Babel directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

As an Academy Award nominee for best picture, “Babel” was a startling choice. The movie, which was written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is composed of three stories held together by a slender thread, and the mood is darkly calamitous; even the few joyous moments are suffused with dread. In the Arriaga-Iñárritu world, if something bad can happen it happens—hardly a typical American movie’s view of life. Earlier, the two men made, in Mexico, the bloody, turbulent “Amores Perros” (2000) and, in the United States, the dolorous “21 Grams” (2003), which starred Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, and Benicio Del Toro. Now, however, the collaborators have had a falling out (each claiming the greater credit for what appears in the movies). As they seem to be heading in separate directions, these fate-driven films can be seen as a kind of trilogy. All three send characters from separate stories smacking into one another in tragic accidents; all three jump backward and forward in a scrambling of time frames that can leave the viewer experiencing reactions before actions, dénouements before climaxes, disillusion before ecstasy, and many other upsetting reversals and discombobulations.

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Cinema

Book Review: The Night Buffalo By Guillermo Arriaga

Manuel loves Tania, his best friend Gregorio’s girlfriend. He is also having recreational sex with Gregorio’s sister. Tania has been sleeping with Manuel for a long time and may or may not love him, but is certainly obsessed with Gregorio. And Gregorio has committed suicide.
What could have been a trite story of youthful passions and betrayal becomes far more haunting and disturbing under Guillermo Arriaga’s pen. Gregorio is insane and brilliant, a doomed genius who manipulates his doctors, friends, and family and is fascinated with death and pain. Alongside, Manuel and Tania thread a delicate razor-edge of sanity, and never succeed in untangling themselves from the maze Gregorio has set for them. As Manuel recognizes, “Gregorio has not finished dying.” Within the scope of this book, he never does.
There are no chapters, no cleanly labeled time frames to ground the reader. Instead, the novel follows Manuel’s frenetic, desperate tumbles through past and present. The short, tense vignettes shade in the relationships between the characters and reveal most of all Manuel, tortured, desperate and tragic. Through his eyes, the women of this novel remain mysterious and merciless, uninvolved in the passionate angst of the men around them. They are an excuse for the actions of the men, not always the true reason.
Arriaga is more famous in the United States for his screenplays: the Academy Award-nominated Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Fans will find the same edgy, urgent pacing and troubled kaleidoscope of characters in The Night Buffalo, the first of three of Arriaga’s novels to be published in the United States.
The flawless English translation is just an added bonus. Alan Page, who has worked with Arriaga on all his screenplays, is a poet. His blend of sympathetic understanding of Spanish linguistic rhythms and taut, meticulous selection of their English counterparts creates a work beyond language barriers. This version will evoke the visceral response of the original text without ever allowing the reader to forget that this is Mexico City in all its tarnished glory. It is a work of art in itself.

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Mexican Literature

Review: Babel

As we wait for the result of the 7 Golden Globes nominations, here's another review of Guillermo Arriaga's Babel.

The third film from the writer-director team of Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Babel displays neither the ingenuity of Amores Perros nor the cohesiveness of 21 Grams. Like those earlier films, it focuses on a series of seemingly unrelated events - in this case, involving four families in four countries - that end up being connected to one another in ways that aren't immediately clear. Also like the two earlier films, it purposefully jumbles its narrative, unfolding its story in seemingly random fashion, without regard to chronology (although each story thread is told chronologically, the timelines don't match each other) or any other convention.

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Cinema

Interview with Guillermo Arriaga

Best known in the United States for writing the screenplays to "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams" - films centered around dramatic car accidents - Arriaga published three novels in Spanish before turning to cinema.

Arriaga now is on tour to promote "The Night Buffalo" (Atria Books), which is the first of his novels to be released in the United States. Originally published in Spanish in 1999, it features Arriaga's distinct storytelling style - a disjointed puzzle of flashbacks woven into layers of dreams and conversations that add up to a love affair in the aftermath of a suicide.

You can find the interview here

Interview with Mexican Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga

Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga likes to write car crashes into his scripts. It's a road accident in Mexico City that unites the three separate stories of Alejandro González Iñárritu's 'Amores Perros', and another that wipes out the children of Naomi Watts's character in Iñárritu's second film, '21 Grams' – which somehow makes it all the more worrying that Arriaga is now telling Time Out about his new film, the Tommy Lee Jones-directed 'Three Burials', while at the wheel of a car in his home country of Mexico. 'Don't worry,' Arriaga reassures me, 'I'll be careful.'

'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada' – to give it its full title – is a cruel but also compassionate and intelligent revenge tale set in the unforgiving desert between Texas and Mexico. It won Arriaga the prize for best screenplay after its world premiere in Cannes last year, where Jones also picked up the best actor award. So how did a famed Mexican screenwriter hook up with a celebrated Hollywood actor to collaborate on the latter's directing debut?

'I was driving once and my cellphone rang and it was Tommy Lee Jones,' Arriaga begins. 'He said he'd seen 'Amores Perros' and that he would love to have a conversation with me. We had dinner together in Los Angeles, and, you know, in cinema I think it's very important to work with people who have similar tastes. We talked about our favourite writers, our favourite films, our favourite actors. He has an impeccable taste. Well, he has the same taste as me.'

You can find the review here

Guillermo Arriaga - The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Guillermo Arriaga is the Mexican novelist turned screenwriter who gained international attention with his script for Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros (2000). Reportedly, Jones admired that film and invited Arriaga to visit his West Texas ranch. The two men became friends, one thing led to another, and the next thing you know, Arriaga had been commissioned to write a script that's not only a tribute to an American-Mexican friendship somewhat like his and Jones', but that also stems from an incident that had stuck in Tommy Lee's craw.
(...)
Arriaga's screenplay for Amores Perros contained a great deal of compelling surface energy and grit along with a tricky, Tarantino-like use of scrambled chronology, a device that further devolved into annoying mannerism in his and Iñárritu's next film, 21 Grams (where the narrative logic seemed to be: If you have a boring story, try jumbling the time sequence so thoroughly that the audience will be so busy figuring out what's going on that it won't have the chance to realize how banal the material is). Three Burials starts out in much the same mode, opening with the discovery of Estrada's corpse, then hopscotching backward in time to sketch the prior relationships of the main characters, and forward to follow Perkins' initial reactions to the crime. Thankfully, once the rancher sets off on his morbid odyssey, the time-shifting ceases and we're treated to a fairly straightforward story.

You can find the full review here

The first half of the movie is mostly shrewd, laconic character study. The script by Guillermo Arriaga, the great Mexican writer responsible for "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," lets the characters collide into one another: Pete, nearly weeping with unmanly frustration; Mike, bored and frightened, with "a face like a white rat," in the words of one border jumper unlucky enough to come up against him; Mike's wife, Lou Ann (January Jones), young and blond and not quite as empty as everyone assumes; Rachel, whom Leo plays as a sort of evolved floozy; Melquiades, who haunts those who meet him even while he's alive.
The second half of the movie crosses into Mexico and metaphor. Having pledged to return Melquiades's body to the tiny village from which he came, Pete pistol-whips Mike into coming along for the ride, and the byplay between the cowboy, his handcuffed captive, and the rapidly decaying corpse is grimly comic.

You can find the full review here