A city is rebuilt every time it's remembered. The streets, monuments, landmarks are similar from one to the next, but whatever fills those spaces is unique to each memory. Those differences, that emotional cartography, is what turns my Mexico City into something completely different from the one in the film Güeros.
The 2014 debut of Alonso Ruizpalacios builds a familiar but ghostlike version of the city I grew up in. Of course, there must be hundreds or thousands of films that take place in that very same city, and that demolish it and rebuild it in as many configurations as possible. But there's something in Güeros about the way the city is shown, the way it traps and frees the characters, that feels at once familiar and unknown.
¿Para qué nos vamos si al rato vamos a regresar? Why leave if we're gonna come back anyway?
t’s a line from one of the characters, but it might as well be the film’s thesis, and by extension, of a certain kind of coming of age narrative that takes place in a city that's as stuck as the its characters. Why change, why move, if we’re just going to end up back where we started? However, Güeros spends its runtime trying to come up with an answer to that question.
There's a tension in me when I rewatch this film: I feel like I didn't live the city enough. I lived in it and through it and across it, but I didn't live it, at least not in the way the characters in Güeros do in just a few days. The Mexico City I knew wasn't the one in the film. Even if I did, even if I recognize the streets, the people, the archetypes and the sounds, I didn't grow up in that city.
And that is because the movie deals with the emotional cartography of a fictional place. Could it be anything else? The real city, the physical place where there is actual bodily and emotional growth, is impossible to map. When it comes to real emotional growth, how could you ever map that? The lessons don't come one at a time at a specific place, they are muddled one on top of the other, contradictory and incomplete. Only fiction allows for a neat and tidy emotional cartography.
A Timeless Mexico City
There's a nifty little trick the film pulls: the story is set in 1999, but it was shot in 2013, and it doesn't try to hide that fact. The urban landscape, Blackberry smartphones, an ID that will expire in 2014. All of it shows there's a deliberate timelessness when it comes to recreating the city.
Güeros is constantly breaking the fourth wall and reminding you that you're watching a film. At one point, the actors discuss the script of the film (one of them hates it), and there are many small moments like this. The film wants you to be aware that it is artificial, a curated version of a city, a specific time rebuilt many years later. So, Mexico City becomes a place where time accumulates instead of replacing itself. It keeps creating time on top of itself, despite itself.
That is true for both the actual history of the city, and the way this film works for me. The coming-of-age story in the film reflects a different version of my own. In the end, both are fiction, created in the same place out of the same material. The connective tissues between both stories are inseverable.
By the time I watched the movie for the first time, I was in college: too young to be Sombra or Santos, too old to be Tomás. Around that time, a Mexican poet visited one of my classes and described his method of dérive: walk a block for every line of a poem, turn left if it ends in a vowel, right if it ends in a consonant. I try not to romanticize Mexico City; if anything, my nostalgia is overly cynical. But I still think about how, with just a poem and a street, you could build a private map of the city. Güeros is like that: a poetic reconstruction of a city, a roadmap for coming-of-age.
Mexico City contains multiple cities within it, monstrous and small. My version of the city is by no means the city they show in Güeros. But there's something to it, a ghost-like echo of the one in the other.
Coming of Age Is Myth-breaking
Güeros tells the story of brothers Tomás and Sombra, as they wander around Mexico City looking for the enigmatic rockstar Epigmenio Cruz, who once made Bob Dylan cry, or so their father told them.
The film starts with 14-year-old Tomás in the city of Veracruz. He gets in trouble by throwing a water balloon at a baby, so his mother sends him to Mexico City to live with his older brother Sombra.
Sombra lives with his friend Santos in a shitty, dirty apartment. They form a friendship with the girl with Down syndrome who lives in the downstairs apartment, and they steal electricity from her family. There's a student strike that's been going on for almost 6 months, so for all that time, the two friends have been slacking off, trapped in the inertia, on "strike from the strike," as they like to say. They are paralyzed in stasis.
One morning, Tomás reads in the newspaper that the singer Epigmenio Cruz is dying from cirrhosis. He's the rockstar who once made Bob Dylan cry. How could you not want to meet him?
Tomás always carries around a walkman with Cruz' cassette. So, when he finds out the man is about to die, he urges his brother and Santos to go look for him. Of course, they don't really care that much, but when the downstairs neighbor gets fed up with them, the three of them have to escape their building. With nothing else to do, they decide they might as well go look for Epigmenio.
Coming of age is also, in a way, about breaking myths. Epigmenio Cruz is nothing but myth. He's so monumental he can't even fit in the screen; he's so massive his music can't even be heard. As Tomás and Sombra get closer to him, the myth only gets bigger and bigger, it engulfs them and the city.
Until they meet him. A drunk, an asshole, an old man lost in pulque and Big Brother. Right there, the myth evaporates. Without wanting it, like most growing up actually goes, the characters have to grow. The old cassette tape is still there, holding his music, but the appeal of meeting him is gone.
I don't want to give much of the plot away. Güeros sits on a very specific point that merges art film and commercial coming-of-age comedy. What I mean by that is you should definitely watch this movie, so the less I spoil the plot, the better.
Sombra and Santos won't go to the protests, they won't work on their thesis, they won't leave their apartment. And why should they? What is actually going to change if they do? Well, fortunately for the plot of the movie, they are forced into motion.
As the film progresses, they travel around different areas of the city following clues to Epigmenio's whereabouts. Throughout the film, Epigmenio is this impossibly monumental figure in the brothers' mind. Even if they don't explicitly say it, we know that this cassette tape is their last connection to their father. So, in a way, their quest to find Epigmenio is a quest to return to their father. Also, we never hear his music. Every time they play it, the sound completely disappears, as if it was impossible for us to comprehend it. Epigmenio Cruz is, after all, the man who once made Bob Dylan cry.
Every time, the brothers are too late. Epigmenio has left, but luckily he always leaves clues behind. A wallet, drawings he made, people he talked to. Each time, his myth grows. Of course, it's impossible to maintain that forever. And that’s what growing up is too: outgrowing the stories you were handed. Seeing, for ourselves, what makes them. The rock legend, the idea you have of your city.
I've never seen that building in a movie
The film is divided into different parts of the city: south, east, west, downtown, and so on. If you've never been to Mexico City, it's hard to imagine how monstrous it actually is. Just imagining their journey after a day seems like torture to me: hours upon hours of being trapped in traffic, bored out of your mind, lost.
At one point, their journey takes them to the west side of the city. A wrong turn leads them into a dangerous area, where they are confronted by what could very well be a street gang. They ask for directions to how to leave the area, and one of them gets in the car with them. They're scared shitless.
Eventually, the guy takes them to a place where they can all have a beer together. And it's there, in a shot that doesn't last more than a few seconds, that the frame shows the building El Pantalón.

The film doesn't draw attention to it because in a landscape full of one-storey, unfinished, gray houses, a 30-storey building in the shape of a pair of pants will stand out.
Growing up, I could see that building from my window at home, and from every window at school. For years, every single day, I would see that building in the background of my life. And the first time I ever saw it in a movie was in Güeros. That seems small and trivial, because it is in many ways, but it is also something that I never thought of. The possibility of seeing that building in a film never crossed my mind.
It's like a warped version of my coming of age. I ran through the same streets, met the same characters, felt the same inertia sickness they feel. There's a feeling of being stuck and a contentment that comes with it. You feel like you can't move, you don't know where to move, and you don't see a reason to move. It's not that idleness is outgrown, is that motion is needed to grow. Physical, emotional, narrative movement breaks people, and characters, out of paralysis.
Everyone in the city has a version of events that mirrors what we see in the film. Being chased at night, wandering around the city, being lost and finding an oasis, feeling the sting of disillusionment. And it looks way too similar to what we see, and it feels like it, and it is still infinitely different. That's what I love about this film: every scene feels true and alien to me.
Of course, their journey is manufactured to create satisfaction and growth. Mine was ambiguous and directionless, at least for a while. But that's the way it happens in reality.
Are you supposed to change?
By the end of the film, both brothers have actually grown. The disillusionment actually helped them along. Sombra becomes Fede, he leaves behind that assumed identity. He joins the student protest. He's in motion. We have no idea what's going to happen to him after that, but at least he's not stuck anymore.
Tomás becomes a witness of life. Throughout the film, he takes pictures of the wrong things, in a way. He photographs Epigmenio's empty hospital bed, Santos' dead plants that he needed for his thesis, monuments of the city. By the end, he photographs his brother, now Fede instead of Sombra, smiling as he joins the protest, as he becomes active.
The film doesn't resolve their issues. But it shows they're different by the end, maybe different enough to solve them. Growing up, in this film, doesn’t mean understanding everything. It means being seen and starting to see others. It's a small shift, not a big moral awakening.
The Mexico City I knew is dead. Its name was actually DF, the name changed in 2016. The city I grew up in has been destroyed and rebuilt a million times, each time I remember it, or parts of it. But Güeros lets me walk the streets of a fictional version of my city. I didn't get to live the city the way Sombra and Tomás do, but their journey helps me build a new version of my city, one based on memories and fiction. I'm forever building and destroying my city.
If my nostalgic rambling doesn't entice you into watching the film, I get it. But Güeros has so much more to offer: the sound design alone is enough to give it a try; the formal experiments, the French New Wave meets Mexico style; the constant breaking of the 4th wall, and the craftsmanship of every single scene and shot. Go watch it, I guarantee you'll find something great.
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