| Spain, 2020 | Postmodern | Author Work | Trailer |
This particular movie caught my attention during my weekly check-out on the movie roster of my usual theatres. It promised “a delicious melodrama in the style of how they were made in the age of Golden Hollywood, without any dialogues, and collage-ing footage from the 40s-60s together”. This thing was too weird for not trying it out. I was not disappointed.
Well, I’ll try to explain my experience in a reduced text.
My Mexican Bretzel starts with a disclaimer addressed to the audience. The absence of sound in the movie is intended. The mixed usage of different film formats is also intended. The fact that the narration is presented with subtitles, without adding any other further accompainment, is also intended. Enjoy.
The movie shows different footages featuring a high-class couple in an indefinite post-WWII age. They are seen living their life in society, they travel to different places and countries. Most of the times we see the female member on screen, with a perennial smile on her face, posing and acting for the camera while living, or acting, her life out. Did she enjoy being filmed? Did she act on purpose? Was her true life different from what is immortalized in the small films her husband recorded throughout their marriage life? We will never know.
The images act as an accompainment -ironic, considering that they’re the most visible part- for a text. In form of subtitles, fragments of the personal diary from a woman called Vivian Barrett are slowly presented to the audience. No sound. No music. Only the filmed footages and the text are the reality we need. We presume that the life we see in the pictures is the life of Vivian and her husband, Léon, considering how more or less they fit with the content of text. Vivian bares her soul to us. How she lives her story with her husband, her hidden desires and anguishes, her rues, reflections… They are only presented to us. The images, clearly showing a “funny” socialité marriage life, could belong to Vivian’s story. But they don’t bare everything. They’re the appearance, whilst the “soul”, the hidden part of the story, is the text. Non-visual information.
The story of Vivian’s life is typical, as we have seen in many other historical dramas. What is inovative is the way it is presented. It acts as a kind of a separation between appearance and interior, between public life and hidden personal life, to us the audience. The blunt, barely decorated way of showing us everything highlights the feeling of impression and empathy we need to tie with the movie. It’s a puzzle that moves in two different environments. Whilst the conventional movie form is analytic -the audience feels different things from a single source-, this movie here is synthetic -the audience feels an unique impression from two different sources.
But this isn’t the true attractive of My Mexican Bretzel. The main concern of Vivian in her diary is how to bear the truth. A lie is just another way of telling a truth. The whole movie is a lie. It turns out, the very existence of this movie is a lie. There exists no Vivian. There exists no diary. All references seem to be real, but they aren’t. The couple in the video aren’t Vivan and Léon. The whole story is a lie. The footages are, however, real. They are taken from existing reels recorded by a domestic camera by a real couple, 60 years ago. Those were the grandparents of the movie’s director. She found those recordings when she inherited their house after they passed away. The director invented a story out of these little bits. Seeing the slices of the life of her grandparents when they were young suggested her another different story. Thus, even her grandparents are ultimately a lie to her. She converted them in posthumous actors. They indeed become Vivian and Léon. For the audience, they are Vivian and Léon, and the director’s grandparents never existed in consequence.
My Mexican Bretzel is a powerful movie. As simple as it is, it delivers a whole ton of cinema. It even becomes metacinema. This movie has SUBJUGATED four festivals in this country already. Can’t wait to see how the rest of the world will react to it.
Do yourself a favour and watch it.