The very strange Mariano (Noé Hernandez) rules a bizarre underground lair in Emiliano Rocha Minter’s WE ARE THE FLESH
WE ARE THE FLESH (TENEMOS LA CARNE) (Emiliano Rocha Minter, 2016)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, January 20
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
In his debut feature, twenty-five-year-old writer-director Emiliano Rocha Minter paints a horrifying vision of modern-day Mexico in We Are the Flesh. The film, a hit at festivals around the world, takes place in a kind of surreal, postapocalyptic underground hellmouth ruled by lunatic ogre Mariano (Noé Hernandez), who is delighted when siblings Lucio (Diego Gamaliel) and Fauna (María Evoli) come stumbling into his lair. As the three of them build a bizarre womblike structure, they engage in taboo acts that can best be described as foul, vile, disgusting, putrid, and demented — as well as strangely beautiful and maddeningly erotic — luridly photographed by Yollótl Alvarado on eerie sets designed by Manuela García. Esteban Aldrete’s threateningly pulsating score is interrupted by moans, screams, and occasional songs, several of which transform into oddly beguiling music videos. Minter also edited the film, with Yibran Assuad, maintaining a steady, sinister pace in which the audience awaits the next bit of craziness with both gleeful revulsion and terrifying excitement. Dialogue is limited and eccentric but gets the point across: “You were chosen by chance,” Mariano says, “and remember that chance is the most dangerous criminal who has roamed the earth.”
Mexican filmmaker Emiliano Rocha Minter’s debut feature is a violent, erotic fairy tale where anything can happen, and does
The film, which deals with various kinds of hunger as well as birth and rebirth, was inspired by the stories and pictures in sensationalist rags that are sold at newsstands throughout Mexico. “These newspapers remain unmatched as a gaze into a country that finds its pleasures in Hell,” Julio Chavezmontes explains in his producer’s statement. “This is the reality that Tenemos la Carne has dared to address. This is a film that is in total synchrony with its time and the ravaged country that gave it birth. It is a fearless, unprecedented vision of Mexico.” It’s also a film that goes where few films venture — with good reason, of course; watching it is like reading one of Charles Bukoswki’s more depraved stories: You know you should stop and put the book down, but you just can’t, in the same way you can’t turn away from Minter’s film. The dark tale evokes the work of such auteurs as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kenneth Anger, Gaspar Noé, Dario Argento, and Carlos Reygadas, yet it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen, a hallucinatory adult fairy tale with a twist ending that brings it all home. Opening January 20 at Cinema Village, We Are the Flesh packs a whole lot of punch into its maniacal eighty minutes.