Chicuarotes

In San Gregorio Atlapulco, in the south of Mexico City, two teenagers work the buses dressed as clowns collecting change. What they make is never enough. Cagalera's father drinks and the house is violent; the boy makes a plan to get out of the district, and at every step the plan turns into a worse crime. The subject is not poverty but the exit being the next trap. No decision in the film produces an improvement; every solution generates the next problem until they arrive somewhere there is no coming back from. The form is hard and largely handheld. The neighbourhood was shot in real locations, most of the cast are not professionals, and the dialogue keeps to local speech. The title comes from there: chicuarote is what people from that district are called, and it carries a sense of stubborn and hard. It is Gael García Bernal's second film as a director. It screened out of competition at Cannes in 2019. Bernal does not appear in it. Benny Emmanuel and Gabriel Carbajal lead. Who it is for: viewers who like Mexican social realism. Who it is not for: anyone looking for hope; the film hardens to the end and rescues none of its characters.