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Film
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Nicotina
It won awards and blazed a trail at the Mexican box office. But this side of the border, it feels like nothing more than a mediocre and belated retread of all things Tarantino.
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
By Todd Gilchrist
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Nicotina is one of those films that, ten years ago, would have been emblazoned at the front end of your well-worn VHS copy of Pulp Fiction, its trailer flashing superlative blurbs about international acclaim and the endorsement of a hipster filmmaker who supposedly knows a thing or two about idiosyncratic genre pictures. After all, it is a stylized crime film, funny and eccentric and violent in alternate measures, and full of colorful characters you can’t quite decide whether you want shoot, shoot up with or save.
Alas, the decade for those kinds of movies has come and gone, and so – assuming some sort of bizarro world shift to truth in advertising – my blurb for the movie’s current ads would read: “At long last, derivative, ironic Tarantino-esque crime films have made their way to Mexico to mine territory bereft of any fresh material!”
In other words, Nicotina isn’t particularly good. Rather, despite its actual international acclaim (it won six Mexican Ariel Awards) and some select, effusive critical praise, the picture is a particularly uninspired trip down memory lane for filmgoers who suffered through the studio dregs that appeared in the wake of Tarantino’s 1994 opus - think 2 Days in the Valley, Things To Do in Denver When You’re Dead, 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, etc. It’s a boring, flatly shot incarnation of caper flicks that even Miramax in their heyday would not have greenlit.
That the film stars Y Tu Mamá También’s Diego Luna adds prestige north of the border where it would otherwise have none; Luna plays Lolo, a computer hacker who is disproportionately obsessed with two events that seem unlikely to cross paths. One involves an upcoming exchange of diamonds with a Russian mobster, and the other touches on his unlucky-in-love next door neighbor Andrea (Marta Belaustegui), whom he monitors around the clock via video and audio surveillance equipment.
By some strange twist of fate that could only be predetermined by a screenwriter who dislikes coincidence, however, Andrea does indeed discover his longtime obsession and destroys Lolo’s apartment, in the process losing an important CD that holds the key to payment for the Russians.
When Lolo’s impetuous partners Tomson (Jesus Ochoa) and Nene (Lucas Crespi) leap to conclusions after the disc he delivers to the Russian appears empty, a firefight ensues during which the diamonds and the partners are scattered to the four corners of Mexico City. Lolo clumsily reconnoiters the city in search of an ailing Russian, as the fat, bleeding gangster stumbles onto a mom-n’-pop barber shop run with an iron fist by Carmen (Rosa Maria Bianchi), the gold-digging wife of the amiable and browbeaten Goyo (Rafael Inclan). At the same time, Nene flees the rendezvous point for the safety of a local pharmacy, where Clara (Carmen Madrid), the long-suffering wife of the owner, reluctantly agrees to help him.
As the conspirators find themselves in more and more sticky circumstances, each now dealing with new adversaries and problems, possession of the diamonds- and redemption from this self-destructive universe- becomes a greater and greater improbability; will Lolo escape with the diamonds, or will he be destroyed by his own greed?
The problem with Nicotina is that its characters are neither sympathetic nor captivatingly unlikable enough to arouse audiences’ even passing interest. Lolo, the perceived main character, is a lecherous voyeur with more technology than brains; perhaps that’s why he surrounds himself (and everyone else he knows) with computers - so they can solve all of his problems with but a click or two of the mouse. His partners are similarly annoying, each for different reasons, but Nene in particular is endlessly irritating because of his nonstop discourse about the merits of cigarette smoking.
| Even though the film will probably never be endorsed by Truth.com, Nene’s repeated monologues about how good smoking feels and how much tobacco is an indication of life lived at the fullest will no doubt send a few smokers heading to the lobby for a five or ten minute break. Thankfully for them, the film maintains such threadbare momentum from one sequence to the next that they’ll hardly have missed anything during the time they were gone.
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While the Pharmacist’s wife, Clara, is by far the most engaging and sympathetic character in the movie, the remainder of the cast is so badly drawn that it’s nigh impossible to wager who else in the ensemble cast the audience might possibly care about. The sequences in the barbershop leap directly into a level of farce the rest of the film seems to intentionally skirt, and director Hugo Rodriguez (a producer who helmed one previous film in 1993) returns time and again to these scenes to ratchet up the tension and escalate a husband and wife’s last-ditch opportunity into Grand Guignol viscera.
| In the end, we are repulsed as much by Carmen’s desperation to succeed in fully cuckolding her husband as we are by her efforts to literally turn the Russian inside out to find the diamonds. Still, it must be said that the folks mixing the on screen splatter concoction of caro syrup and food coloring earn their money here, perhaps just as thoroughly as any actors who subsequently gets sprayed with it.
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In the end, Nicotina is about as appealing as the substance for which it was named. Outwardly cool, its enjoyment rests in the quiet unease of one’s individual reaction to toxins and other potentially harmful stuff, but the film ultimately leaves one feeling worse than if you’d never seen it at all.
So go ahead, check it out for yourself and see what all the hype is all about. But don’t say you weren’t forewarned.
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