Last year, when up-and-coming Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo ejaculated his ninety minutes of intensity Voy a Explotar into the planet’s cinematic cervix, the film made award panels all over Europe and the US erect with excitement. A year later, typically belated on this drizzly American aircraft hanger (the hooligans call it ‘Ingerland’), Naranjo’s beautiful debut is set for this summer’s cinemas.

The film follows the personal revolutions of two disaffected teens tired with the conformity of school life, home life, the social destinies that our teetering economic system felches all available human meat towards. They are rebels-without-a-cause, camping out on the roof of one of their own houses, hiding from their parents and the police and living a fragile utopia of red wine and barbecues. Their journey is political, economic, sexual but ultimately unsustainable. Their innocence must give way to experience and action is inseparably sewn to consequence. Naranjo himself has described with typical auteristic pretence the way in which his two star-cross’d lovers encounter and interpret rebellion, which he intends as: ‘an essentially romantic act’. In his words, the story is one of love, anger, energy, truth, desire and belief. The towering soundtrack,

pushing Western classical alongside alternative dance does this sense of near-sickening romance justice, as does the quick, slick editing and the gorgeous shots of the storming Central American environment. These sweeping shots especially make you want to nuke East Anglia just to push us a little further into the Atlantic and a little closer to what looks like virginal paradise. The film does well to remind us that the continent is also one of gun violence, right-wing authoritarianism and emotional suppression, but then again, there’s always Ipswich.

Voy a Explotar, as a crashing, dizzy drama, may make Gerardo Naranjo the most exciting director to come out of Mexico since Alejandro González Inárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams). The film is full of the energy of life: it has dynamism and at the same time the sick entropy that tips all great drama towards death. Naranjo describes it as ‘an angst against stillness’ and with this ethos injected into every microframe of the flick, everyone may feel called to step out of the cinema into the English summer and maybe just make a quick call to their slave-driving boss to finally tell him to go fuck himself. The fact that this review is here in front of you means that I, at least, just about managed to contain myself.  

Words > Joe Bedford