Broadly speaking, the major filmmakers to have come out of Mexico over the last three decades—Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Gerardo Naranjo—are bound by a sense of showmanship. They design their films to astonish, incorporating some flashy camera movement, composition, or edit into every scene. Their work carries on a tradition that can be traced back to Orson Welles, F.W. Murnau, and even Georges Méliès—call it the cinema of attractions, in which practically every shot is meant to assert the medium’s power to transform reality. Museo, the second feature by Mexican writer-director Alonso Ruizpalacios, belongs to this tradition too. Moment for moment, it’s one of the most enjoyable movies around; Ruizpalacios is clearly drunk on the possibilities of filmmaking, and his enthusiasm is infectious. In fact his direction is so engaging that it successfully distracts from his shortcomings as a storyteller. The narrative of Museo pretty much falls apart in its last third, but even then the formal playfulness inspires goodwill. The film serves as a reminder of Welles’s famous assertion that cinema is the greatest train set you could ever give to a boy.
The film’s first climax is a lengthy sequence that plunges viewers into Juan’s dysfunctional home life. Set during an extended family gathering on Christmas Eve, the passage finds Ruizpalacios switching to a documentary-style approach, with handheld camerawork and jumpy editing that communicate a sense of chaos. Viewers come to understand, through snatches of dialogue and the general milieu, Juan’s complicated relationships with his four sisters, his parents, and his uncle (another black sheep of the family). These people all love him, though they’ve long been exasperated by his slacker lifestyle. Ruizpalacios returns to Juan’s perspective with a graceful tracking shot toward him as he sits at the dinner table, a spotlight gradually rising over him; the change in perspective points to his alienation from the rest of his family as well as his fixation on robbing the museum. It’s not long before he decides to move up the robbery to this night (he and Wilson originally planned their heist for closer to New Year’s Day); before he leaves, though, he inadvertently shows his nieces and nephews where their parents hid the Christmas gifts, ruining the holiday.
irected by Alonso Ruizpalacios. In English and subtitled Spanish. 129 min. Fri 11/16-Thu 11/29. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.
