El Mariachi: 1992, dir. Robert Rodriguez. Seen on DVD (May 8).
I remember Robert Rodriguez making El Mariachi when I was in grad school at UT. Everyone thought he was going to be the Next Big Thing. And he made El Mariachi for what, $7,000?
Suddenly a lot of people in the production course at my school realized they should just go out there and make movies for $7K instead of spending that much in film school having to make films that the instructors approved and take a bunch of classes that they felt weren’t very useful anyway. We had a number of dropouts.
(The RTF grad program is a lot better now, I am told, but when I was there it was in a transitional state between the MA and the MFA, and a lot of us kind of got lost in the shuffle.)
Anyway, I haven’t heard of any rousing film successes from anyone in my film school classes, but Robert Rodriguez is doing even better than people anticipated. And now that I have finally finally seen El Mariachi, I understand why.
I have seen other Rodriguez films and liked them a lot (Spy Kids, From Dusk Til Dawn), but I had never had much interest in seeing El Mariachi. You know how all those “first films” seem the same, what with the stilted acting and the grainy production values and that indefinable film-school feeling. I didn’t much like Clerks, for example.
El Mariachi is not like that at all. The acting was not annoying, the movie didn’t look cheap, and the plot had a certain simple elegance that made it suspenseful and interesting. I was charmed.
Actually I was extremely irritated with the DVD because the director’s commentary would not turn off when I started playing the movie. I don’t know what I did to shut it off, because at one point I was just smashing buttons and screaming four-letter words at the screen. My boyfriend pointed out later that the movie is Spanish with subtitles and you have to set it that way, because if you set it as English you get the director’s commentary. Now you know, in case you ever rent this movie.
However, once the movie started I enjoyed myself. As I said, it’s a simple but suspenseful story: A mariachi singer, entering a new town with nothing but his guitar case, is mistaken for a killer who keeps all his weapons in a guitar case. It’s a mistaken identity plot but without any of the tired cliches, artificial situations, and predictable pitfalls that populate so many mistaken identity plots.
The story does include a lot of bloodshed but it always seemed to me to be interesting without becoming excessive (as it did seem to get in Desperado).
In short, this is a simple story told very well by a good storyteller and filmmaker. El Mariachi stands up beautifully next to Rodriguez’s other films.