El Mariachi (1992)
If I handed you $7,000 and told you you had to earn back $2 million, what do you think you would do? Gamble? Maybe invest in stocks and play the long game? Something perhaps a bit more dangerous, like a cage fight bet?
This is a strange question, perhaps, but one with at least one real-world counterpart - the tale of Robert Rodriguez and his debut film, El Mariachi.
If I had to describe El Mariachi, the term I would feel is most applicable is “amateur”. When someone hears that, though, they probably picture a movie that makes lots of mistakes or perhaps fails to be entertaining, but as an “amateur” writer myself, I see it in a different light - one of passion.
Set and shot in the city of Acuña, Coahuila, Mexico, El Mariachi tells the surprisingly tragic story of a man (Carlos Gallardo) whose only dream is to be a mariachi, like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him. He travels Mexico in an attempt to find a venue that will take him, eventually finding a bar owned by Dominó (Consuelo Gómez). At the same time that our hero is in town with his guitar and black suit, however, a gang war is brewing. The leader of one of these gangs, Azul (Reinol Martínez), is a man dressed in black who carries a small armory with him in, of all things, a guitar case.
Since no one but the other gang boss Moco (Peter Marquardt) has ever seen Azul, the Mariachi finds himself in the crosshairs of Moco's comically incompetent Sicarios. What was starting to look like a lucky break instead drags our protagonist into the world of bloody gang warfare.
Sometimes, you gotta swap the guitar for a gun, I guess.
When I say comically incompetent, I mean it, too. There's an almost slapstick quality to some of the earliest scenes, as the Mariachi runs circles around gun-toting goons who really only know to be on the lookout for a man in black carrying a guitar case. An early bit in a hotel sees the hotel owner, having ratted out our boy, constantly having to redirect the squad of hooligans, since they can never seem to actually set eyes on the Mariachi.
This goofiness doesn't only extend to scenes like this, though. A really fun detail is that a lot of times, characters will do something in a slight panic, and to show that, the film is ever-so-slightly sped up. It's a subtle touch, but you recognize it immediately when it's happening, and it's legitimately funny.
But El Mariachi isn't just here to deliver laughs, and in all honesty, it's overall not very funny at all, instead being a sad tale of a man losing everything for no reason at all. A petty struggle between two criminal kingpins leaves so many dead, and our hero crippled.
I think everyone should watch this film, but not simply because it's a good movie. It IS a good movie, truly, but what's most important about it is that it's a PASSIONATE movie.
Robert Rodriguez famously spent some time as a medical test subject to raise the money to make this film. In the end, he walked away with $7,000. A paltry sum in the movie business, really. But he had a vision, and literally nothing was going to stop him.
The film was set in the city they were shooting it in, just so they never had to edit signage. Local amateur actors play most of the roles in the film. Squibs were made using condoms as a cheap option. Instead of using a dolly, Rodriguez would sit in a wheelchair with the camera and be wheeled around. Imperfect takes would have to do.
There's a short moment early on where the hero asks for a coconut at a stand right outside of the town. He walks away without paying, something that was actually an oversight on Rodriguez’ part. Instead of going back and spending time and money to fix it, there's instead a bit of narration saying that the coconut was actually free.
It's things like these that are what I mean when I call it “amateur”. An amateur is inexperienced by definition, of course, but to make up for that, they often have creative solutions. What that sort of thing does for a film is make it feel like someone behind the camera actually cared about it. That's not to say that experienced and well-funded directors don't have love or passion for what they do, because Rodriguez’ own mentor, Quentin Tarantino, is proof that that's not the case. But when a production is clearly held together by nothing but hopes, dreams, and a lot of tape, something magical comes through.
A project of passion feels different, it truly does, and El Mariachi couldn't be any more a passion project than it is. A clear effort from someone who is doing everything they possibly can to make it work is something everyone should see.
