In the eye of the zeitgeist

In a shady plaza on a tranquil Sunday morning, Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear are having a quiet chat about murder. Framed by a high stone wall, their surroundings are postcard-picturesque: the mustard-colored, 17th century Santa Catarina Church, antique wooden balconies garnished with potted geraniums, stands of graceful trees. Nearby, strolling vendors show off hand-woven rugs to worshipers en route to morning Mass.

It could all be pure Hollywood artifice, a quaint illusion for the benefit of the rolling cameras. But apart from the two movie stars, a dozen cafe tables and a handful of extras, the setting is pure Mexico City, an authentic sliver of the artsy-genteel Coyoacan district on this far-flung capital’s south side.

Wait -- what’s wrong with this picture? This is Mexico City, right? The most desperate and treacherous metropolis in Latin America outside Bogota? The city that, as Vanity Fair magazine once gushed, possesses an “exciting air of lawlessness”? A kidnapper’s Shangri-La, the Detroit of the 19th parallel, urban modernity run amok -- you know, that Mexico City?

Make no mistake, it’s still here. Both in reality and in movies like Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Amores Perros” (2000) and Tony Scott’s current “Man on Fire,” this restless mega-city of 20 million people has a well-earned reputation as a place where you’d best watch your back. Ever since the great Spanish surrealist director Luis Bunuel shocked Mexicans with his bleak vision of their capital in “Los Olvidados” (1950), numerous auteurs have mined Mexico City’s grittier aspects, with visually harrowing results.

But other images of Mexico City also have begun seeping into pop-culture consciousness, as makers of low-budget independent Mexican films and a handful of Hollywood directors attempt to convey a sense of the city’s rich, contradictory texture, its precarious balance between ancient and modern, grinding poverty and cosmopolitan elegance, beauty and brutality.

“This city is so unique-looking,” says director Richard Shepard, who has been here since March directing a cast that includes Brosnan, Kinnear and Hope Davis in “The Matador,” a black-comedy thriller that he also wrote. “There’s so much old architecture and so much new architecture. New York and L.A. and Prague and a lot of the cities people shoot in are a little overused. Here it was more like, ‘How do we narrow our choice [of locations] down?’ The city is a character in the movie, there’s no doubt.”

Great cities go in and out of vogue for reasons that don’t always please tourism officials. In the pop culture of the 1960s, Rome epitomized the jet-setting hedonism of la dolce vita. In the 1970s and ‘80s, New York was depicted as an open sewer of moral entropy and social pathology in the movies of Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet, the novels of Tom Wolfe and Jay McInerney and the apocalyptic hip-hop of Grandmaster Flash. Practically since pop culture began, L.A. has signified wretched excess, a distinction later claimed by Las Vegas.

Today, New York has been Giuliani-fied and gentrified, L.A.-as-postmodern-wasteland is a tired cliche, and even the dialectical cool of the “new” Berlin is sooo Wim Wenders. Instead, it is Mexico City that may become the first emblematic metropolis of the 21st century. From marquee movies like “Man on Fire” to lesser-seen films like Gerardo Tort’s “De la Calle” (“Streeters”), an intimate saga of street children, and Julian Hernandez’s improbably titled “A Thousand Clouds of Peace Fence the Sky, Love, Your Being Love Will Never End,” a mytho-poetic odyssey of homoerotic longing, Mexico City is being promoted and popularized as a hyper-intense, high-contrast landscape where fear and desire, the global and the provincial, profound alienation and tender human connection all mash together.

Above all, the new visual iconography of Mexico City tends to focus on its reputation as a massive car wreck of a town, where danger can erupt into violence at any minute and intimations of mortality may cast a shadow anywhere -- even in a beautiful church square on a serene Sunday morning.

Authentic Mexico

It was this violent and unpredictable image of the Mexican capital that many cast and crew members of “The Matador” were bracing themselves for when they arrived here to begin shooting several weeks ago. The film, co-produced by Brosnan’s Irish DreamTime company, stars the actor best known as British Agent 007 as a jaded, spiritually bankrupt hit man named Julian Noble. During a business trip to Mexico City, Julian has a breakdown and soon after meets Danny Wright (Kinnear), a recently downsized, down-on-his-luck Denver businessman, at a bar. Gradually the men form an unlikely friendship that leads them vicariously into the nitty-gritty of each other’s lives: Julian’s lonely but seemingly glamorous globe trotting, and Danny’s conventional but troubled suburban existence with his beautiful wife (Davis). The film is scheduled for release in 2005.

Like millions of other U.S. and European tourists, Brosnan and Kinnear say they’d spent time lolling around Mexican resorts in the past but had never set foot in the capital before. “All the places I’d been to were very gringoistic -- is that a word?” Kinnear says during a break from shooting. “You hear all the negative side of it, the violence and the kidnappings and the pollution,” says Brosnan, acknowledging the trepidation some “Matador” cast and crew had felt about working here.

But instead of a Third World combat zone, they have discovered a dynamic city steeped in 700 years of history, where an Aztec pyramid, a Beaux Arts palace and Latin America’s tallest skyscraper all sit within a few blocks of one another. A city where perfect strangers bid each other good afternoon, the subway system runs smoothly most days, and the art museums, parks and restaurants are packed on weekends.

As for the city’s uglier side, there has been one nasty incident in which a crew member got robbed of about $200 and a cellphone. Yet overall, the moviemakers say, the city they’ve encountered isn’t the one that pop culture and the mass media prepared them for. Even so, they’ve taken precautions.

“It’s a little different for us,” says Kinnear, warming to the irony of the situation. “There’s a lot of insurance taken out. They don’t need any harm or difficulty or lost actors. They don’t want us traipsing around back alleys. I’m sure if you come down here as just a regular person without [knowing] what you’re doing it could be dangerous. But that’s not the sense I get -- as I glance over to my bodyguard to the right! He will kick your [butt], man! I haven’t been driven around in an armored car before. So yeah, I feel absolutely safe here!”

Though “The Matador” is a genre film, Shepard says he wanted “to turn the hit-man genre a little on its head.” Beyond an obligatory bombing scene or two, the movie shapes up primarily as a very modern tale of misplaced identity and emotional rebirth, of two lost souls who find new meaning through their friendship -- and through contact with a strange new environment. “There was talk of, ‘Should we go to Spain ... ‘ and I was like, ‘No, this is it, this was written for Mexico, we should be here,” Shepard says.

Filming of “The Matador” has taken the crew across the metro area, from Coyoacan to the massive Plaza de Toros bullring to the gleaming Fortune 500 corporate towers of Santa Fe, to the Camino Real hotel, a kind of cubist reimagining of a pre-Hispanic monument. “The architecture here is so much more interesting than what’s going on in America, it’s night and day,” Shepard says. “The new buildings here are so much more coolly designed and interesting.” The film also is making extensive use of Mexican grips and other crew members, several with experience working on “Titanic” and other big-budget movies shot in Mexico.

To the surprise of the film’s producers, Mexico City and its environs also have proved varied enough to stand in for other locales: Denver, Budapest, Tucson, even the Philippines. “It’s just such a layered society,” says Brosnan, scarfing down a banana sandwich in his trailer, “and it’s not one that you can really make a passing comment on in one visit. It’s a culture which works on so many levels of aesthetics, sensuality, violence, passion, religion. And that’s what’s kind of intoxicating about it.”

Beyond the explosive images

Only the most Panglossian of tour guides would argue that Mexico City isn’t a place to be reckoned with. Crime rates are high, poverty endemic, the traffic is horrendous, and the air barely breathable at times. While the privileged elites barricade themselves behind stone walls and razor wire, even they aren’t beyond the reach of Mexico City’s abundant hazards.

It is this image of the planet’s third-largest metro area that has suffused world cinema and popular culture in recent decades. “Amores Perros” depicted Mexico City as a dog-eat-dog society where the rich, the poor and the middle class inhabit grotesquely different environs and make contact only through chaotic head-on collisions. “De la Calle” (2001), which swept Mexico’s version of the Oscars, collapses the unwieldy city into the cramped, precarious quarters of a group of street children. And “Man on Fire,” in which Denzel Washington takes bloody revenge on a gang of kidnappers, envisions a city on the verge of blowing apart, like the massive volcano Popocatepetl that hovers above it.

But beyond these explosive images, viewers may glimpse a more complex, parallel Mexico City, whose details gradually are coming into focus. “Man on Fire,” like “Amores Perros,” captures the metro area’s astonishing variety, as Washington and his cohorts hop-scotch from the rough-and-tumble Los Arcos barrio to the modish Condessa neighborhood. Rather than serving as empty travelogue, these scenes convey the city’s tensions and dramatic juxtapositions.

“It’s a dangerous city but a very exciting city and a very sexual city,” says “Man on Fire” director Scott, who shot a previous film, 1990’s “Revenge,” in Mexico and is working on another, “Tom Mix and Pancho Villa.” Scott added another touch of authenticity to “Man on Fire” by casting several Mexican actors, including the telenovela (soap opera) star Carmen Salinas. Being a native of England, Scott says what he misses most about living in L.A. is “the antiquity of Europe. L.A. is devoid of that culture, but Mexico obviously has it.

“I think Mexico is a fantastic -- I wouldn’t say untouched -- country in terms of filming,” he adds, “but I feel I have a vision of what I want to do with it.”

Because only a relatively small number of Mexican films have been translated into other languages -- even during Mexico’s cinematic “golden age” from the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s -- foreign movies such as Sergei Eisenstein’s semilost masterpiece “¡Que Viva Mexico!” (1931) and Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” (1969) have colored how the world sees Mexico. And despite the attention paid to a recent cluster of Mexican films including “Amores Perros,” “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” “Like Water for Chocolate” and “Sexo, Pudor y Lagrimas” (Sex, Shame and Tears), on average only a couple of dozen movies a year are produced in Mexico. For better or worse, movies made by foreign (read: Hollywood) directors are likely to shape outside perceptions of Mexico and Mexico City for some time.

Undoubtedly, the most influential film ever set in Mexico City is “Los Olvidados,” or “The Forgotten Ones.” (Its more sensational English-language title is “The Young and the Damned.”) Fusing surrealist imagery with documentary-like social commentary, it tells the story of two juvenile street-gang members locked in a bitter rivalry that echoes the city’s internal conflicts. Bunuel shot tin-roofed shacks alongside gleaming new highways. He photographed a crucial murder scene in front of an unfinished high-rise building -- a symbol of the ruling elite’s unfulfilled promises. Among the characters in “Los Olvidados” are uprooted rural peasants, who flocked to the city when Mexico’s traditional farming economy collapsed in the mid-20th century. “Los Olvidados” ends unforgettably with a man’s body being tossed onto a garbage dump.

Ironically, Bunuel had come to work in Mexico at the invitation of the Mexican government, who hoped that the famous Spanish auteur’s presence would lend cachet to the national arts scene and showcase the government’s social agenda. Instead, Bunuel captured an ugly reality that undercut official claims that Mexico was striding boldly into the modern age.

The cruel and despairing world of “Los Olvidados” stunned and infuriated Mexican audiences weaned on movies like “Nosotros los Pobres” (1948), a heroic, idealized portrayal of Mexico City’s struggling poor that starred matinee idol Pedro Infante. But once “Los Olvidados” won the director’s prize at Cannes it could no longer be shunned. Suddenly, world cinema had an image of Mexico’s capital that had nothing to do with singing cowboys in sombreros.

Yet in showing Mexico City’s social failures and its people’s sufferings, Bunuel also universalized and elevated the capital. Without sentimentality, he caught the faded elegance of the city’s Baroque facades, the bustle of its markets, the simple, pastoral charm that still peeked through the steel and cement. The movie opens with a montage of New York and other cities and a voice-over intoning that the story of “Los Olvidados” could be set in some other 20th century urban center. In effect, “Los Olvidados” argued that Mexico City’s street urchins were worthy surrogates for all humanity.

Octavio Paz, the Mexican writer, ambassador and Nobel laureate, made much the same claim for Mexico as a whole in his best-known book, “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” which was published the same year that “Los Olvidados” was released. It was Paz who publicly championed “Los Olvidados” after Mexican critics had savaged it, and it was he who argued that Mexico -- with its repeated history of conquest and subjugation, its unique ethnic mix, its mongrel spirituality -- represented the essence of the modern condition. This, Paz wrote, was a form of “orphanhood,” a feeling of being separated from one’s true historical and cultural parentage and the desire to “reestablish the bonds that unite us with the universe.”

Evergreen themes

Consciously or not, many contemporary films set in or partly in Mexico City are taking up some of the themes that Bunuel raised and Paz articulated 50 years ago: the search for an authentic self amid a crush of millions; the clash between old Mexican cultural values and new global commercial values; the capacity of mega-cities to both liberate and entrap.

In “A Thousand Clouds of Peace,” the 17-year-old protagonist’s journey through Mexico City’s endless streets parallels his meandering thoughts about his absent lover. In “Amores Perros,” a beautiful model stares out her apartment window at a giant billboard of herself -- a grotesque caricature in a dehumanizing environment where people are reduced to acting like animals. And in Alfonso Cuaron’s “Y Tu Mama Tambien” (2001), the spoiled rich friends played by Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna must kiss goodbye their Americanized lifestyle of creature comforts in Mexico City to embark on a sojourn of sexual and psychological discovery that also becomes a journey into the soul of modern Mexico.

Juan Antonio de la Riva, director of the University Center for Cinematographic Studies in Mexico City, says that practically all contemporary Mexican cinema is now “cine urbano, a cinema that occurs in the Federal District [Mexico City].” But if Mexico City itself has become the fundamental subject of Mexican cinema, the question is, which Mexico City?

“The Matador’s” Shepard admits that he had the noir Mexico City in mind when he shot a previous feature here, a thriller about an American woman whose brother disappears while the pair are traveling together. Its literal-minded title, “Mexico City,” connotes not only a physical place but an existential condition, like Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.” Shepard says he conceived the story line during a previous vacation here.

“I had a really good time, but I must say I got pickpocketed and I had a little bit of like an edgy trip,” he recalls. “Mexico City was scary to me, and one of the things was that I didn’t speak the language and I thought, ‘God, if I got in trouble here....’ Like when I got pickpocketed, communicating to the police was like a nightmare, and I thought, ‘What if something really bad happened?’

“But my whole point of view about Mexico changed completely while I was living here for that two months [making ‘Mexico City’]. And after that I’m like, ‘God, that movie was so wrong!’ It was wrong in the sense that it was so paranoid that it doesn’t really even reflect what this city is. And so subsequent to that I think the Mexico that is portrayed in this movie [‘The Matador’] is a lot more realistic. There’s still an edginess to it, but there’s a lot more going on with it, and a lot of the bigger picture.”

For Mexico City, communicating that picture to the rest of the world has been something of a problem. Will “The Matador” and other future Hollywood films narrow the city’s image or expand it?

“Listen,” says Shepard, a native New Yorker, “there’s been movies made about New York being the hell on Earth that it was or is or whatever, and you know what? It’s not untrue. But this movie I think just looks at Mexico as a place of interesting drama in the streets that can affect the drama of the characters. And it’s not making Mexico out to be the most dangerous place in the world, it’s not making it out to be the most beautiful place in the world, though I think when people see the movie they will think, ‘God, this is beautiful, there is beauty here.’ ”

It is time to start filming again, and Shepard goes off to huddle with his set crew. Brosnan and Kinnear take their seats at the “cafe.” Silencio por favor, an assistant calls out, silence, please!

But the old Baroque plaza has other ideas: Just as the cameras are ready to roll, Santa Catarina’s bells begin to peal, a dozen, long leaden strokes. The sound, echoing off the surrounding buildings, is nearly deafening. The shoot will have to start over again. But the Hollywood visitors don’t seem to mind. Most, in fact, are smiling.