The Three Who Left and Won

Around the turn of the millennium, Mexican cinema produced a burst of films too alive to ignore. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros braided three stories around a car crash in Mexico City with a ferocity that announced a new national cinema; Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro were close behind, and the older lyric strain was still there in Like Water for Chocolate and, at the art-house extreme, in Carlos Reygadas' luminous Silent Light. For a moment there was a nuevo cine mexicano, rooted in Mexican streets, money, faith, and violence.

And then the three friends left — and the leaving is the story. Del Toro built fairy tales out of fascism and monsters, carrying his Spanish-Mexican gothic from The Devil's Backbone into the masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth and onward to Hollywood. Cuarón turned long-take virtuosity into a worldview, the camera holding through chaos in Children of Men and weightlessly through space in Gravity, before circling all the way home to a black-and-white memoir of a Mexico City childhood in Roma. Iñárritu kept braiding catastrophe — 21 Grams, Babel — and then chased the sublime into the wilderness of The Revenant. Between them, the "three amigos" won the Academy Award for Best Director in a stretch that made the category briefly look like a Mexican franchise.

It is easy to read this as an unambiguous triumph, and mostly it is — but the shape of it is worth pausing on, because it is the same shape as a hundred quieter emigrations. A national cinema's most gifted children are exactly the ones the wider industry can use, and so the success of the individuals can hollow the scene that formed them. The three amigos took Mexican sensibilities — del Toro's Catholic monsters, Cuarón's social texture, Iñárritu's fatalism — and globalized them, which is a victory; but the films got bigger, more universal, less of a specific place, as the careers rose. The most Mexican of the late films is Cuarón's Roma, and it is pointedly a return, a deliberate journey back to the particular street the success had carried him away from.

That return is the honest center of the story. Emigration as triumph is real here in a way it rarely is — these are not exiles but conquerors, and they took the gate by force of talent. But a movement and a career are different things, and the three amigos are finally three magnificent careers rather than an enduring national wave. What they proved is that a specific place can produce world cinema; what their trajectory shows is how hard it is for the place to keep the people who prove it. The three who left won everything. Whether Mexican cinema won is the question Roma exists to ask.

---

The line: Like Water for Chocolate → Amores Perros → The Devil's Backbone → Pan's Labyrinth → Children of Men → Silent Light → Gravity → Roma

This line crosses:

• The Children of the Rubble — another national cinema whose auteurs emigrated; Wenders' America and the three amigos' Hollywood are the same pull, the gifted leaving the scene that made them.
• When Cinema Went Outside — Roma and Silent Light reach back to the neorealist contract: real place, real time, the camera attending to ordinary life as worthy of the whole art.

Read through: Deborah Shaw, The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón.

A note on the argument: the careers, films, and the Oscar run are documented record. The framing of the three amigos as an emigration — individual triumph that leaves open whether the national wave endured, with Roma read as the deliberate return — is this essay's reading.