Jonás Cuarón – Año uña AKA Year of the Nail (2007)
What could be more austere than the first film directed by Alfonso Cuarón’s young son Jonás, who also takes credits for script and photography? Like Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée (the only other example that springs to mind), this is a moving picture that doesn’t move, being told only through still photographs. Moreover the first 20 minutes are in black and white and it is even longer before we hear any music, playing (briefly) on a car radio. Yet this story of the tentative cross-cultural romance between horny Mexican teenager Diego and oversensitive American college student Molly turns out to be, against all the odds, as charming as it is challenging. Indeed, for long stretches I simply forgot that the images were still, so engrossing was the plot and so endearing the characters.
The opening titles claim: “From 2004-5 I took photos of everything around me. At the end of that year I ordered the images in such a way that they suggested the following narrative to me. These are documentary images. The moments and characters are real. Only the story is fictional.” While the characters do indeed keep the real names of the people who play them, and Diego’s grandfather really did die during the shoot (the film is dedicated to his memory), the titles are clearly a tease. In reality, the story isn’t random but skilfully structured through multiple echoes and ironies. Thus Molly’s parents will break up at the end of the film just as Diego’s already have at the beginning; and Molly’s flights to Mexico are mirrored by Diego’s trip to New York (in both cases they lie to their mothers about the journeys).
Sometimes Cuarón crosscuts to telling and even troubling effect, as in the single sequence when Molly visits the gynaecologist, Miguel takes his cat to be neutered, and the grandfather is operated on for cancer. The still shots are shown for varying lengths of time and from varying points of view, using high and low angles when, say, Molly dives into a pool. Where generally Cuarón’s carefully framed and artfully composed shots hold still for us to admire and examine, sometimes the rostrum camera roams over them in a rare ‘Ken Burns Effect’. More importantly, the elaborately designed soundtrack takes up the slack for the immobile image. Given access as we are to the characters’ thoughts as well as their words (in two languages), we see conflicting perspectives emerge. Thus Molly tells herself that boys are so “romantic” at Diego’s age, while the youth himself thinks only of tumbling her in the sand.
Equally proficient in the teenage vernacular of Mexican Spanish and the pompous pretensions of academic English (Molly’s boyfriend lectures her witheringly, “You cannot split time into fragments”), the surprisingly literate script is at once funny and accurate about the pleasures and problems of cross-cultural, bilingual romance. And beginning as it does with Molly’s breathless litany of impossibly exotic subway station names (“Chapultepec, Cuauhtémoc…”), the film goes beyond clichés of both north and south to show the vertigo of losing your old familiar self in a strange new language and a strange new country. But nothing’s taken too seriously here. Molly’s perpetual embarrassment (are locals upset when she mispronounces their names or fears to eat their food?) is punctured by her friend Katie. The ugly American par excellence, Katie loudly claims that, in spite of their scorn for gringos, Mexicans must really love the US: after all, why else would so many of them be working as waiters in restaurants back home?
Ironically, Cuarón’s minimalist technique proves that you can indeed split time into fragments: still images can serve just as well as moving pictures to recount a story that stretches over a full year. But another line of dialogue is equally telling. After the central couple have spent a single, splendid day in grungy Coney Island (how, wonders Diego, can Mexican funfairs be so much fancier than this gringo one?), the young romantic tells his older partner: “I wish I could freeze this moment and live it forever”. Featuring as it does some surprisingly sombre moments touching on disease and death, this delightfully still comedy proves beyond a doubt that what makes things special is that they must always come to an end. Año uña, which clocks in at a modest 78 minutes, is as brief, and as special, as the summer romance it chronicles.
– Paul Julian Smith, Sight & Sound, December 2008.
File Name .........................................: Año uña.avi File Size (in bytes) ............................: 945,883,136 bytes Runtime ............................................: 1:15:39 Video Codec ...................................: XviD ISO MPEG-4 Frame Size ......................................: 720x416 (AR: 1.731) FPS .................................................: 25.000 Video Bitrate ...................................: 1212 kb/s Bits per Pixel ...................................: 0.162 bpp B-VOP, N-VOP, QPel, GMC.............: [], [], [], [] Audio Codec ...................................: 0x2000 (Dolby AC3) AC3 Sample Rate ...................................: 48000 Hz Audio Bitrate ...................................: 448 kb/s [6 channel(s)] CBR No. of audio streams .......................: 1
https://nitro.download/view/4AFFB3B5AD3BA3D/Ano_una.avi
Language(s):Spanish & English
Subtitles:English & Spanish (hard)