Written and Directed by Jorge Michel Grau.
Starring Adrián Aguirre, Miriam Balderas, Francisco Barreiro, Carmen Beato and Alan Chávez.
SYNOPSIS:
A family of cannibals struggle to survive after the death of their father.
Watches will always be lumbered with Time. It’s kind of their thing. Yet in the last decade or so they have come to embody Time in a different way, a more finite way. Mobile phones, with the time permanently etched on their screens, have rendered wearing a watch almost obsolete. They’re merely an accessory now. The Watch’s monopoly over Time is running out.
The patriarch of We Are What We Are is a watch repairer. That says a lot about his way of life. We Are What We Are is a Mexican film about a very insular and isolated family. A father, mother, two sons and a daughter - their isolation is self-imposed. They keep their bloodline to themselves with an almost religious dedication.
It is on the father, Papa, on which the film opens. His figure stumbles outside a modern shopping mall, completely disjointed from all that around him. It’s as though he were a caveman dropped into the present day, like some early 90s high-school comedy. He stops to leer at window displays of women in bikinis. His sunken eyes glare with a primitive hunger. Not for sex, but for food. Whatever condition he suffers from begins to overwhelm him. A black bile spews from his mouth like alien blood as he keels over to die on the floor. He was a cannibal, and the chief provider of food for his family.
This brief opening scene is majestic, mimicking the cold, static camera of Michael Haneke. The dark, soiled tone is immediately set, which it shares with the great South American film Tony Manero. Unfortunately, We Are What We Are never quite follows up on its initial promise.
The film follows Papa’s death on the rest of the family, centring on the eldest of the children, Alfredo. It’s now up to him to feed the family, and they’re hungry. You see, they need to perform an important ceremony (eating a human) to anoint their new head of house. Why it is of such importance, we are frustratingly never told.
Their house is adorned with clocks, all ticking and tocking in a deafening natter. They’re like an unseen audience, a thousand ghosts of the family’s victims, all chanting towards that horrific ceremony at the film’s conclusion. A ticking clock, as Hitchcock famously observed, is an effective way to create tension. We are cinematically conditioned to see and hear such timepieces as countdowns. Our minds anxiously whir away, asking: “Red wire? Blue wire? Red wire? Blue wire?” The clocks, and the film’s narrative, all propel us towards the concluding ceremony. If only we were given reason to care.
None of the characters are at all sympathetic. Yes, they might be cannibals, but that’s one of the beauties of cinema – identifying with the protagonists regardless of their flaws. Having a few subtle traits of humanity usually does this, but this family has none. The sister is manipulative, the mother is insane, the brother is impulsively violent and Alfredo, well, there isn’t really much to him. If Todd Haynes can make one sympathise with a paedophile in Happiness, then it should relatively straightforward to help us relate to a family of cannibals. That they are not suggests that this is the director’s intent. We aren’t meant to sympathise.
With such detestable protagonists, We Are What We Are must surely then work on an allegorical level. It’s hard to find one. Whereas Tony Manero perfectly captured American cultural dominance on the countries it subordinates (the film is about a violent psychopath obsessed with John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever), We Are What We Are seems to say nothing about Mexico. If only there was some narrative intrigue and conclusion to why they are what they are. They constantly allude to preserving their bloodline and continuing their practices, something the ceremony is vital for, but nothing is ever satisfyingly explained.
But surely, the clue’s in the name, right? ‘We Are What We Are’ kinda suggests it doesn’t intend to explain itself. Still, that’s no reason to make an empty narrative.
A huge merit the film does possess, however, is its sound effects. Every crunch of bone and puncture of skin is wonderfully realistic. It needs to be as we rarely see the actual gore. Our ears and imaginations are left to do the hard work. The musical score accentuates this. The screeching violins transcend sound to become a mass of ants and maggots and flies swarming over your face and into your mouth, eyes and ears, while you lay in a dark, creaky forest, your face fixed forever in Munch’s Scream. Powerful things, those imaginations and ears…
Oli Davis
365 Days, 100 Films
Movie Review Archive
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