Güeros
2014 · Alonso Ruizpalacios
For when you want something cool and alive — a black-and-white hangout movie to watch with a drink when you're nostalgic for aimless nights and the friends you wandered them with. Easygoing on the surface, but it leaves a pleasant ache.
What it's about
Mexico City, 1999: the national university is shut down by a student strike, and an aimless teenager is shipped off to his older brother's apartment in the capital. A rumor about a dying, half-forgotten folk singer — the man who supposedly once made Bob Dylan weep — sends the brothers and their friends drifting across the paralyzed city in search of him. It's a road movie that never leaves town, and a coming-of-age story soaked in the static electricity of a city on pause.
The experience
Playful, restless, and quick on its feet — jump cuts, deadpan jokes, and sudden swerves into melancholy. It has the loose-limbed energy of being young and broke with nowhere to be, and it sneaks real feeling in under the mischief.
The craft
Shot in silvery black-and-white in a boxy old-fashioned frame, it crackles with the jump-cut mischief of the French New Wave while staying defiantly Mexico City in its soul. It's also gleefully self-aware — the characters mock exactly the kind of arty festival film they're inside. The photography of the city, from highways to hidden courtyards, is gorgeous and worth a big screen.
Why it matters
It won Mexico's Ariel for Best Picture and Berlin's prize for best first feature, announcing Alonso Ruizpalacios as one of the most inventive directors of new Mexican cinema.
Reception & legacy: how Güeros was received, argued over, and remembered →
During the 1999 strike that shut down Mexico's national university, an aimless teenager is packed off to his older brother's Mexico City apartment, where a rumor about a dying, half-forgotten folk singer — the man who once, legend insists, made Bob Dylan weep — sends the boys drifting across a paralyzed capital. Alonso Ruizpalacios's debut is a road movie that never leaves the city, shot in silvery black-and-white and boxy Academy ratio, crackling with the jump-cut mischief of early Godard and Jarmusch's deadpan cool while remaining defiantly chilango in soul. It is also gleefully self-aware: characters mock the very kind of festival-circuit art film they're inside, black-and-white and all. The film won the Ariel for Best Picture and Berlin's prize for best first feature, announcing both Ruizpalacios — who went on to Museo, A Cop Movie and La Cocina — and cinematographer Damián García as major talents. Its finest trick is tonal: student politics, grief and slapstick held in a single restless tracking shot through streets that seem to hum.
Lines of influence
- Breathless (1960) — The jump cut as expressive punctuation within a scene — Güeros lifts Godard's technique of excising frames from continuous action to make time stutter and the youthful drift feel restless.
- Masculin Féminin (1966) — Chaptered, intertitled self-reflexivity married to deadpan youth caught between apathy and student politics — the template for Güeros's ironic titling and its 1999 UNAM strike backdrop.
- Band of Outsiders (1964) — Aimless-trio digression structure and direct nods to the audience (the 'minute of silence' gag) feed Güeros's playful ruptures of the fourth wall and its plotless wandering.
- The 400 Blows (1959) — French New Wave location shooting of restless youth, and the extended following-tracking-shot-into-freeze-frame that Ruizpalacios echoes in his mobile camera trailing the boys through the city.
- Stranger Than Paradise (1984) — Deadpan minimalist road movie built from static black-and-white tableaux in near-square framing — the direct model for Güeros's boxed academy compositions and affectless drift.
- Down by Law (1986) — Robby Müller's high-contrast, silvery black-and-white photography of aimless drifters — a photographic reference point for Güeros's crisp monochrome and its trio of listless escapees.
- Los Olvidados (1950) — Foundational Mexican black-and-white realism of drifting urban youth on Mexico City streets, the national lineage of location-shot juvenile aimlessness Güeros reworks.
- Y Tu Mamá También (2001) — Mexican road-movie quest whose detached voice-over narration keeps cutting away to the sociopolitical world outside the car — Güeros inherits this braiding of a boys' journey with the state of the nation.
- Slacker (1990) — Plotless, ambulatory structure where the camera wanders from one aimless talker to the next — the drifting, quest-without-a-goal architecture underlying Güeros's episodic day.
- Temporada de patos (2004) — Contemporary Mexican deadpan comedy shot in stark black-and-white with static, boxy compositions and long-held pauses — the same New Mexican minimalist grammar Güeros adopts.
- Lake Tahoe (2008) — Rigorously composed static frames, elliptical cutaways to black, and deadpan performance style that Güeros shares as part of Eimbcke's and Ruizpalacios's common minimalist school.
- Frances Ha (2012) — Contemporaneous black-and-white portrait of youthful urban aimlessness that wears its Nouvelle Vague debt openly — jump-cut energy and Godardian buoyancy in parallel with Güeros.
- Post Tenebras Lux (2012) — New Mexican Cinema's formal experimentation with academy-adjacent framing and image distortion — the same movement's push toward self-conscious aspect-ratio and texture as expressive device.
- Roma (2018) — Later black-and-white Mexico City memory film built on gliding lateral tracking shots — extends the monochrome-plus-mobile-camera lyricism Güeros applied to the same city.
- Museo (2018) — Same authorship: genre-bending heist reframed through unreliable, self-reflexive narration and title-card irony — Ruizpalacios carrying forward Güeros's meta storytelling devices.
- A Cop Movie (2021) — Ruizpalacios pushes the self-reflexive impulse of Güeros to its limit, exposing the apparatus of fiction itself through a documentary-fiction hybrid that interrogates its own performances.