SUJO - CAMBRIDGE FILM FESTIVAL
The new Mexican movie has a mysterious element running through it: why is the main protagonist called Sujo? It is, we are told, an unusual name. No spoilers here but there is a poignant twist to the film that had me thinking of ‘Citizen Kane’ – and no, it’s not a sledge!
Billed as a ‘coming of age’ movie, the work is directed by the rising-star auteurs Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez who maybe Mexico’s answer to Powell and Pressburger. They direct, script and one even writes the underscore.
The setting is today’s rural Michoacan where agrarian poverty has only one way out – drugs or education. The latter is a hard-won route for Sujo, at first a four year-old and later a teenie. His dad was a hired assassin who worked for the drug cartels and whose end was predictably short and violent. Sujo is brought up by his tough and resilient poor aunt Nemesia (powerfully played by Yadira Perez). He is a studious lad with a love of reading but tell that to the gang bosses. The film charts Sujo’s attempts to stay alive in a gangland warzone and thrive in the one chance he has; sent by Nemesia to try his luck in Mexico City.
You may think a story about a young lad trying to make a decent life in an indecent world would be thick with the air of gunpowder. But the two excellent directors manage to keep the bitter gang struggles in the background. Instead we get a cactus-side view of Sujo’s life away from the violence and law breaking. The narrative is told in short cutaway shots constantly keeping the audience on its toes. We see rural Mexico through the wooden slats of a poor cottage (prison bars?) or in the bleak twilight of a Michoacan sunset. There are long shots of repressed countryside punctuated by the sounds of cicadas and motorbikes ridden by teenagers grasping at a carefree moment.
The second half of the movie takes us to the wholesale veggie warehouses of Mexico City where Sujo finds hard work and meagre pesos. But his future will not be in humping sacks of onions. He is taken in by a college teacher Susan, played with warmth and humour by Sandra Lorenzano. The backwater to buzzing capital cannot be more of a contrast for Sujo who is whistled at by trainees in a boxing academy. This is the city far away from the tourist sights, a place of grinding work, but maybe, just maybe, some light at the end of Sujo’s tunnel. And for us the audience, there is more than light there but the glimpse of what the whole film is really about.
Sujo is a lovely, subtle film that packs a lot of story in a seemingly slow-moving structure. Like some modern-day David Copperfield, his fractured journey from orphan supported by a tough but kindly aunt to some kind of redemption in the city, is powerfully told and utterly gripping. For me it came as no surprise that this won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema at the 2024 Sundance Festival. Watch out for it on general release.
