Film Review: The Outsiders

In the past several decades the theme of migration has continually recurred in the cinema of and about Latin America, and it is not difficult to see why it is a popular topic in a region characterized by rapid upheavals in political, economic, and cultural circumstances. In the midst of flux and change, movement is transformed into something more than an urgent necessity. It is a reflex; it becomes one of the few ways that one can make sense of the ever-shifting world. Indeed, we can even speak of the aesthetics of migration itself and suggest that cinema is well suited to depicting and contemplating that experience of traversal within and across national borders; the medium is capable of capturing grand vistas and broad swaths of space and time, along with attending to the minute details of daily life and daily struggle.

The more familiar manifestations of this theme come with the cycle of films, almost a subgenre unto themselves, that chronicle the danger-filled journeys of migrants toward the global North. In films like El norte (1983) and Sin nombre (2009) the border between Mexico and the United States serves as a kind of finish line at the end of a perilous obstacle course. The trajectories of migration in these films are varied. Una noche (2013), for example, traces a line of flight from Havana to Miami. However, when considering the theme of migration we should be aware that it is not merely a one-way movement outward and northward but a more complex network that involves flows of labor and culture and ideas toward and within Latin America. Argentine film, for example, has been especially attentive to questions of immigration and the culture clashes its brings; films such as Bolivia (2001), El abrazo partido (2004), and El niño pez (2009) all feature characters who have come to Buenos Aires from abroad seeking a better life but end up finding that proposition more difficult and complex than they expected.

The experiences contained in these two kinds of migration films are intertwined, and a pair of recent examples—La jaula de oro (2013), directed by Diego Quemada-Díez, and Un cuento chino (2011), directed by Sebastián Borensztein—provide insights into the realities and difficulties that underpin the idea of migration in our contemporary moment. La jaula de oro follows a group of Guatemalan youths as they trek across Mexico toward the United States; from the outset, even in its metaphoric title (which it shares with an earlier 1987 film and a 1983 song), it displays an ambivalence toward the value and promise that journey holds. In contrast, Un cuento chino is an odd-couple comedy in which Roberto, a Buenos Aires shopkeeper played by the Argentine leading man Ricardo Darín, inadvertently finds himself responsible for the well-being of a young Chinese man who is lost on the other side of the world and searching for his family.

On the level of form and surface narrative, these films are strikingly different. La jaula de oro exemplifies contemporary “global cinema”: it is steeped in a quasi-documentary, long-take realism, and it makes a claim for the tenor of real experience with its subdued aesthetics and first-time nonprofessional actors. In that regard, Quemada-Díez’s style follows in the social realist tradition of filmmakers like Ken Loach, for whom Quemada-Díez worked as a camera operator, and that style is well-positioned for international film festivals and art-house distribution. Un cuento chino, in contrast, is a broad comedy designed for domestic consumption and was the highest-grossing non-U.S. film in Argentina in its year of release. Borensztein, who rose through the ranks writing and directing for Argentine television, works with sight gags, slapstick, and unsubtle word play as the film heads toward a feel-good denouement in which families are reunited and the hero emerges from his misanthropy by learning to love again. Yet for all their differences, both filmmakers display an awareness that cultural and ethnic identities are carried along the currents of migration like baggage and may be the seeds of conflict and barriers to understanding. In each film, these questions are represented by the figure of the outsider, who alternates between invisibility and utter visibility in a foreign country.

In these stories of migration, movement serves as an act of disintegration and of destabilization. To be sedentary is to have stability, to have a fixed identity, to have a sense of place in the world; the migrants in each film give all that up as they head toward uncertain and unfamiliar destinations, and in that process they become indeterminate people. Their movement through space, even as it is impelled by necessity, carries a tentative quality marked by their precarious legal and economic status and their tenuous or nonexistent connections to friends or family. The outsiders push these tendencies to their extremes; more than any other migratory figure, they always remain on the outside looking in. Their words separate them and their skin marks them, but labor is labor, and at bottom that labor is always fungible.

In La jaula de oro the outsider figure is Chauk (Rodolfo Domínguez), an indigenous (Tzotzil) youth who joins the main migrant group; in a film about Guatemalans moving through Mexico to reach the United States, he has yet another set of national and cultural barriers to overcome. With the other main characters, we join them early on, seeing the intimate details of their preparation for their journey; for example, we see Sara (Karen Pineda) binding her chest in an attempt to pass as a boy. Chauk, in contrast, makes his mysterious entrance partway through the film. In the wilderness he appears seemingly out of nowhere, with a machete on his belt; his attempts to tag along with the group and his silence make it difficult for us—and for them—to suss out his intentions. He becomes a question to be discussed among the group, and in his passivity he finds himself in situations over which he has little control. That passive quality is also a determining element for Jun (Ignacio Huang), the Chinese protagonist in Un cuento chino; his entrance into Buenos Aires is similarly abrupt as a dishonest cab driver tosses him onto the street in front of the airport, leaving him without money and without bearings. It is serendipity that he happens to land in front of Roberto, and he presents such a desolate, helpless figure that even the gruff, misanthropic shopkeeper feels compelled to offer assistance.

One of the key characteristics of the outsider figure is the language barrier that separates him or her from others. Many of the conflicts in migration films arise from a lack of understanding—the abstract conceptual gap between cultures and nations becomes palpable in the moments when two people are literally unable to understand each other. Roberto cannot speak Chinese and Jun cannot speak Spanish; even when they are in the same room, each can only really talk to himself. The film wrings comedy from this lack of understanding as it depicts Roberto’s exasperated attempts to communicate with Jun through gestures, all the while speaking Spanish. While the film is a comedy and thus perhaps exempt from the strictest standards of realism, it is telling that Roberto does not attempt the most expedient solution of finding a Spanish-Mandarin dictionary, since there must be at least one of those in Buenos Aires. Roberto assumes that the onus of coming to understanding is entirely on Jun’s shoulders, and it never occurs to him that it might be otherwise. Another aspect of the problem of language comes to the fore when Roberto takes Jun to the city’s Chinatown in an attempt to find someone who might know Jun or at least can communicate with him. Of course, the people they encounter speak Cantonese, not Mandarin, and thus the language barrier remains. The sedentary Roberto has the luxury of not perceiving the nuances of these cultural differences, but the migratory Jun has no such luck; even within the cordoned enclave of Chinatown he remains on the outside, unable to communicate and unable to connect.

In La jaula de oro, Chauk displays a similar silence-induced passivity; his inability to communicate in Spanish, as with Jun, perhaps adds a benign quality to his character. The ways in which the other characters relate to that language gap speak to their own personalities and the group’s power dynamic. Teenage belligerent Juan (Brandon López) attempts to drive Chauk away, berating and yelling at him in words he knows the boy does not understand; he lets his visible anger and aggression speak for him. Sara tries to bridge the gap not merely by trying to get Chauk to understand her but also by trying to understand him. In discerning what Chauk is trying to say with the single syllable lek (meaning “good” in Tzotzil), she also displays a respect for the boy’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The scenes in which they try to reach a mutual understanding are tender and heartfelt; amid the chaotic and uncertain currents of migration they display the need for a real connection that cannot be passed over in silence.

If language stands out as one of the most immediate barriers within the spaces of migration, the nation-state and its laws pose some of the most serious consequences to the migrants who move through those spaces. The lack of stable subjectivity provided by one’s own language and one’s own culture only accentuates the fact that government and police authorities treat these outsiders as objects. In La jaula de oro the idea of these authorities as a suffocating threat is presented as a matter of course; the police deal with our migratory protagonists by arresting and deporting them. They form barriers, both literal and abstract, to their movement. It’s not just that there are fences and checkpoints to keep Sara, Chauk, and Juan at bay; treated as “illegal” people in foreign territory, they cannot escape the exploitation and violence that happens to them there. While Jun’s conflicts with the Argentine and Chinese authorities do not rise to the same life-and-death level, there remains a sense that he is an object to be shuffled around by various governmental bodies, a problem to be moved from one place to another until it disappears.

Curiously enough, in both films labor becomes the method through which the outsider is given a chance to enter the inside, or at least hope for such a possibility. La jaula de oro features an almost dreamlike interlude in which the group finds short-term agricultural work, and even amid that difficult labor the simple fact of remaining in one place for a little while brings forth a sense of solidarity and camaraderie that proves all too fleeting. Labor bridges the communication barrier in Un cuento chino as well, and not merely in the moment when Roberto solves one of his problems by ordering Chinese food and having the Chinese delivery man serve as translator. In attempting to wring some benefit out of having Jun as a boarder, Roberto charges him with rehabilitating his junk-filled and overgrown backyard. In performing that labor, Jun is able to express himself far more clearly than words ever could; in the film’s final moments Roberto steps into his backyard, sees a mural Jun has drawn (of a soulful cow), and stumbles into a better understanding not only of Jun but also of himself. In both films these moments are hopeful yet ambivalent; they bring the multifaceted nature of migration to the fore. These films suggest that the flowing global network of migration is beset by political strife, cultural conflict, and economic exploitation, but on a very real level it is driven by the hope and dream that something better lies on the other side.