Gaze
into the near future of Mexico, when drug cartels will control every aspect of
life. Call it ninety minutes from now. Most average people have fled, leaving a
depopulated economic wasteland in their wake. The country is unlikely to
rejuvenate itself, because the cartels make it their business to search out and
abduct young girls. “Huck,” as she calls herself, has eluded their grasp by
passing for a boy, but her luck is about to run out in Julio Hernandez Cordon’s
Buy Me a Gun, which screens during
this year’s Neighboring Scenes: New Latin American Cinema.
Life
is surreal for Huck, mostly in a bad way. Her junkie father Rogelio ekes out a
living as the caretaker of a decrepit baseball field in the middle of the
desert that caters to the cartel game-nights. What little he earns, he mostly
turns back over to the cartel for drugs. However, he is acutely responsible
when it comes to Huck, whose hair he cuts short to appear boyish. He also keeps
her ankle shackled to a lead to prevent any grab-and-go attempts.
Unfortunately,
Huck does not seem to fully appreciate the gravity of her situation, even
though she should. She has heard no end of horror stories from the gang of
orphans living rough in the brush surrounding the baseball field. Although
Rogelio is cagey on the details, Huck still understands to some extent the
cartel is responsible for the disappearance of her mother and her older sister.
Nevertheless, her carelessness will bring down a lot of trouble on Huck and
Rogelio.
Watching
Buy Me a Gun leads to even greater respect
for Issa Lopez’s Tigers are not Afraid,
because she so effortless created a fable-like vibe, whereas Cordon’s flights
into fantastical symbolism are exhaustingly laborious. In fact, the awkward
attempts at Huck Finn allegorical parallels becomes altogether baffling late in
the third act (there is indeed a raft, but Huck’s companion is a far cry from
Jim, the escaped slave in Twain’s novel.
Admittedly,
there are some tense moments in Gun,
but any film that honestly depicts pervasive and arbitrary nature of cartel
violence in Mexico will be unsettling. Huck is a realistically flawed character
and young Matilde Hernandez Guinea shows both sensitivity and disciplined
reserve beyond her years as Huck, but the character can be her own worse enemy,
which becomes ever-more frustrating over time.
Cordon
offers up no shortage of cartel violence and half-baked literary allusions,
including the nearly feral pack of children, who are like the Lost Boys from Peter Pan, by way of Lord of the Flies. Yet, it mostly feels
derivative coming after Tigers and the
original Miss Bala, just to name a
few examples. Painfully earnest but ultimately rather flat, Buy Me a Gun screens this Saturday
(2/23) at the Walter Reade, as part of Neighboring Scenes.
