Review: This Is Not Berlin Espouses Freedom in Attitude If Not in Style

Hari Sama’s This Is Not Berlin is set in Mexico City in 1986, the year Mexico hosted the World Cup, during which Argentina’s Diego Maradona, assisted by the “hand of God,” proudly scored a goal against England at Aztec Stadium. The film takes us to this moment in history to tell a coming-of-age story that runs counter to traditional narratives about Mexico’s indelible soccer year. While the misadventures of a group of privileged Mexican teens begins with them as run-of-the-mill macho types, bonding through fistfights and homophobic insults, they end up getting in touch with their queerer selves upon discovering another venue named Aztec that’s a place for tasting freedom: a nightclub teeming with naked bodies, hard drugs, trite performance art involving orgies, mud, and fake blood.

When best friends Carlos (Xabiani Ponce de León) and Gera (José Antonio Toledano) first walk into the Aztec, they’re equal parts enticed, confused, and scared. “Is this a gay bar?” Gera asks his sister, Rita (Ximena Romo), an electronic goth musician who tags along for the ride. “This is an everything bar,” she responds. Up to this point, the boys have lived a traditionally repressed sexual life. At the Aztec, though, bourgeois prudishness, punishment, and good manners are nowhere on display, and Carlos and Gera give up on over-thinking their transition from homophobes-in-training to freed souls. They surrender to the multi-sensorial experience that the nightclub offers as a congregating site for the few who think that “soccer is homophobia” and those who allow themselves to watch performances involving arty teens destroying a car with hammers while yelling “You’re not our parents! You’re not our parents!” and a music act sings, “Sexual promiscuity! Sexual promiscuity!”

There’s some similarity between the Aztec and the sex club in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus. Except that film’s site for carnal freedom seemed peopled by a multiplicity of fixed types—a white gay couple, a trans woman, an Asian-American cisgender woman, and so on—that exist primarily to preach a message of tolerance. The idea, then, of the Aztec as an “everything” club, where few patrons are easily defined as a type, is refreshing, as This Is Not Berlin is one of the rare films where refusing heteronormative life doesn’t mean accepting its supposed polar opposite, but a queer alternative that rebuffs categories altogether. As such, Carlos and Gero are less concerned about embracing their newly minted selves than simply getting high and dancing in order not to claim any stable self at all.

At the Aztec, there are what we may call gay characters, such as its self-described spiritual guide, Nico (Mauro Sanchez Navarro), for whom too much vodka is better than too much boredom, and who’s unfortunately depicted as a kind of predator. But Carlos and Gero are largely portrayed as having opened the gates of their sexual identities and orientations through the Aztec experience, and having left those gates wide open. The club doesn’t turn them gay, or make them realize they were gay all along. The Aztec makes them take up an anti-status quo position vis-à-vis the world in general, and Mexico specifically, through the osmotic group contamination of nightclub drug-taking and dancing, which involves a willingness to try everything they’ve been groomed to avoid: pleasure for pleasure’s sake.

This kind of freedom, however, isn’t successfully translated into This Is Not Berlin’s narrative. Sama never quite manages to seamlessly sync the film’s anti-bourgeois political commitments to its soap-operatic register, such as the histrionics that follow the death of one character. Once Carlos and Gero become addicted to the Aztec, the story becomes rather repetitive: They drink and take drugs, watch arty performances, and then, a day later, mourn the fact that the whole world isn’t a nightclub as their parents scold them.

This Is Not Berlin could have looked to Alexandra McGuinness’s Lotus Eaters to avoid this gap between politics and form. In McGuinness’s film, youth is also a hazy, and somewhat endless, celebration of recklessness. But McGuinness’s camera is as teenage-like as the actors it films. It gets to playfully roam around the characters’ debauchery, mirroring their own liberation, unconcerned about crafting well-recognized narrative paradigms. Sama’s aesthetics, in contrast, never catch up with the emancipatory ideologies behind them. It’s as if the film sides with its unbridled teens in principle but not enough to queer its very language.