HOLA MEXICO FILM FESTIVAL: The Cinema Hold Up, the debut feature from Mexican writer/director Iria Gomez Concheiro, begins worryingly. Belligerent jaw set, Latin hip-hop soundtrack in place, Negus (Gabino Rodriguez) lopes along an overpass and then descends down into an abandoned loading dock. As the camera at first precedes and then follows him, you can pick out neat little sub-groups amidst Mexico City’s youth culture: rappers, skaters, metalheads, junior gangsters, soccer players. It’s an overly choreographed spotter’s guide.
But just as you fear that Concheiro is imposing familiar labels on this working class neighbourhood, resulting in another woefully contrived teen movie, Negus arrives at a drain entrance, where his best friends, Chale (Juan Pablo de Santiago) and Sapo (Angel Sosa), are working on a piece of graffiti. Once the film finds this teenage clique, which is completed by their female comrade, Chata (Paulina Avalos), when she can escape her watchful mother, and the story stops marshalling extras and instead concentrates on letting the characters live their lives, it slows down and conversely comes alive.
Sitting against a wall, a tiny patch of green before them and an electricity substation looming behind them – power is literally just out of reach – the boys are a study in disaffection. They smoke dope, wander the streets and sneak into a cinema through the fire exit, only to be thrown out by guards. Manhandled, they complain in a desultory manner, but the whole episode feels like a familiar night for them; even when they’re shaken down by a pair of police officers they generate nothing more than disappointment because they only have a few coins between them.
The movie shows you their lives together first, then their individual situations, so that you understand why their annoyance at the cinema turns into an idea to rob the multiplex. Despite their problems – Chale has failed to get into university, Negus’ older brother is a thieving lowlife – the group comes from homes with varying family structures in place. No-one is on the street and no-one is a criminal, although Sapo fancies himself one to match the reputation of an older brother who has fled to 'the Other Side" (America). What they are, simply, is disaffected and adrift of opportunity.
When they make one, by instigating a robbery plan, they’re motivated and detailed: maps are drawn, guns real and fake are procured. Sitting on a rooftop, like so many cinematic teens before them, they’re excited to be doing something, even if it’s wrong. Shooting on 35mm, Concheiro captures the street hustle and tiny bedrooms, and the pacing is set to the character’s everyday routine – no montages set to music, no diversions. You get a sense of the mundane and then the tension of the robbery, and it’s not hard to see why they’re so excited afterwards. It’s a change from what they know.
While the film is not an overt piece of social realism, it favours knockabout small talk over proletariat credentials, it’s immersive enough, and honest to the hard knocks world crafted by Concheiro that it just stays with the protagonists afterwards, as they slowly realise that nothing fundamental has changed. Sapo is still scared, Negus is still living with his older brother. The Cinema Hold Up doesn’t just show the temptation to risk everything, it reveals that the risk never truly pays off.
