Aimless Youth: Part II

GUEROS (C+) - This debut feature reeks of film-school artifice. It is far too precious and self-indulgent to pull off its wistful depiction of '90s-era student unrest in Mexico City.

Shooting in stylized black-and-white, Alonso Ruizpalacios unloads his bag of tricks and overwhelms what could have been a touching road movie -- "Duck Season" meets "The Motorcycle Diaries." Cliches abound. The shaky camera running after a character through winding streets. The manic pixie dream girl (protest leader Ana (Ilse Salas), reduced to being an object of lust and longing). Elevator doors opening with the car missing, leaving a view of the deadly shaft. Preciously choreographed crowd scenes. Young men striding in slow motion. Meta-commentary has the characters remarking on the quality of the film they're in.

Young Tomas (Sebastian Aguirre) is too much for his mom to handle, so she ships him off to live with his older brother, Federico (Tenoch Huerta), a.k.a. Sombra (Shadow), and his fellow slacker roommate Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris), killing time while idled from school during the protests and shutdowns. They pick up Ana for a lazy road trip.

That's where I lost the connection. Ruizpalacios runs the title gag into the ground -- Tomas is much lighter-skinned than his brother (he's a guero, or paleface), and those around him keep bringing it up, to little effect. Tomas clings to a cassette tape of an old balladeer, Epigmenio Cruz, a favorite of their father's. A charming device involves each character taking turns at various times putting on headphones and sampling the cassette. When they don the headphones, the soundtrack goes silent, the opposite of what you'd expect; in this way the mystery builds about Cruz, who becomes the eventual object of the youngsters' epic journey. It's a magical touch, but it's just about the only organic element in an overly mannered films

But I'm a crank. Critics (and the audience I was with) loved this movie. Here's a sampling of the positive reviews:

Salon magazine:

It’s a gorgeous sound-and-vision journey through a mystical or mythical space that has echoes of the 1960s Paris of Godard and Truffaut and the 1980s New York of Jim Jarmusch.

The AV Club:

Even if "Güeros" doesn’t entirely work, it feels worthy: a film made independently and without interference whose reverence for the past thankfully doesn’t result in too much solemnity or seriousness. 

RogerEbert.com

Best debut feature I’ve seen in the last year, best Mexican film in recent memory, and best (black and white) cinematography since Pawel Pawlikowski’s equally stunning but very different “Ida.”

The New York Times:

The story pops and swerves; the images are by turns comical, banal and ravishing; and the result is a briskly shaken cocktail made of equal parts provocation and comfort. You come away with a buzz that is invigorating and pleasantly familiar.

Variety:

The personalities here feel genuine, as if a group of friends had banded together to make a movie just a few degrees removed from their real lives — a la “Clerks” or “Swingers,” though not nearly as conceptual, plot-wise.

Eh. Meh.