Screening rupture in "El sueño de Lú" and "Los insólitos peces gato"

• Autores: John V. Waldron
• Localización: Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana, ISSN 0145-8973, Vol. 47, Nº. 1, 2018, págs. 17-31
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Recent Mexican films like Hari Sama's "El sueño de Lú" (2012) and Claudia Saint-Luce's "Los insólitos peces gato" (2013) attempt to handle the rupture caused by death in a way that allows for the creation of a more inclusive or at least newly imagined community. Around the trauma caused by the impending death of Marta, the maternal figure played by Lisa Owen, in "Los insólitos peces gato", Saint-Luce creates a non-heternormative family without a father figure, clearly against the grain of the normative, paternal family structure that formed the corner stone for the Mexican national imaginary. Sama goes even farther in his "El sueño de Lú", a film that engages the viewer with the unendurable trauma caused by death without proposing a clear way to organize meaning. Sama suggests no social constructs, ceremonies or modes that are capable of responding to the loss Lú (Ursula Pruneda) feels. While Saint-Luce proposes an open ended, fluid reorganization of cultural signs and communal structures, Sama reveals the insufficiency of all social bonds. The open ended mutability that Saint-Luce portrays is similar to Sama's lack of any cohesive cultural, communal signifiers in that they both show the insufficiency of such things in the face of rupture and challenge the viewer to create her or his own social connections. Each of these films makes the viewers aware of the inadequacy of any cultural or symbolic order creating the possibility for solidarity based on lack rather than identification.