ALFONSO CUARṒN: SOLO CON TU PAREJA (1991) / GRAVITY (2013)
It is difficult to compare Alfonso Cuarón’s first and last films when one is set in a Mexican apartment and involves a lot of slapstick and sex, and the other is a cinematic record breaker set in space with just one main character. Gravity is one person’s fierce quest to survive against all odds, Solo Con Tu Pareja includes a scene where two people fight over who gets to commit suicide in the microwave.
Solo Con Tu Pareja is a bedroom farce, and was Cuarón’s foray into the screwball, madcap type of comedy that was popular in Mexican cinema at the time. But whereas Solo Con is obviously light-hearted in many ways, the cultural difference in the comedy is clear. For example, whereas the set piece of the film is a sequence in which main character Tomás Tomás (no, not a typo – double names were apparently hilarious at that time, and the other characters have them too) climbs backwards and forwards between two apartments in an attempt to divide his time between two women without either of them noticing, the plot’s main feature is actually a prank that involves Tomás receiving a positive result from a HIV test. And the last time any of us checked, AIDS wasn’t funny.
However, the unusual title- which translates as ‘Only with your Partner’ – is actually a slogan from a Mexican contraception advertisement for safe sex (which is why the re-titling of the English version to Love in the Time of Hysteria was so misguided). The film was financed by the Mexican government itself – although only after there had been a cancellation in their list for that year – and there is a degree to which this is a sort of satirical social commentary. Quite a lot of Cuarón’s debut then was lost in translation and both the Spanish and the English versions of the movie largely disappeared, despite its decent characterisation and lively spirit.
Cuarón did, however, hold onto one crucial thing. This was his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubzeski. After leaving a steady trail of success behind them with A Little Princess, Children of Men and Great Expectations, Cuarón and Lubzeski turned their gaze skyward – and in 2013, Gravity became the year’s force to be reckoned with.
As it unfolds in all its visual and technological glory, there can be no doubt that Gravity eclipses Solo Con in every possible way. From the enormous undertaking of the physical shoot, to the level of detail in the set, Gravity is a landmark not just in Cuarón’s career, but in cinematic history.
But as well as the visual achievement, Gravity’s success was at least partly to do with its vivid sense of profound loneliness. The awful exposure and crushing claustrophobia, which lead finally to the scene in which the only human voice in her universe mistakes Stone’s distress call for her name and then allows her to listen to him singing his baby to sleep, all combine to make Gravity far more moving than anyone could have predicted. (There is in fact now a whole short-film companion piece to Gravity, based solely on the Inuit fisherman whose voice we hear in this scene).
Gravity may be worlds away from the philandering Tomás and his farcical health crisis with which Cuarón’s career began, and Cuarón may now have created one of the most sophisticated films of the last decade, but clearly he never lost sight of the real focus of his films – the human beings.