El bulto

A modern or post-modern Rip Van Winkel story of as much relevance to the US or Europe as it is to Mexico and Latin America. A young protester of the sixties era is caught up in a demonstration and savagely beaten by government-sponsored thugs. Nursed by his loving wife and children, he awakens and must confront the both the changes and the continuities in the society that he has missed participating or viewing in the intervening period.

This is one of the best films on the impact of the rebellion of the sixties on contemporary society in any language or culture. While the literate US public has some knowledge of the protests in the United States, France, and possibly Czechoslavakia, it is not known generally that Mexico also had a great protest tradition and was rocked by a major student rebellion. In this film, directed and acted in by the creative and accomplished Mexican cinema and theater producer, Gabriel Retes, an activist who was badly beaten and in a quasi-coma for around two decades, awakens in the new world of the contemporary post-sixties and must come to terms with it. A Rip Van Winkel story for the postmodern era, fascinating and intriguing, highly recommended.

The fact that Mexican movies were seldom made during the early 90's is no reason to tag this amateurish film as a classic. It's a movie with an interesting sounding plot, shoddily executed.

Retes hires relatives for the roles, and boy, you can really tell they're not actors. Maybe I'm being unfair since almost all actors do an awful job during the movie. The writing's one dimensional and cliché-ridden and the direction is consistently unremarkable.

I read reviews talking about the "Mexican identity" that is portrayed in the movie. As if the identity of tens of millions people could be defined. The human expression in the movie isn't it even representative of Mexican behaviour, it isn't representative of human behaviour period.

This is no classic.

... to appreciate this film (but good luck finding a copy in the USA.) Reading IMDB's "external reviews" made me a bit ashamed of my fellow countrymen; the 3 "estadosunidenseados" there all panned it, and only a Mexican web site described it as "excepcional." At least the USA reviewer listed in the "newsgroup reviews" had the sense to give it 3 out of 4 stars, and that's about what it deserves. This Mexican Rip van Winkle tale has a lot of guts and a lot of psychological insight. If some viewers feel that leftist journalist Lauro, awakened from a 20-year coma to a very changed world, is a bit one-dimensional, hence unsympathetic, in his central role, perhaps they're just too young to remember how one-dimensional politics and society looked in 1971, the year Lauro is clubbed over the head by PRI thugs while photoing a demonstration that turns into a "police riot" a la Chicago 1968. Beyond that, I find that the scene where Lauro comes to in his hospital bed is very moving, and the exposition of his situation and difficulties afterwards is actually quite plausible. I wound up sympathizing both with Lauro and with his friends and family who are getting increasingly irritated with his failure to adjust to radically changed circumstances. The only complaint I have is that the ending-- the last few minutes-- seems very contrived and implausible. But then again, it is consistent with the Latin American literary tradition of "magical realism." Please excuse my fit of pique, but I don't think you should have to be Latino (I'm not) to understand that other cultures have different cultural practices, and their artistic products call for a certain discretion in judgment.

Interesting the jump from the period of the dirty war to the free trade agreement with the US as if that subjugation in the 90s was a consequence of the repression of socialism in the 70s, how there is no possibility or place for socialism in the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall as Fukunaga mentions in "The End of History and the Last Man" as well as the protagonist seems to have no possibility or place in the world in which he wakes up, that he is in a mindset of his twenties with an older body infers the falas perspective that revolutionary thinking is a thing of youth or immaturity that with the passage of time that impetus is lost and everyone ends up subjugating themselves to hegemonic power but with the conclusion that in every historical moment there is reason for the fight to go on and there is something to be said for it.