66 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
In Issa López’s film, victims of drug-cartel violence haunt a Mexican town.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
DEAD QUICK
“Tigers Are Not Afraid ” and “Give Me Liberty.”BY ANTHONY LANE
ILLUSTRATION BY R. KIKUO JOHNSON
W
e never learn the name of the
town in which “Tigers Are Not
Afraid” is set. What we do know is that
it’s in Mexico, and that, for two equally
frightening reasons, it’s a ghost town.
One, the streets are pretty much de-
serted, thanks to the drug cartels, and
the only school we see is closed after
a nearby gunfight. Two, the innocents
who are massacred, in the cartels’ quest
for power, will not take death lying
down. They muster in spectral gangs,
hissing their demand for justice. Even
when somebody is murdered, he stands
there afterward, surveying his own
corpse. Later, he sits on a swing and
complains of feeling cold. The dead
seem more alive than the living.
The men in the movie, which is writ-
ten and directed by Issa López, are ei-
ther yellow-bellies or brutes. Look at
El Chino (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), a
local politician, who is running for office
and doing all that is required, and more,
to guarantee his success. Or the Huas-
cas, the roaming thugs who execute his
orders. Or the cops we meet, in a squad
car, who, when presented with damn-
ing evidence of El Chino’s barbarous
methods, pull away fast, hellbent on
not getting involved. Men, however, do
not own this tale. The bulk of it be-
longs to women and children—the
folks who bear the brunt of the dam-
age in almost any conflict zone but
whose fates, all too often, are tucked
away in the shadows. Folks like Es-trella (Paola Lara), a placid girl of
around ten, who lives alone with her
mother, until the day she comes home
and finds no mother there.
Before long, hunger drives Estrella
out of doors. To be precise, it drives her
up, into the relative safety of the roof-
tops. There she encounters a pack of
kids—orphans, runaways, and scaven-
gers—even younger than her. In charge
is a boy named Shine ( Juan Ramón
López), who has a stolen gun, a sto-
len phone, and a half-burned face that
looks too old and too weary-wise for
his age. (Anyone who recalls “Pixote,”
Héctor Babenco’s startling 1980 drama
about a child in the slums of São Paulo,
will think of Shine as Pixote’s kindred
spirit. Seven years after the film’s re-lease, the actor who played Pixote was
killed by Brazilian police.) Shine’s com-
rades are Tucsi (Hanssel Casillas), Pop
(Rodrigo Cortés), and Morro (Nery
Arredondo), who can’t or won’t speak.
So small is Morro that he can curl up
inside an abandoned television, star-
ing out through the void where the
screen used to be.
That is a typically fertile image from
López, and her film is forever suggest-
ing that the urge to tell stories about
oneself, and the nourishing virtues of
play, can be a means of survival. Some
kids lark around with crime-scene tape,
yards away from a body on the side-
walk. Others burn a discarded grand
piano for fun. Shine and his crew hole
up in what was once a fancy house,
where ornamental fish, freed from their
tank, still dart about in a puddle on the
concrete floor. Upstairs, the lads enjoy
a game of soccer, inking numbers on
one another’s bare backs, with a per-
manent marker, to make up for the
want of shirts. We are worlds away
from the Edwardian coziness of “Peter
Pan,” but there’s a definite tinge of the
Lost Boys in these gleeful desperadoes,
and Estrella, in teaming up with them,
becomes a kind of instant Wendy;
within days, she goes from losing a
mother to mothering. Mind you, when
she plants a calming kiss on Morro’s
brow he wipes it off as if it were dirt.
I’m not sure that you can name your
heroine Estrella without summoning
memories of Víctor Erice’s “The South”
(1983), which takes place in the long
wake of the Spanish Civil War. The
Estrella in that film, whom we see at
the age of eight or so, at the time of
her first Communion, and again as a
teen-ager, seeks to fathom the secrets
of her beloved father, with his burden
of despair. (We sense that the genera-
tion gap has been stretched, by national
trauma, into a gulf.) Before her came
Ana, the little girl in Erice’s master-
work, “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973),
who is entranced by a showing of “Fran-
kenstein” in the village hall. López, who
likes to hurry us through the plot, may
lack Erice’s tranquillity, and few direc-
tors can match his uncanny ability to
balance the inward with the political,
yet “Tigers Are Not Afraid,” like Ana,
seems quite at home with monsters. It
gets its claws into you, and won’t let go.