Friday 19 April 2019

Non-Abstract Review: Year of the Nail (2007)

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a.k.a. Año uña
Director: Jonás Cuarón
Screenplay: Jonás Cuarón
Cast: Eireann Harper as Molly; Diego Cataño as Diego

Synopsis: Told entirely in photographs, of real people and family of the director, Jonás Cuaron tells a fictional story of a young American college student Molly (Eireann Harper) whose encounter with Mexican teenager Diego (Diego Cataño), whilst she is briefly in his country, leaves him smitten for her.

Alfonso Cuarón is a director I don't necessarily take interest in; the director who has done work in his homeland (Y Tu Mamá También (2001)) to the States (Gravity (2013)), a critical darling with the Netflix approved Roma (2018) just an example of someone whose constant praise in the mainstream unfortunately puts me off without actually judging the work. It's an unfair attitude and I will rectify it one day. (Gravity, though, doesn't work for its heavy handed and empty spectacle especially when not seen on a cinema screen). Here though, I finally am round to a film I've wanted to seen for over ten years, his son Jonás Cuarón making films into the current day too. Year of the Nail is told entirely in photos like Chris Marker's La Jette (1962), real documents in photo form, in montage and with voice over.

It has two different beginnings - an American named Molly is stuck in a lost twenties where she is aimless, unsure what to do with her life but going to Mexico twice, once for her studies and then again out of a desire for sightseeing, which mark a comfort for her to escape this dead-end. The second time introduces her to Diego, as she stays at his family home as a guest; Diego is a hormone driven male fourteen year old, obsessed with sex, intrigued to woo the older American girl, constantly dealing with an ingrown toe nail, interestingly where the English title comes from, but also serious issues like family fragmentation and a grandfather becoming stricken with cancer. Using real photos, rather than staged ones, means occasionally a background face is blurred out, and it ends with a tribute to a past relative, a sense the "actors" included actual Cuarón family in their day-to-day lives, turned into fictional characters. Even Molly herself, actress Eireann Harper, was the girlfriend of the director-screenwriter, who took these images between 2004-5 as the introductory text elaborates, a film built from reality that is emphasised just by the fact the camera used switches from monochrome to colour halfway through.

Year of the Nail weave a lot of interest beyond its style, the story interesting in this frankly problematic love story which yet avoids becoming icky in a natural, inevitable way. It plays on conceptions a great deal too - able to understand Spanish, Molly is aware of how she is perceived as an ignorant American, whilst for Diego and his family, preconceptions of Mexicans is also poked at, particularly as he tries to avoid his family (especially his grandmother) embarrassing him in his misguided attempt to flirt with Molly, which considering his idea is to laze about on the beach all the time can be seen as an immediate failure anyway.  

The film doesn't try to sugar-coat the obvious issue, more so ten years on, of an adult woman and a young teenage boy in a potential romance, especially as the character Molly does flirt with the idea of a relationship before, when he finds a way of meeting her in New York City, she sees the issues that have arisen. I do understand the real concern viewers can have with fictional tales which have these premises, but it's as much an unwanted avoidance of that transgressive issue that, in real life, the beginning of sexuality all of us went through after puberty is one that's very uncomfortable to deal with but should be tackled, especially in lieu to how this relates to the adult world and trying to consider the subject with thoughtfulness. The film doesn't step from why its taboo either, without being remotely explicit barring how much profanity and sex talk Diego himself uses especially in voice over. The subject of adult-teenage relationships and the idea that that they can be consensual for participants, even in a merely fictional realm, can now seen much more as too far, but the truth is I'd rather have a film tackle this subject in this particularly case frankly, and carefully, with the necessary complexity needed. Even if the moments of humour and farce may have become more uncomfortable for some in the last ten years.

Altogether, Year of the Nail was a good surprise, a really interesting experiment in limited resources. A lot of drama is surprisingly found even without moment, a greater sense of creativity required to establish a world, needing multiple photos for one scene to exist; even in mind that these images probably existed already before the idea to make a film did, you still had to find a way to connect them together in editing and careful use of the voice over and dialogue recorded over them, to which Jonás Cuarón never oversteps into heavy handedness in drama or the cultural clash that takes place with the main characters. To establish such a world, you have fleshed out experience of places in Mexico and outside of it like Coney Island in New York City in detail, which you rarely get in cinema due to the ease in using a camera has. Knowing real family is involved in the director's work is great, as is that he doesn't flinch away for details, from a hospital corridor to showing the actual neutering of a pet cat in a veterinarians' in lieu to the Diego family cat having the operation.

Jonás Cuaron manages so much in only less than eighty minutes, a fleshed out premise with emotional weight, that it does become a great representation for me of the fascinating underbelly of cinema that'll be uncovered over the next decade particularly for the maligned late 2000s, where one-offs and experiments are gathering dust on DVD copies waiting another evaluation...or in this case actually seeing the film after taking too long as I did.


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