Buy Me A Gun review: Known as Cómprame un revolver in its homeland, Julio Hernandez Cordon’s latest hits Director’s Fortnight at Cannes 2018.
Buy Me A Gun review by Andrew Gaudion.
Buy Me A Gun review
Shown as part of the Directors Fortnight at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Buy Me a Gun has been compared to The Florida Project in terms of its world approach. That comparison is easy to track, seeing as most of the film is told through the eyes of a young girl, but there is something a tad more fantastical at play here. In his sixth film, Julio Hernandez Cordon has constructed a down and dirty dystopian drama set in a world that imagines a not too distant future in which Mexico has been completely taken over by the Cartel. Women are disappearing and young girl Huck has to disguise herself as a boy in order to try and survive in this treacherous landscape.
A more apt comparison for Buy Me a Gun, I think, would be to say that is something of a cross between Beasts of the Southern Wild and the original Mad Max, with a tiny bit of Beyond the Thunderdome thrown in for good measure. Like Beasts, Hernandez’s film focuses on the relationship between a daughter and her father in a landscape in which luck so often plays a very strong hand, a landscape that they could once recognise but now have to rally against in order to make it to the next day, with Huck and her struggling addict of a father acting as a custodians of an abandoned Baseball arena that the Narcos like to frequent. The daughter/father dynamic is affecting, if never quite as profound as the dynamic in Beasts (but most films would struggle to match that level).
Related: The Florida Project review
It is in the rest of the world where the Mad Max comparisons come in to play. Like the original Max, there is a lot of imagination on display here, depicting a dystopic world that has gradually fallen into chaos, with much of the landscapes often vacant and empty, but landscapes which could very well be occupied with gunfire and violence at any given time.
Huck also forms a friendship with a group ‘lost boys’, orphans who have become rather adept at camouflaging themselves against the Cartel forces and are secretly at work devising a plan to take on the violent gangs through their own naïve means (namely a catapult that they have constructed).
The world that Cordon has developed is undoubtedly interesting and feels like it has great potential to present a violent landscape that while fictional is still grounded in the reality of the violent gang culture in Mexico. He has also made sure to populate the film with natural performers, with the young actress playing Huck turning in touching performance, forever reminding you that there is a little girl’s life and soul at risk at the centre of it all. However, it often feels like the film’s imagination is hindered by the productions own limitations (much like Mad Max).
There is a vibrant world worth exploring here, with the lost boys’ aspect proving to be the most interesting, but the film never seems to have enough time to allow a lot of these plot points to breath, as the 85-minute runtime means that not a great deal actually ends up happening. There is a brilliantly tense sequence during a party out in the desert, bookended by aerial shots that definitely have a virtuosity to them, but ultimately only come to demonstrate how dynamic this concept could have been should more time had been dedicated to fleshing out this dystopic world.
Buy Me a Gun never quite realises its full potential, with a late in the game Huckleberry Finn-esque dynamic being established between Huck and ‘The Boss’ of the Cartel only to then be quickly abandoned, demonstrating the limitations of the film as a whole. If a little more time was given to fleshing out this world, there could be something really truly great here. As it stands, it is just promising; undoubtedly interesting, but Buy Me a Gun is never quite able to kick it up that extra gear.
Buy Me A Gun review by Andrew Gaudion.
Buy Me A Gun was reviewed at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
