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Shaw, Deborah. The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013. 270 pp.
Deborah Shaw's impressive book, which treats the three best known, but very different, Mexican film directors, is well aware of the ironies in its (and their) project. The monograph is published in a series called "Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers." Yet, as Shaw writes in her introduction, none of her subjects have directed a film in Mexico since 2001 (1). And if they have "strategically claimed a collective Mexican identity" (2), they no longer view Mexican cinema in opposition to the US, but have rather created a "symbiotic" relationship between the two. Further contradictions, explored throughout the lengthy book, arise: the threesome's rare combination of commercial success and critical praise; their appeal to genre movies, which problematizes the identification of their mode of auteurism with art film; the ambiguous understanding of "independent" cinema in this production context; and a transnational focus which embraces not just Mexico and the US but also Europe (with del Toro and Iñárritu shooting in Spain and Cuarón in the UK). Theoretically Shaw focuses here on what she calls "the politics of the transnational," asking where the directors position themselves through their films and interrogating the relationship (or lack of it) between their explicit statements on the subject and the commercial demands of each project (12).
The focus on the topics of independent cinema and transnational bordercrossing coincide with another recent book, Misha MacLaird's Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry. Unlike MacLaird, who treats a wide...