In the early 2000s, Mexico turned yellow on screen. From Guadalajaran parking lots to Sonoran deserts, any scene in which tropical heat, air pregnant with danger and lurking baddies congregated got a sepia sheen. Notoriously nicknamed “The Mexican filter”, the wash dominated Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic” and later appeared in “Breaking Bad” whenever chemist-turned-drug-baron Walter White crossed the border to expand his criminal empire. Mexicans duly added Hollywood’s new favorite trick to their ever-lengthening list of movie clichés, alongside gold-toothed thugs, meek domestic help and live-wire dealers. Movies about Mexico became, in effect, filtered through a strange, yellow lens that dominated the country.
For a place often creatively sieved through a foreign lens, it’s unsurprising that art carves out elements of this vast and varied country and offers a distorted taste of Mexico. But screen entertainment, so easily consumed as an alternate version of reality, should perhaps be held more accountable for its portrayals.
So how accurately is the foreigner-in-Mexico character depicted? Do we have the subtle expat equivalents of Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” or Wong Kar-wai’s “Happy Together”? Certain characters might have lodged in our minds like beloved, unbudgeable roommates, including the tequila-fuelled clowns of “The Three Amigos,” lovesick sirens a-la-”Night of the Iguana” and “Under the Volcano”-style doomed dreamers.
With Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ “Queer” now primed for release, I’ve been contemplating lesser-known examples. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of films from the last decade in which Mexico is the loyal host, incomers are troublesome guests and the usual tropes have been disinvited, even if they occasionally gatecrash.
Rotting in the Sun (2023, dir. Sebastián Silva)
One to avoid watching with your great-aunt, pet parrot, or anybody who might accidentally relay what they saw at a lunch party, “Rotting in the Sun” sees director Sebastián Silva playing a barely fictionalized version of himself lounging around Mexico City with post-pandemic fatigue and a drug-fueled death wish.
After accidentally rescuing real-life Instagram star Jordan Firstman in a “Baywatch”-style meet-cute in Zicatela, the much paler, more nihilistic protagonists return to the capital, where Jordan relentlessly pursues Sebastián to make him ‘actually famous’ by collaborating on a film. Black comedy morphs into a nudity-filled thriller as Sebastián vanishes, leaving Jordan to play the lead in his own detective noir, assisted and obstructed by scenester friends, a nervous whippet and a paranoid maid.
Savage and explicit, this is Lars Von Trier on a Hitchcockian odyssey loose pun intended). Go to the filming location in La Roma and you might just see the film’s extras wandering around with lattes in hand and dogs on leashes, calling their friends about existential dread.
On MUBI, with a subscription.
Sundown (2021, dir. Michel Franco)
Flashing past with the dramatic subtlety of a sunset, “Sundown” is one of Mexican auteur Michel Franco’s best. Tim Roth, with blissful disassociation, plays Neil Bennet, a Brit whose holiday in Acapulco with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is disrupted by their mother’s death. Pretending to lose his passport to avoid returning to reality, Neil embraces inertia by joining those who, as Robert Frost described, “turn their back on the land.”
Migrating between grimy hotel room and grimy beach with lover Berenice, Neil stares at the ocean while Alice single-handedly manages their family fortune made in pig slaughterhouses. The drama is masterfully underscored by complex undercurrents as everyman Neil suffers the extraordinary, visceral effects of the lineage of traumas that founded his inheritance. Eerie and moving, “Sundown” is like that final hour on the beach, when tan and beer have morphed into burn and dread and evening has arrived far too soon.
On Amazon Prime US, or with a Now subscription.
Sundowners (2017, dir. Pavan Moondi)
Discovered, admittedly, while searching for the last film, it’s maybe telling that this low-budget Canadian flick didn’t put Franco off his title choice nor threaten to knock shoulders with the 1960 Western of the same name. “Sundowners” follows thirty-something Alex, a down-and-out photographer sent to Mexico to shoot a wedding, who ropes in equally down-and-out friend Nick to pose as his assistant.
The film meanders as the men navigate the doomed wedding, doomed romances, doomed finances and a slightly doomed plot. But there is something curiously watchable about this indie, with its pretty handheld visuals, improvised dialogue and cast of non-actors. An off-kilter bromance becomes a warming Sunday night watch you don’t turn off, even if you realize halfway through you’ve got the wrong film. There’s something strange, though, about the Cancún-like setting and the taxi driver’s accent. This mystery is swiftly solved when a Google search reveals it was all filmed in Colombia.
$5-9 on Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, YouTube and more.
Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015, dir. Peter Greenaway)
A film about filmmaking, another with unblinking nudity and — finally — one without the word “sun” in the title. Don’t let that put you off this wacky tale about the godfather of auteur filmmakers, Russian practitioner Sergei Eisenstein, attempting to make his ultimately abandoned 1930 revolution flick “Que Viva Mexico!” It’s got all the flamboyant, motor-mouth hallmarks of British director Peter Greenaway, which prove to be fitting bedfellows alongside Mexican surrealism and Russian zaniness.
Eisenstein, played by Elmer Bäck, is having his first love affair at the age of 33 in this paradisical country that has driven him wild with passion, having been shunned by Hollywood. The film doles out delicious dollops of 19th-century architecture, peering up at Porfirian buildings as though dropped into the middle of a birthday cake, making a great advert for Guanajuato, where the whole film was shot. Like its sometimes-forgotten protagonist, this is a film worth keeping in mind for its risk-taking eccentricity.
$5.99 on Amazon Prime or with a BFI Player subscription.
499 (2020, dir. Rodrigo Reyes)
Very much a voyage across an unknown land, though whether seen through the eyes of a foreigner is debatable. 500 years after the first Spaniard set foot on Yucatán’s shores, a 16th-century Spanish conquistador makes a pilgrimage through modern-day Mexico. He meets broken families of murdered activists, visits schools where children march uniformly, witnesses clandestine deals in clubs downtown and observes a damaged landscape.
As the blank-faced Spaniard, mustached and armor-clad, paces across the paradise his counterparts crossed half a millennium before, he absorbs the resentment and confusion of its living descendants. Half documentary, half fiction, Reyes infuses his film with beauty and anger in equal measure and plays with our understanding of time and trauma, debating whether the two can ever really be separately processed.
$3-9 on Amazon Prime or Apple TV+, or with a Criterion Channel subscription.
Bettine is from the Highlands of Scotland and now lives in Mexico City, working in film development at The Lift, Mexico’s leading independent audiovisual production company.