Luis Alcoriza, Buñuel's most frequent collaborator during his Mexican period, debuts as a director in this refreshing and transgressive work about Mexican youth. Modernity in Mexico is represented by the youth in this picture, exploring the new generation of Mexicans, their radical ideas, vices, rebellious attitude, sexual liberation and overall americanization of Mexican culture that's still prevalent to this day.
The idea of sixties western materialism was just starting to take hold in Mexico and Alcoriza was the first one to portray this metropolitan scene, quite honestly and efficiently might I add. As such, the cinematic techniques are also modernized, Alcoriza directs with a notable influence of Nicholas Ray, something clear in it's text, mise en scène, composition and tone, some others have noted a French New Wave influence but it's not iconoclast enough in it's form to be such a thing, perhaps it's closer to a Jean Renoir or Fellini film and their way of criticizing the bourgeoisie (long, self-indulging parties conveying their boredom and escapism from life's real threats) more than the frenchmen of the sixties. Also, the film was shot before Breathless took over the world.
In some ways it resembles Los Olvidados a lot. It features a young generation lost in an adult world that they are not ready for. In Los Olvidados they were forgotten by their parents but in Los Jóvenes they were spoiled and badly prepared by parents who were also faulty and can't adapt or evolve with the times to begin with.
It drags a bit and its melodramatic touches are too artificial for me, unlike the raw and realistic Los Olvidados, but I suppose that's just a different approach altogether. This is more in line with the swinging sixties moralistic teenage dramas with one foot in the counter cultural territory rather than the cruel and raw portrait of human misery from Buñuel's film, but even the other Buñuel-Alcoriza collabs were commercial pictures that worked and managed to be paced better than this. Either way, this is an essential but somehow forgotten piece of Mexican cinema.
