La delgada línea amarilla

The Mexican film La Delgada Línea Amarilla (2015) (The Thin Yellow Line) is a road movie very different from all the other road movies I've seen - five hired men (followed by a dog) walk 200 km on foot, painting a yellow dashed line on a stretch of a road in Mexico. As the task takes days to be finished, the group faces a few events they need to deal with. It was written and directed by Celso García who, in a very ingenious way, created and managed the filming of a simple story that is at the same time inspiring and engaging, in which the five characters get to know each other and create bonds of friendship as they travel along the road doing their job. It was one of the best movies I watched in 2022.

Nice movie about ordinariness of life. A man who has lost everything, founds a new reason to keep living. A travel watched from 5 different points of view. A Well made sound and photo work, showing Mexican desert in its whole beauty. A very watchable movie. If you like to see something different, watch it.

I found this movie by accident and have shared it with my family. I enjoyed it so much I bought it to watch again since I found it was no longer available anywhere. I wish it had subtitles so I could share it with my non speaking Spanish friends. I am familiar with some of the actors. I love the story line and how each character has their own story they share as they work together on this journey while learning to paint the thin yellow line. The hot sun, the rain and the obstacles they encounter they still find time for humors stories. Their compassion for each other and the dog begins to rub off on their boss even though the ending is not a happy one. I love this movie and will continue sharing it with whom ever can understand Spanish.

The Thin Yellow Line just played the Palm Springs International FilmFest. Having lived and worked in Mexico many years ago, I was immediately struck by its ring of authenticity. Everything about it reflects workaday life in "blue collar" Mexico. The story centers around a down-on-his-luck working stiff, Toño (Damian Alcaraz), encountering an old acquaintance who hires him to ramrod a crew of misfits (four guys who might have been picked up at some Home Depot parking lot) to paint a centerline on a back-country road in northern Mexico--210 km. in 15 days. The five of them, a beater pickup, an antiquated walk-behind spray painter, a wheelbarrow, and a dog undertake their own little odyssey. The task is simple; new challenges appear daily. Over a couple of weeks, what starts as a band of bothers becomes, slightly twisted, a band of brothers. The language, the horse play, the problems they encounter and their solutions to them are totally, characteristically, the Mexico I once knew. Because work pivots the plot, Thin Yellow Line exalts the working man in a way that few films of this genre do. Billed as a comedy (and occasionally quite funny), it's a minor-key Homeric, authentic slice of life in working class Mexico. An enjoyable film to watch, its awards are well deserved.

A gang of five road laborers has the task of painting the discontinuous yellow line between two Mexican towns, under inclement sun, camping during cold night and finishing the work before the rains come. The crew consists of a watchman, a waiter, a circus worker, a thief and a truck driver, all previously unemployed. The instruction is to take five steps painting the line with a machine that atomizes the paint on the road and then take another eight steps without painting. This strategy is similar to the structure of Celso García's script, who debuted as a director with "The Thin Yellow Line", under the auspice of producers Bertha Navarro ("Reed: Insurgent Mexico"), Alejandro Springall ("Santitos") and Guillermo del Toro ("The Labyrinth of the Faun"). The idea is valid. The problem is that every eight steps equates to pauses in the action so all five men can make forced statements of their personal pasts. In contrast, the five steps of work are the most interesting. When the five men work or solve obstacles, their actions define them better than their (often-overemotional) recitations of what happened to them in the past. The five actors are very good and they do the best they can with their dialogues. But besides this weak point of the script, you have montages of scenes of "camaraderie" with gay music, overused resolutions and shots (for example, when a patient is carried in gurney, we the audience watch the ceiling and lights), a bitch that adds the "Disney touch ", a short flirt with a beautiful girl, plus a gruesome ending. As a result it turns into a poor drama instead of a plausible first work.