeros,” including Otizgris as Ben and Ilse Salas as one of Juan’s sisters. This Venn diagram of talent fills out Ruizpalacios’ cynical slacker world and its collateral heartache in the fallout of the theft. A dramatic showstopper between Bernal and his father (Alfredo Casto, astonishing in Golden Lion-feted “From Afar”) breaks through the genre shell to reveal the wounded feelings at the movie’s center.
Just as he did with “Güeros,” Ruizpalacios directs a critical eye to the revolutionary, yet compromised ideals of Mexican youth. Early in the film, Juan criticizes his mother for using the English word for “fruitcake,” always skeptical of the influence of capitalism and American culture on Mexican society. He proves to be a hypocrite, wasting his days playing “Space Invaders” and he owns a stack of cassettes. Worse than that, he’s a holier-than-thou jerk, and the Christmas setting gifts the audience with some hilarious evidence of Juan’s selfish values. Details pile up to explain this attitude; Juan is often insultingly addressed as ‘Shorty’ by his sisters, but the label ‘Whitey’ cuts deeper with its implication that he is not authentically Mexican.
“Museum” introduces numerous moral complexities without providing solutions to any of them. The nagging question that hovers over the picture is what has motivated protagonist Juan to carry out the heist. At first glance, Juan is another of Ruizpalacios’ hypocritical revolutionaries, advocating for indigenous rights from a decidedly bourgeois vantage point. This issue of who the artifacts truly belong to — Mayan descendants or the Mexican government — becomes inseparable from Juan’s insecurities over his identity. As absorbing as “Museum” is, it remains uncommonly ambivalent and uncritical.
Like the equally historically introspective work of Pablo Larraín —even borrowing Castro from the Chilean helmer’s stock players — “Museum” can overwhelm at times. The overstuffed film brings a few loaded threads — Juan encounters a porn star he idolizes, for example — that distract from the primary themes and hinder the pace. At the same time, the touching motif of the relationship between fathers and sons does well to fill out the piece and provide relief from the ideological stakes. Quoting Juan in voiceover, Ben intones, “Why ruin a good story with the truth?” With “Museum,” Alonso Ruizpalacios challenges the spectators to squint for glimmers of that truth in the frame. [A-]
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