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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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