We never learn the name of the town in which “Tigers Are Not Afraid” is set. What we do know is that it’s in Mexico, and that, for two equally frightening reasons, it’s a ghost town. One, the streets are pretty much deserted, thanks to the drug cartels, and the only school we see is closed after a nearby gunfight. Two, the innocents who are massacred, in the cartels’ quest for power, will not take death lying down. They muster in spectral gangs, hissing their demand for justice. Even when somebody is murdered, he stands there afterward, surveying his own corpse. Later, he sits on a swing and complains of feeling cold. The dead seem more alive than the living.
The men in the movie, which is written and directed by Issa López, are either yellow-bellies or brutes. Look at El Chino (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), a local politician, who is running for office and doing all that is required, and more, to guarantee his success. Or the Huascas, the roaming thugs who execute his orders. Or the cops we meet, in a squad car, who, when presented with damning evidence of El Chino’s barbarous methods, pull away fast, hellbent on not getting involved. Men, however, do not own this tale. The bulk of it belongs to women and children—the folks who bear the brunt of the damage in almost any conflict zone but whose fates, all too often, are tucked away in the shadows. Folks like Estrella (Paola Lara), a placid girl of around ten, who lives alone with her mother, until the day she comes home and finds no mother there.
Before long, hunger drives Estrella out of doors. To be precise, it drives her up, into the relative safety of the rooftops. There she encounters a pack of kids—orphans, runaways, and scavengers—even younger than her. In charge is a boy named Shine (Juan Ramón López), who has a stolen gun, a stolen phone, and a half-burned face that looks too old and too weary-wise for his age. (Anyone who recalls “Pixote,” Héctor Babenco’s startling 1980 drama about a child in the slums of São Paulo, will think of Shine as Pixote’s kindred spirit. Seven years after the film’s release, the actor who played Pixote was killed by Brazilian police.) Shine’s comrades are Tucsi (Hanssel Casillas), Pop (Rodrigo Cortés), and Morro (Nery Arredondo), who can’t or won’t speak. So small is Morro that he can curl up inside an abandoned television, staring out through the void where the screen used to be.
That is a typically fertile image from López, and her film is forever suggesting that the urge to tell stories about oneself, and the nourishing virtues of play, can be a means of survival. Some kids lark around with crime-scene tape, yards away from a body on the sidewalk. Others burn a discarded grand piano for fun. Shine and his crew hole up in what was once a fancy house, where ornamental fish, freed from their tank, still dart about in a puddle on the concrete floor. Upstairs, the lads enjoy a game of soccer, inking numbers on one another’s bare backs, with a permanent marker, to make up for the want of shirts. We are worlds away from the Edwardian coziness of “Peter Pan,” but there’s a definite tinge of the Lost Boys in these gleeful desperadoes, and Estrella, in teaming up with them, becomes a kind of instant Wendy; within days, she goes from losing a mother to mothering. Mind you, when she plants a calming kiss on Morro’s brow he wipes it off as if it were dirt.
I’m not sure that you can name your heroine Estrella without summoning memories of Víctor Erice’s “The South” (1983), which takes place in the long wake of the Spanish Civil War. The Estrella in that film, whom we see at the age of eight or so, at the time of her first Communion, and again as a teen-ager, seeks to fathom the secrets of her beloved father, with his burden of despair. (We sense that the generation gap has been stretched, by national trauma, into a gulf.) Before her came Ana, the little girl in Erice’s masterwork, “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), who is entranced by a showing of “Frankenstein” in the village hall. López, who likes to hurry us through the plot, may lack Erice’s tranquillity, and few directors can match his uncanny ability to balance the inward with the political, yet “Tigers Are Not Afraid,” like Ana, seems quite at home with monsters. It gets its claws into you, and won’t let go.
It also demonstrates a gratifying law of movie economics: the greater the frenzy with which money is thrown at special effects, the less likely they are to linger in the heads of customers. And vice versa. As I cast my mind back to “Avengers: Endgame,” earlier this year, all that remains, of maybe a hundred million dollars’ worth of wonders, is a vaguely stunned impression of the flamingly vast, plus a lot of hammer-tossing. What strengthens the effects in “Tigers Are Not Afraid,” by contrast, is that so few of them are especially special. I wasn’t convinced by the bat-size dragons that flit out of a cell phone, but the rest of López’s inventions are properly grubby and grounded. A thin red line of blood, which streams along the ground, spelling doom, is kept at bay by a hastily drawn boundary of white chalk. The voice of Estrella’s mother emerges from an empty paper cup, followed by a long-nailed hand. And the deceased, when they return, are trussed in plastic wrap, as if they were decaying food that somebody tried and failed to keep fresh. The sound they give off, I am obliged to report, is a softly rustling squelch.
This mixture of poverty and fantasy will not be for everyone. Compare the angry reaction to Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados,” when it came out, in 1950; not content with revealing the plight of destitute children, in Mexico City, Buñuel had the temerity to swerve into nightmare, with a scene in which an exhausted boy takes refuge in sleep, only to find himself wrestling with another kid, in slow motion, over a handful of raw meat. Viewers today, I suspect, may take similar issue with López’s film. If, as she informs us at the start, a hundred and sixty thousand people have been killed during Mexico’s drug wars, and fifty-three thousand have disappeared, is a movie like hers not an irresponsible distraction? Who cares if gruesome crimes are assuaged, now and then, by the advent of dreams?
My answer would be that López is no escapist. “Every time I make a wish, something really bad happens,” Estrella says. The phantasmal, in other words, offers no respite; it is simply part of the detritus that litters the townscape, making it that much easier for the residents—who are all too accustomed, God knows, to a ruined reality—to accept the imagined as true. What’s more, there will always be times when the visions run dry and even the imagination gives up the ghost. As Shine says to Estrella, “There are no wishes. There’s nothing. Not even tigers. We’re all there is.”
The most surprising thing about “Give Me Liberty” is that although it’s about a vehicle full of ordinary civilians, careening at a reckless pace around an American city, it is not a remake of “Speed” (1994). For one thing, the city is Milwaukee. For another, the vehicle is not a bus but a medical transport van. Oh, and the hero is not an off-duty policeman; he’s just a driver. If he barrels along, it’s not because there’s a bomb on board but because his impatient passengers rely on him to get them to their various destinations, preferably without flipping either his van or his lid. Somehow, against the odds and the traffic, he succeeds, and the heartening moral to be drawn from the movie is: the fast doesn’t have to be furious.
The director is Kirill Mikhanovsky, who was born in Moscow. The fact that he moved to Milwaukee and, at one time, drove a medical transport van is, of course, sheer coincidence. His movie stars Chris Galust as Vic, the harried driver, and Lauren (Lolo) Spencer as Tracy, a fiery young woman in a wheelchair, who, seated at the back of the van, is ready to engage in—and win—any argument with those at the front. (Spencer, a funny and forthright presence, is herself disabled.) More voluble still is the bunch of Russians, mostly old ladies, who shouldn’t even be in the van. Vic, in an act of kindness that could cost him his job, is ferrying them to a funeral, a solemn occasion for which they prepare by singing “Go Down Moses,” en route, to the drone of an accordion.
At an hour and fifty minutes, the movie is much too long, and constantly threatens to run out of gas; as a rule, and with all due respect to “The Blues Brothers” (1980), the madcap approach is not made for the long haul. But Mikhanovsky is all eagerness, and, as if taking his cue from Vic, he can’t resist stopping to pick up extra characters and scenes, whether they belong in the story or not. I particularly liked the gentleman at the Eisenhower Center (a real place, in Milwaukee) who has a mental impairment and delivers a proud rendition of “Born in the U.S.A.” At once breakneck and tolerant, “Give Me Liberty” manages to be both rousingly Russian and touchingly all-American. The Cold War is officially over. ♦
