Lost in the Night

(Perdidos en la noche, Amat Escalante, Mexico/Germany/Netherlands/Denmark, 2023)

Lost in the Night begins in a hotly political context: public manifestations of anti-mining activism in Mexico. We see how opinions and beliefs in the local community are being massaged: a young woman is thrust forward from the crowd to speak up for ordinary people’s right for a job – jobs provided by the booming mining industry.

Then we plunge into commotion and chaos: the activists are grabbed and taken away in the night, by cops and perhaps other, darkly interested parties. One of the militants, never seen again – disappeared, one of the most tragic words in contemporary political history – will turn out to be the mother of the young hero, Emiliano (Juan Daniel García Treviño), of the story to come.

At this early point, Lost in the Night changes gear. The initial political context is never forgotten or elided, but it is reframed into a different kind of narrative – one of employers and workers, masters and servants. Emiliano manages to get himself a paying function as helper in the weird home of Carmen (Bárbara Mori) and Rigo (Fernando Bonilla).

They are a high-bourgeois but ‘renegade’ couple on the (literal) outskirts of society: she’s a currently not-very-active actor/singer, and he is a ‘transgressive’ artist who, for the moment, has run out of handy things to transgress. Their grand, modernistic house is situated in the middle of nowhere; and, as Cristina Álvarez López has pointed out in her note for the Rotterdam 2024 catalogue, that can only register, in the cinema of Amat Escalante, as a sign of imminent trouble.

I count myself as an Escalante fan, and particularly of his second feature, Los bastardos (2008; I was once on a festival jury where no other juror would consider it, for even a moment, as a serious contender – which made me even fonder of it!). That film has a jagged, confrontational quality – few narrative links, no psychological explanations, unadorned long takes, stark presentation of social context, interpersonal awkwardness and perversity galore, and a loooong build-up to a split-second digital effect that must have been the most expensive item in the budget – which ties it to Carlos Reygadas on the one hand, and Michael Haneke on the other. Heli (2013) follows along that particular line of ‘extreme cinema’.

Lost in the Night, for its part, follows a more commercial model: it’s a post-Parasite (2019) tale of class conflict played out within the microcosm of a cozy home and its various ‘satellites’ (shacks, surveillance points, big rocks & trees) scattered around the nearby environment. The images are more conventional, the acting is geared to a middle-ground of naturalism rather than either soap-opera histrionics or minimalist deadpan, the story flows (more or less: see below) … Has the experience of working on three TV seasons of Narcos: Mexico (2018-2021) reoriented Escalante’s aesthetic? Not permanently, I hope.

Certain themes pop out. Conflicted families: an Escalante constant. Social media: two big moments centre on personal recordings (one kept hidden) for the sake of two different kinds of Internet fame. Transgression in art: how easily and quickly it’s co-opted by the market-system. Curiously, the sex factor is fairly tame: it’s more Romeo and Juliet than the ‘animal force’ in previous Escalante (or Reygadas).

I am usually not one to complain of verisimilitude problems, but the on-screen plotting of Lost in the Night (co-scripted by Amat & Martín Escalante) is, at several glaring points, shaky. There is an entire section which would have been better cut out, or at least reconceived: when Emiliano is called upon by some mates (whom we hardly recognise) to avenge some crime (which we do not see or care about), and then hops a truck to get there (which he soon abandons), and then makes his way back into town … The sole function of this interlude, it seems to me, is to fill a night that needs to be ‘marked’ as such for the main plot to work – but it’s a bad miscalculation.

Not to mention – and here Escalante is probably being more deliberate in his ambiguity and ellipsis – the central connection between the artistic couple and the mother’s murder: why would they have wanted such a thing, and how could they have ‘ordered’ it to happen? This never made convincing sense to me.

In short, like in The Untamed (2016), some narrative elements appear to have been reverse-engineered from the Big Ideas/themes that Escalante wanted to include at the outset. The tracks of this ill-advised operation are not well hidden.

© Adrian Martin November 2023 / January 2024