Doomed Youth

Gerardo Naranjo’s latest film I’m Going to Explode (Voy a explotar) sets out to document the meeting and subsequent misadventures of a pair of Mexican teenagers in Guanajuato, one of the country’s most beautiful, and conservative, cities. Taking inspiration from films that could be described as doomed romantic death trips — Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Pierrot le Fou — Naranjo’s film not only documents Maru and Roman’s brief time together, but aims to express their subjective states, delirious and delusional throughout, with an impressive array of cinematic styles and techniques. I sat down with Naranjo to talk about I’m Going to Explode during the Edinburgh International Film Festival this past June.

Put simply, the film is about two people who meet, feel an intense connection, and end up on the run trying to escape from the world they are in. A lot of films start from a similar premise. What do you think it is about this scenario that continues to attract filmmakers?

I guess [it's] the possibility of creating an alternative world, to the point that we know any world always becomes, once you form it, it’s ready to get broken. I guess the possibility of just creating an alternative way of living out of the social structure. We are all trappers because we create the structures. But when we look back, at times, I feel that we discover our life is absurd. And I think that the chance of creating a new reality is maybe the only way to go. And soon enough when we create a new reality it will fail because we are corrupted.

In your statement for I’m Going to Explode, you say you want to allow for a freer cinematic grammar in this film. Could you briefly explain what that means for you?

The movies I have made live better in the festival world and in arthouses, and I think that is a great place to be but at the same time it’s a problem because I think filmmaking, as I understand it in Mexico, has the power to make a change and I think we have the obligation to try to speak about what we don’t think is right. I am against the idea that a quiet film or an artistic film is something that doesn’t have judgments, or doesn’t bring direct ideas. I think there is a concept that films have to be Bressonian, or like Bruno Dumont, you just have a documentary and the filmmaker stays in the background. And I’m against that and that’s why I copy – I don’t want to pay homage or make an “a la Godard” film. I watched Pierrot le Fou, which is one of my favorite films, and I said “I’m going to use this kind of grammar.” I tried to make a movie with many different levels of communication. So, there is the written word, the voiceover, the music – that is not coming from the fiction, the director is doing that.

There really are quite a few Pierrot le Fou references in I’m Going to Explode. Why was that film such an inspiration? Was it while you were working that you decided to put them in or was it planned beforehand?

Well, they were always there but I didn’t know how they would fit. Badlands or Bonnie and Clyde were always there while we were making it. Not that we were watching them, but I knew in my head that I would have a certain kind of editing. I knew the voiceover would go in the same way that Anna Karina’s did (in Pierrot). I never felt that I was taking something that was not mine. That movie, I live with it…

Well, Godard was always doing that same thing, quoting, copying, stealing… and you just seem to be entering into that same kind of playful dialogue with cinema’s past.

Exactly. Also, I wanted to use the camera that way and I didn’t want to hide it, to do it like [in Pierrot le Fou] but differently. I wanted to be very obvious in that sense that, yeah, it’s a recycled thing but it’s also a window I think for classicism that I think we are missing these days. I feel like nobody’s doing an ultra-romantic film. And I felt I wanted to make an ultra-romantic film and I said how can we do it today, taking into account that we are in 2009. We had the Dogme style already, how can we make an ultra romantic film after that, and I said, well, I guess it’s only if we made it from the delusional point of view of a teenager that thinks a prince came to save her. But this prince happened to be crazy. And then things get a little bit complicated.