Minotauro: Dreams, Hopes, and Everyday Life in the Films of Nicolás Pereda
Minotauro, Nicolás Pereda (2015)
Toward the end of Nicolás Pereda's Minotauro, Luisa (Luisa Pardo) crawls on the floor of what looks like a garage in the building where the story unfolds. In a barely lit scene, one of the maids looks at her from above, then passes over her. We know Luisa's efforts to get away are utterly hopeless. We have seen her and the other two protagonists of the film interacting indoors— they never leave. Their domestic workers, on the other hand, freely circulate in both private and public spaces.
The scene is the film's most dramatic in expressing the confinement that restrain Luisa, Gabino (Gabino Rodríguez), and Paco (Francisco Barreiro), three twenty-something Mexicans who spend most of their time sleeping and communicating by reading aloud. Luisa's attempt to escape this dream-like atmosphere is evocative of Luis Buñuel's Extermination Angel (El angel exterminador, 1962)—the Spaniard-Mexican filmmaker paints a comic, cruel, and ruthless portrait of the bourgeoisie while Pereda's humor is slighter, as is his scorn towards his characters. And as in many of his previous features, Pereda attempts to reflect upon a fundamental component in Latin American middle-classes identity: their complex relationship to domestic workers and the privilege, entitlement, and leisure such a relationship grants them.
Minotauro, Nicolás Pereda (2015)
Minotauro is a recent film of Mexican filmmaker Nicolás Pereda, a remarkable artist whose body of work has been showcased in multiple venues, museums, and festivals such as the Film Society at Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, and the Pacific Film Archive; Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Morelia and Toronto; the Reina Sofía, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Guggenheim, and MoMA. With extraordinary style, Pereda's work strides unapologetically between fiction and documentary, which are often indistinguishable from each other. Class, generational and gender relations, displacement and the cruelties of modernity are all approached from the perspective of the everyday.
Minotauro opens with Gabino speaking to the phone while saying goodbye to what we assume are two (faceless) maids leaving his apartment, one of which is incredibly young. A delivery guy comes in with a pizza and no change which he is sent off to bring, but never returns—Gabino indolently falls asleep on his desk. The rest of the film is a series of scenes in which the protagonists sleep endlessly, interact with the people who serve them, and read to each other.
Minotauro, Nicolás Pereda (2015)
These characters have time to spare, as do the same characters in Juntos (Together, 2009). In his previous film, Pereda explores the three friends' daily lives and the menial chores they perform—looking for their runaway dog, repairing the fridge or a leaking kitchen sink, eating, bathing, and talking. These tasks consume all of their time, day after day.
That they carry on with these tasks blatantly underscores their advantaged position in a region where domestic labor is intimately coupled with gender and race. In Minotauro, we see a parade of darker people—mostly women—who in one way or another sustain with their labor the three characters' shared and rarefied lifestyle. As the dealer says to Paco after delivering him marijuana, "were you resting? Are you exhausted from relaxing too much?" In both Juntos and Minotauro, Pereda explores the complexity of the everyday using both fiction and documentary tools. Within that eclecticism, he introduces the political not as a comprehensive, overall mantle—rather, it emerges in waves, through the ellipsis of visual style and narrative.
Minotauro, Nicolás Pereda (2015)
Images are especially eloquent in El palacio (The Palace, 2009), a film bare of dialogue. In the opening scene, several young and elderly women brush their teeth in a rundown patio. They are obviously getting ready for bed; as this beautifully-shot film progresses, spectators notice the place may be a training facility for female domestic workers. There is no spatial-temporal reference to or account of who these women might be. It is in their paused and methodical daily chores, a still camera closely observing them, that we see them learning their trade whilst a patronizing off-screen voice guides their tasks and prepares them for job interviews.
El palacio, Nicolás Pereda (2009)
El palacio exceeds the mere consideration of domestic labor's material and symbolic implications in Mexico or Latin America. The film experiments visually—the camera lingers languidly on objects, spaces, and faces to frame and express a complex universe crossed by power relations.
El palacio, Nicolás Pereda (2009)
The beauty of a crafted photography is subtly threaded with the cruelty of the circumstances Pereda displays in front of our eyes. Elderly women and children are not only taught domestic work but proper social behavior. Submissive answers to questions regarding skills, salary, and personal hygiene are presented as essential to the job description. That some women fight back against this arbitrariness provides the film with its most political undertones.
El palacio, Nicolás Pereda (2009)
The political emerges subtly in the voices and faces of some of these women who resist ceaseless humiliation. This thread is also present in Tales of Two Who Dreamt (Andrea Bussmann and Pereda, 2016), a stunningly-crafted documentary of a Hungarian Roma family seeking asylum in Toronto. Surrounded by other Roma families, the characters go on with their quotidian routines. Space also plays a central role here, as these families hope to triumph over their despair and displacement to build a community in a country that does not belong to them.
Resilience is also part of Pereda's most emblematic character to date, C.B.—an artist, activist, archeologist and profound humanist who created the Mining Museum in La Unión and lives in the Sierra del Catorce in México. In his interactive presentation The Private Property Trilogy, Pereda wanders between documentary and fiction to draw a portrait of C.B., who he compares to Buñuel's Simón (Simón del desierto, 1965) in his strength and resistance against the dark side of the process of modernization.
Simón of the Desert, Luis Buñuel (1965)