“Diaz manages to strike a balance between continuing the path of his first film and taking it to a whole new level in terms of means and ambition – a fact embodied by the casting of Bérénice Béjo in the lead role.”
In his feature film debut, Guatemalan film director César Diaz dealt with his country’s traumatic past – the military dictatorship and the civil war that lasted over thirty years until the 1990s. Our motherswhich won the Golden Camera at the Cannes Film Festival. This first film was based on the strenuous work of forensic scientists trying to identify victims of the massacres committed by the armed forces. As part of this task, the main actor also searched for his own father, a guerrilla fighter who disappeared in the 1980s and was probably killed. With his second feature film, Mexico 86Diaz seems to be expanding the story of Our mothers. Once again, there is the dead father and his son, executed by the military; this time, the boy’s mother, Maria, is also there, working for the resistance and forced to flee to neighboring Mexico. Mother and son are reunited years later when the boy’s grandmother becomes too ill to care for him – at the same time that the mother is ordered to have the names of the army officers responsible for the mass murder and torture published in a Mexican newspaper, putting her life in danger.
Diaz manages to maintain a balance: on the one hand, he remains faithful to the path of his first film (part of his crew remained the same for camera and music, for example), but on the other hand, he reaches a whole new level in terms of his means and ambitions – a fact that is embodied by the casting of Bérénice Béjo in the lead role. Mexico 86 navigates equally successfully between sharp action sequences typical of the spy genre (a chase through the city streets, a sudden murder in front of everyone’s eyes, shot in a single take) and tender scenes with the family. Diaz and Béjo make us believe in the authenticity of Maria in both parts of her life, through their shared ability to make the character and her scenes work in any context – the rhythm, the length, the editing are completely different, as is the actress’ performance – whether the sequence is suspenseful or intimate. Therefore, the film proves to be equally solid and moving in the two narrative strands introduced by its opening scene and the impossible dilemma it contains: either leave your child behind or everything you have always stood for and continue to fight for.
Maria is determined to keep both: being a mother and an active freedom fighter at the same time. Yet, heartbreakingly, we mostly see a woman who has no place anywhere. The film is the visual reflection of the limbo in which Maria lives, neither here (the place where she lives in exile) nor there (in her homeland). Diaz never gives us the full picture of her surroundings because the character herself does not. Forced to live constantly in hiding, she is little more than a ghost wandering around Mexico City, a city of which we, in turn, only see glimpses, like herself—the World Cup, alluded to in the film’s title, is mentioned but remains far from the screen. Since she has not been in Guatemala for over a decade, the events and history of her country reach her (and us) in indirect and incomplete ways, through logbooks of dead and tortured activists or brief archival footage and newspaper clippings. Back then Mexico 86 As the film takes place, Guatemala’s present looks bleak and Maria’s future even bleaker. She is on the verge of losing everything despite her best efforts, as the film ends by taking the point of view of the son left behind, possibly a representation of the director himself.
