NYFF: Nicolás Pereda's "Fauna"

by Jason Adams

The title of Fauna, the latest film from Mexican-Canadian director Nicolás Pereda, turns out to be good enough a punchline that I'd never spoil it, but it's one of those punchlines where the characters themselves get to burst into laughter at it -- it's extra-textual enough for everybody to recognize its ridiculousness all at once, even as it exists within the narrative. There are many such laughs in the film but highlighting that distinction up-front matters. The space between the people on-screen and the people watching? Well, Pereda's having a heap of fun wigglin' all around in that uncanny void...

The movie begins with we will soon discover two actors, Luisa (Luisa Pardo) and her boyfriend Paco (Francisco Barreiro), lost in the Mexican desert thanks to their GPS directing them to the side of a highway instead of Luisa's parent's house, where they're intended to be. Already we feel unmoored and that desert haze slowly attaches itself to everything, dust on our sleeves -- for all we know from here on out the rest of the film's a mirage, hallucinated by lost souls still sitting on the side of traffic somewhere.

Luisa and Paco do actually make it to her parents though, only to find that the parents are not home -- first Luisa's brother Gabino (Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez) shows up, and the three sit awkwardly in their car trunks waiting around some more. The pattern of intentions meeting odd-duck experience introduces itself formally then -- nothing seems to go as planned. And that's before the actors begin play-acting out parts in the middle of their lives -- there's a hysterically funny scene, once the parents do make it back around, where Luisa and Gabino's father demands Paco show them his latest acting role, which is of a silent background actor, and we watch him adamantly nod for a couple of minutes, reacting to an unheard dialogue we're not privy to. And it's weirdly riveting!

Against all of this the specter of Mexican Crime Shows, your Narcos's and what-nots, shimmies like heat off stone -- Barreiro himself has acted in several such roles in his actual career, and Pereda's film seems to have a lot to implicate about that dusty yellow-tinged vision of Mexico shaping all of their stories whether they like it or not. At mid-point Fauna the movie carves itself down its middle and slips into a Lynchian netherworld of such drug-runner crime-boss sordidness, but a purposefully opaque kind, with a focus on patently absurd banalities -- misplaced hotel towels, especially bad wigs, a slow dance surrealism commenting upon itself.

The film casts a spell, a memorably unconventional one that seems to stand in the mirror and tickle itself while also being somewhat righteously annoyed with the entire set of circumstances it's poking fun of at the same time. It's angry about what it's angry about without ever simultaneously losing track of its prankful spirit of goofiness. I especially dug Gabino Rodríguez (who can also be seen in Yulene Olaizola's film Tragic Jungle, screening later in NYFF) with his hangdog face suddenly perched beneath an absurd straw hairdo, setting just the right nonsense tone all unto itself.

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