Cinema is one of the highest celebrated forms of contemporary media, and it’s obvious that the
One of the most popular Mexican directors is Alfonso Cuarón, who first achieved international recognition in 1991 with Sólo Con Tu Pareja (Only With Your Partner). In 1998, he directed an American adaptation to Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, then returned to
Sólo Con Tu Pareja is a social satire aimed at the promiscuous and macho middle-class “Don Juans” of
However, when servicing two women at the same time, and switching between his apartment and his neighbors’ (who is also his doctor and best friend, and conveniently out of town), Tomás sees into a third neighbor’s window and is struck by her beauty and graceful movements as she practices a flight attendant’s safety routine. She becomes his newest conquest, and his ambition alienates the other women he’s having affairs with. As punishment, the two trick him into thinking he has AIDS, which drives him to attempt suicide in a myriad of failures.
The film is more than a silly story of a casual sex addict. It addresses the social expectations of Mexican culture in its treatment of women, the machismo of its men, and absurd actions of its upper-middle class.
Cuarón said in the included documentary, Making Sólo Con Tu Pareja, “I wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, in the sense of going all the way not to use reality for your film, but to transform reality and transform everything through camera and through montage.”
Cuarón’s film is a comfortable match to the works of
The cover art for today’s Criterion release of Sólo Con Tu Pareja is a montage of items and symbols from the film. High contrast images of airplanes, skyscrapers, travel itineraries, and Tomás’s conical paper cups circle the scribbled black title. It is underlined with red arrows, and printed on a hospital mint-green; an intentional reference to the film’s dominating color palette.
Viewers may notice that almost every scene in the film has a green object somewhere in it, and oftentimes find that everything in the shot is green or tinted to match.
Although Alfonso’s co-writer and brother, Carlos Cuarón, accuses the director of whimsically going through a “green period,” Alfonso Cuarón insists the color’s utilization serves as a tool for the film. “We wanted to create a heightened reality,” Cuarón said. “It was a reaction to a couple of decades in Mexican cinema in which the sense of style is almost lost.”
The tinted green comes across beautifully in the Criterion version of the film. According the transfer details in the included 30 page booklet, the film’s original cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki oversaw a remastering of the film, in which “thousands of instances of dirt, debris, and scratches were removed using the MTI Digital Restoration System.”
The booklet also includes a very interesting essay that focuses on the similarities and running themes of Cuarón’s films, most specifically the links and contrasts of Sólo Con Tu Pareja and Y Tu Mamá, Tambien, respectively. After the essay is a fictional biography of the film’s protagonist, called Tomás Tomás, written by Carlos Cuarón to introduce the character to actor Daniel Giménez Cacho.
DVD extras include the aforementioned documentary, Making Sólo Con Tu Pareja, a pair of short films by each of the Cuarón brothers, the theatrical trailer for the film, and updated English subtitles.
