A SEVEN-FILM variety pack under the Maya Entertainment indie-film label is touring in eight markets with sponsorship by Blockbuster and Verizon. The show hits San Jose showing in rotation starting Aug. 27 at Camera 7 in Campbell.
The septet of films feeds various tastes, from family-friendly to David Fincher grisly. The easy best of show is Backyard, an ambitious, well-directed thriller by Carlos Carrera (best known for 2002’s The Crime of Father Amaro).
The setting is Juarez’s Maquiladora zone in the mid-1990s, the perfect hunting grounds for a serial killer: a boom town drawing cheap labor up from the economically depressed south of Mexico. The protagonist is an unpretty hardboiled female cop, Blanca Bravo (Ana de la Reguera), who is trying to solve the hate crimes against women that have made Juarez infamous—this, despite police corruption and government obstruction.
She is helped by volunteers as well as a bearlike radio DJ (the excellent Joaquin Cosio), who keeps tabs on the various official stories as they change from day to day.
Carrera has made a movie that couldn’t have been safe to make, since the killers are still at large, despite a fictional character whose final cornering and confession gives the audience some closure. It’s strange then, how well made and concentrated Backyard is—how it gives you a volume of information and yet doesn’t sprawl; how it opposes the ichor- and iodine-colored borderlands tag-team films that became so popular with the rise of Paul Haggis and A. Gonzales Innaritu.
The subplot about Juanita, a Chiapas girl (Asur Zagada) who seems destined to fall into the murderers’ hands, isn’t meant to cream us with tragedy; we see how much the excitement and opportunity of the city gets under Juanita’s skin. The film doesn’t judge her, even when the excitement turns her head.
Even if the police chief laments the no hay, no se puede (“don’t have it, can’t do it”) unofficial motto of the Juarez cops, Backyard finds some stark beauty in that city, as well as in the mountains and the savaged desert around it. Lastly, de la Reguera’s Bravo deserves a bravo of her own.
Tropico de Sangre has Michelle Rodriguez as the martyr Minerva Mirabel growing up in Trujillo’s Dominican Republic before—as we see in a pretty clumsy bracketing sequence—she and her sisters were politically assassinated in 1960. The reign of Trujillo, a Caribbean Caligula, is stray history for most viewers, despite such movies as In the Time of the Butterflies, The Feast of the Goat and the bad Harold Robbins roman à clef The Adventurers, which is more specifically about Porfirio Rubirosa. Trujillo was the kind of feverish tin-pot dictator who renamed the nation’s highest mountain and the capital city after himself. Certainty, novice director Juan Delancer has cooked up a scary Trujillo (Juan Fernández).
Rodriguez, who co-produced, saw this as a chance to play girly instead of just steely; her Minerva Mirabel, a crusading lawyer, gets to do a little dancing, is serenaded while surrounded by candles and models some chic 1950s outfits. This is an honorable tale about a brave woman; unfortunately, the Saw-level atrocities are grisly, to the point of ambiguity (sometimes you wonder where the historical lesson ends and exploitation begins).
The Rio-based, Sex and the Cityish film In Therapy concerns 40ish mad housewife, Mercedes (Lilia Cabral), math teacher by day, painter by avocation. She unveils her life to an unseen therapist, regarding the dissatisfaction that led to her divorce, which her ex-husband (José Meyer) describes as “turning one boring life into two exciting ones.” The jokes are good, and the pace is sprightly in José Alvarenga Jr.’s slick, amusing girls’-night-out movie. Sadly, some retro attitudes are revealed: Mercedes’ best buddy is absolutely shocked to hear that her friend masturbates.
Also in the lineup: Sólo Quiero Caminar, about a squad of women taking on drug dealers; Chasing 3000, which chronicles Roberto Clemente’s search for his 3,000th hit juxtaposed with a tale of a sick child who steals a car and heads to Pittsburgh to see it happen; and The Dry Land, about a returning Iraq vet (Ryan O’Nan) dealing with his experiences in Texas, with Melissa Leo as his mother.
Maya Indie Series
Aug. 27–Sept. 2
Camera 7 in Campbell
