My Mexican Bretzel (Nuria Giménez, 2019) (Patreon)

[SPOILERS. BUT FRANKLY I WISH SOMEONE HAD SPOILED IT FOR ME.]

As was the case with The Year of the Discovery, My Mexican Bretzel purports to be a reexamination of a particular period of time based on the recorded material available to the filmmaker. It seems as though a dark corner of history is going to be productively illuminated. But as compared with The Year of the Discovery -- which was at least based on historical fact, even if it fudged a lot of its documentary / interview material -- My Mexican Bretzel has even less connection to the actual world.

Or to be more precise, filmmaker Nuria Giménez absorbs wholesale the tactile, Bazinian guarantee of lived reality that is part and parcel of old home movies, and turns it against the audience. By producing a skillful, almost seamless visual track comprised of her grandparents' edited amateur cinema (mostly shot by her grandfather Frank Lorang, and featuring her grandmother Ilse Ringier), Giménez claims to have discovered the films of another man, downed pilot-turned-industrialist Léon Barrett.

As a textual counterpoint to these images, Giménez gives us the (purely fictional) written diary of the wife, Vivian Barrett. One is immediately moved by the sad discrepancy between her words and what we see. Léon's cinematic perspective is acquisitive and domineering; Vivian's thoughts are poetic and introspective. She laments that her husband seems to be orchestrating their lives in order to film them. She, meanwhile, is experiencing an existence that is more and more passionate in inverse proportion to her failing connection with Léon.

But this disjuncture between what we see and what we are told is a red herring, a simple instigation of the Kuleshov effect. Apart from the obvious -- we can be misled to think virtually anything about images, given the proper misdirection -- what do we really learn from My Mexican Bretzel? If Giménez had just announced the work as fiction from the beginning, we ourselves might've taken part in the experiment, seeing how our desires might make us inclined to give ourselves over to the illusion. But without that awareness, My Mexican Bretzel feels less like a fiction-documentary hybrid and more like a hustle.