SUJO at AFI Fest
by William J. Hammon (ActuallyPaid.com)
Of the 16 films I saw at the festival, eight of them are official submissions from various countries for next year’s Oscar for International Feature. Sujo is Mexico’s entry, written and directed by Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez, which won the World Cinema Jury Prize at Sundance back in January. A combination of a crime thriller and a coming-of-age story, the issues at play here are ones we’ve seen many times before, but there’s a level of grace that prevents the film from being pedestrian or anodyne.
The title character is played at different stages of his life by Kevin Aguilar and Juan Jesús Varela. At the age of four, his father is assassinated by the drug cartel he works for, and the boy himself is set to be killed, saved only by the intervention of his aunt Nemesia (Yadira Pérez), who agrees to take him into her remote shack and raise him to never join or interfere with the cartel’s business. Despite living in a house with no electricity and not being allowed to go to town and enroll in school, Sujo learns vicariously from books, newspapers, and his cousins, Jai and Jeremy (Alexis Varela and Jairo Hernandez, respectively).
As he grows, however, a life outside of local crime becomes all but inevitable, as the cartels control basically everything in the area. When the boys’ involvement backfires with deadly consequences, Sujo flees to Mexico City, where he works on a shipping dock while sneaking in to a local college to observe and learn literature by osmosis, eventually earning the trust and tutelage of Susan (Sandra Lorenzano) so that he can enroll properly and get a chance at a normal life.
None of this is particularly revolutionary. Films like Sicario handle the cartel side of things while the likes of Stand and Deliver offer more than enough fodder when it comes to underprivileged kids using education as a means of social mobility. Where this film is able to distinguish itself is in its unflinching depiction of the realities of rural Mexican life under cartel rule, and the degree of forgiveness that Susan is willing to give Sujo when he inevitably backslides and does wrong. I remember sitting in the theatre (this was the last film I saw during the festival) and dreading the moment where he screws up, because it’s so clearly telegraphed. But once it happened, I found myself very pleasantly surprised at how Rondero and Valadez handled not just the moment itself, but its aftermath. It could have easily been left as trite melodrama, but there was a skill and maturity to it that I did not expect, elevating the picture overall by a solid letter grade in my head.
Originally published at http://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on November 16, 2024.
