Midaq Alley

OPENING FILM! ►  One of the most honoured movies in Mexican history, Midaq Alley, directed by veteran Jorge Fons, transposes a novel by Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz from 1940s Cairo to modern-day Mexico City, and features Salma Hayek in a prominent role. (Hayek’s big Hollywood break would come in Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado, her next film.) The teeming drama concerns the denizens of an old downtown neighbourhood and follows several interlocking story lines, sometimes relating events from multiple perspectives. Ernesto Gómez Cruz plays a gruff, middle-aged cantina owner who realizes he has hidden gay desires. Hayek is a strong-willed beauty who impatience for life and love will lead her terribly astray. Margarita Sanz is a lonely, spinsterish landlady looking for love in all the wrong places. “Fons does a superlative job of translation and transformation . . . Borrowing a few pages from Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Fons and screenwriter Vincente Leñero have restructured Mahfouz’s novel into four episodes with overlapping characters . . . A riveting and well-acted drama” (Joe Leydon, Variety). “One of the best Mexican films since Like Water for Chocolate . . . A vibrant portrait of millennial Mexico City” (Ed Morales, Village Voice). Colour, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 140 mins.