De la calle
****/****
starring Luis Fernando Peña, Maya Zapata, Armando Hernández, Mario Zaragoza
screenplay by Marina Stavenhagen, based on the play by Jesús González Dávila
directed by Gerardo Tort
by Walter Chaw Gerardo Tort's primal scream of a debut, Streeters is a sepia-soaked DV exploration of the teeming underbelly of Mexico City's sprung metropolis, as well as another in an ever-evolving Mexican cinema that, film-by-film, takes on the spirit and ferocity of the French Nouvelle Vague. This more a Godard than, say, Alfonso Cuarón's Truffaut-ian Y Tu Mamá También, Streeters follows every-urchin Rufino (Luis Fernando Peña) as he rips off a corrupt cop to secure safe passage for him and his girlfriend and infant child. Even as Rufino takes a paternal responsibility for that dream of emancipation from the mind-forged manacles of the inner city, a stray comment leads him on a search for his own long-thought-dead father. Courageously, unremittingly bleak with brash elements of the classical structure of Greek tragedy, Streeters is the height of unblinking realism, punctuated here and again by a marvellous symbolic intelligence and marked by extraordinary performances from Peña and the feral, lovely Maya Zapata as Rufino's girlfriend Xochitl. With images as sticky as those in any film this year, the under-bridges and sewers of Mexico City alive with the taint of ruined youth and humanity, Tort's first film is one of promise, it goes without saying, but also one of lasting importance and ineffable power. Taken with Robert Denerstein's (of the ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS) "Critic's Choice" selection at this year's DIFF, Marisa Sistach's inspired Violet Perfume (also starring Luis Fernando Peña), Streeters begins to secure a heft and a place among the best films of what may be the most exciting emerging cinema in the world.
