Beyond the Mexican Bay by Jean-Marc Rousseau Ruiz

For its closing evening, the Critic’s Week is proposing the Mexican feature Desierto Adentro, preceded by the short film Beyond the Mexique Bay by Jean-Marc Rousseau Ruiz. The desert thus has a special honour in this screening programme.

In this sparse short, in which love is not powerful enough to protect against death, the desert is more than a simple backdrop. Firstly, it provides the reason for a brief encounter between a man and a woman : “I’ve been told that you could take me into the desert”, asks this tired European of a beautiful young Mexican woman, busy selling her jewellery on the market.

The woman guides this silent and reticent man through the desert and tries, despite the language difference, to converse with him. Whether they be trivial or more serious, human emotions tend to speak for themselves. Thus the two characters spending time together somehow manage to communicate the essential : to speak about their pasts, about their experiences of death and loss. Their ephemeral encounter is not able however to change the inescapable destiny of this man, whose apparent calm hides a well of sadness.

The desert landscape is one moment the place which one has dreamt of, the next place where one has lost those one loves, and finally, the place where one comes to die. The final sequence, the only moment of lyricism in this contemplative road-movie, thus takes on the dimension of a distraught flight from death - without a doubt failed in advance, but necessary all the same. It is not until this point that the film, with an extreme sobriety, finds its meaning and reaches its resolution. The technical clumsiness, particularly in the uneven image, becomes touching and the sobriety gives a fable-like dimension to this story of human existence fleeing from death.

Chloé Averty