A walk in the clouds
A Mexican love poem lights up the cinematic sky.

By B. Ruby Rich

A THOUSAND CLOUDS of Peace, the debut feature of young Mexican writer-director Julián Hernández, is a sublime meditation on love, heartbreak, sex, and loneliness. Hernández is too smart and too sensitive to join his compatriots in their race to match Hollywood's action output. Instead, A Thousand Clouds offers up romantic pleasures that cannot be found in a quickie – and delivers its love bites with the smooth, deliberate tempo of a bolero. It's a film for anyone who ever went to bed forlorn, comforted only by Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday – or Sara Montiel – on the stereo. As for me, I'm not sad at all: I just filled a slot of my 10-best list for 2004.

The star of A Thousand Clouds, on-screen at every moment, is a sexual flaneur named Gerardo who wanders Mexico City, traversing and transgressing its physical boundaries in search of love and affection but finding only sex for hire. No hustler could be more different from the model of Warhol's narcissistic stud. Gerardo is an avatar of heartbreak, a lonely soul seeking connection. He works in a pool hall and services some of the men who frequent the place. He lives in an anonymous room, with little to call his own apart from the intensity of feeling, physicality, and sexuality that marks his existence. Not content to let the camera dwell happily on first-time actor Juan Carlos Ortuño's face and body ad infinitum, Hernández breaks up the shots, jump-cuts his transitions, disrupts time and place with voice-overs and nonsynchronous sound, and even ends scenes with an abruptness that can make us lose equilibrium as surely as Gerardo loses his own. He wants us totally immersed.

Hustling may be a life, but love isn't a hustle. When Gerardo finally falls for a guy, an offer of money breaks his heart – and a Dear John letter from the beloved john fractures it even more. Gerardo wanders the streets in search of his lost love, finding consolation not in the anonymous sex he performs with the mechanical urgency of a heroin addict copping a fix but instead, surprisingly, from the many high-spirited women he encounters. A pair of women are conducting a sidewalk sale, where Gerardo searches for a long-lost song he remembers from a movie. They recognize the tune and laugh uproariously at his rendition, even as they boost his spirits and find Montiel's old LP El último cuplé for him.

This memory and purchase aren't scripted randomly: Montiel was the preeminent femme fatale, actress, and singer of the '50s and '60s, in Latin America and Europe. She captured hearts and sympathies on-screen and off-, including an infamous romance with director Anthony Mann that ended in a disastrously short-lived marriage. Montiel's songs formed a soundtrack for heartbreak, as cherished by her lovelorn fans as by lovesick Gerardo. Montiel's song binds us to the movie, turning the audience into a virtual shoulder Gerardo could cry on, if only he knew we were there.

Mexico City is a bifurcated, gendered universe. Apart from one school friend who offers desultory advice and a melancholic queen whose attention he half disdains, it's the women Gerardo encounters who understand the damage wrought by men. A sympathetic waitress offers him advice and free food; she turns out to be pregnant, alone, dreaming against the odds of a better life ahead. He meets another woman on a bridge; she seems dangerously close to the edge, emotionally and geographically, yet she pauses to sympathize and share a utopian dream of the return of her own lost love. Women dream in this strange city emptied of masses and peopled only by the compass points of Gerardo's subjectivity, and men act. Badly. In one episode Gerardo encounters a visitor from the dark side, an icon of macho masculinity straight out of somebody else's movie. Needless to say, Gerardo's erotic encounter with this stranger in a curiously abandoned industrial landscape (that he enters on one of his quests to find his true love) doesn't go well. It's bad enough to send him running back to mama, but alas there's no comfort to be had from the astonishingly young and hostile woman to whom he cannot even talk.

Hernández doesn't mention Fassbinder when he reels off his influences to me during a cell phone conversation from the midst of the Guadalajara Film Festival, where last year he won the award for Best Director. But Fassbinder's dystopic universes have something in common with the one Hernández brings alive for us here. The difference is heart. Hernández loves his characters, he loves his city, and he's not afraid to let his story veer toward the sentimental as well as the sexually graphic. Nor is he afraid to let his vision unspin in a visually original fashion. Shot by the talented Diego Arizmendi in luminous 35mm black and white (sure to glow on the Castro Theatre's giant screen), the graphic splendor of the images rescues the film from ever toppling over into the full-color sordidness of an Arturo Ripstein film, or those of the many younger Mexican directors who've followed his lead into the lower depths of ever more-predictable squalor.

Think of A Thousand Clouds, then, as the anti-Amores perros. Its use of black and white is a tribute, Hernández says, to the black-and-white television sets on which he and so many other Mexicans watched the movies that fixed their fantasies – like photographs developing in darkrooms – with a monochromatic signature. But I suspect it's also a gesture toward cinephilia itself, a proclamation of connection to a cinematic past that was so much more colorful than color.

Recent Mexican films – from María Navaro's Without a Trace to Carlos Reygadas's Japón – have been busy trying to reconfigure the harsh gender conventions of their national cinema. Hernández here is doing that and more. In a decisive break with New Latin American Cinema's disavowal of past pop confections in favor of a gritty realism, Hernández names as two of his biggest influences men responsible for everything the new wave sought to overturn. He cites Mexico's Emilio "El Indio" Fernandez, king of the golden age of popular movies and cinematic godfather to the wondrous Maria Felix and Dolores Del Rio; Hernández points in particular to El Indio's cinematic elevation of women and their suffering. But he might also have had El Indio's problematic race politics in mind, since Gerardo's dark skin has a clear relationship to his marked, tragic life where, incidentally, his runaway love and bitter mom are both lighter by far. Interestingly, Hernández also cited to me the overlooked Argentine director Leonardo Flavio, whose movies fused politics and pop culture into some of the highest-grossing Argentine films ever, citing his formalism as a strong influence.

It's important to note, though, that Hernández has also been nurtured and shaped by an international world of queer cinema. He and his collaborators first met while students in the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográfico and showed their early shorts in the MIX festival of gay and lesbian films, a forum for experimental work that started in New York City two decades ago and became an important presence in Brazil and Mexico in the '90s.

Imagine Happy Together had been directed by Antonioni in his L'avventura period. Imagine the kind of urban adventure Derek Jarman might have brought to life, complete with deadpan acting and nonnarrative edits, had he been born Mexican instead of English. Or follow the lead of the third point on the holy trinity of influences Hernández recited to me: Pier Paolo Pasolini. I imagine Teorema turned inside out, with the stranger now the one disrupted, alone, and unloved. There goes Gerardo, wandering Mexico City – often running, inexplicably, with total desperation but no real destination. Run, Gerardo, Run? No, he's not Lola. There's no heist, no boyfriend, no gun, no father. Just a lack, a wound, a heartbreak, out of which Hernández's assured direction and Ortuño's astonishing performance have created a moving, romantic surplus.

'A Thousand Clouds of Peace' opens Fri/2, Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F. Call for price. (415) 621-6120. See Rep Clock, in Film listings, for show times.