Micro-Budget March: El Mariachi (Dir Robert Rodriguez, 1h 21m, 1992)

For all his ventures into high budget cinema, most recently birthing the long-gestating adaption of Alita: Battle Angel from the mind of James Cameron, and flirtations with the Star Wars universe via the space western The Mandalorian, to many Robert Rodriguez is the man who made his career on the back of a film that cost barely $7000. Certainly, his career since he exploded onto the scene with El Mariachi is dominated by films that cost, in the grand scheme of Hollywood, a mere twenty to forty million dollars, whether they be CGI-dominated childrens' films, dark gritty Mexican-set tales of revenge (bizarrely featuring a supporting character from his main childrens' series, Spy Kids), or the Frank Miller comic adaption, Sin City. Rodriguez, like no other director in cinema, save for the legendary Roger Corman, knows how to make a film on the cheap.

El Mariachi, though, is a thing of legend, a brutally efficient lean beast of guerilla film-making, a story as twisted and complex as the one it tells, where a wandering guitarist (Carlos Gallardo) becomes embroiled, through mistaken identity, and swapped guitar cases, with the revenge of small-time gangster, Azul (Reinol Martínez), upon his former comrade, Moco (Peter Marquardt). It is a tale on-camera of a man becoming caught up in love, in music, in dealing with the declining identity of his nation, and eventually, caught up in revenge. Behind the camera, a first-time director, a one-man crew, a lone gunman walking into town to make a picture, undergoes drug trials, deals with a disinterested and at points hostile town, convinces the local police and prison to let him film in a wonderfully strange blur of reality and fiction, and arrives in Hollywood to, alongside his eventual friend, Quentin Tarantino, and Kevin Smith (more of in the next article) kick-start the 1990s independent movie boom. This is the story of the film made for $7,000.

El Mariachi begins with a prison break, during which we are introduced to our film's antagonist, Azul, his former partnership with Moco, whose men are sent to kill, but are quickly dispatched by, Azul, before Azul, guitar-case crammed with weapons in hand, escapes via truck into the nearby town. It's a stunningly economic scene, the jail's real-life staff, including the blasé female warden merely watching would be assassins enter and convict leave, playing themselves, whilst the terse gunfight is only the opening aperitif to show the economy, the bare-bones efficiency of the film. Why shoot a long exchange of fire, after all, when a few shots, largely from blank guns filmed from several angles, and where overdubbing and actors sneakily dropping bullets, will do just fine?

For his part, Azul is an enjoyably nasty foil to the titular Mariachi, a dark shadow that moves through the film counter to the earnest young guitarist, who is introduced as the convict and his crony roar past in their truck. In quick, voiced-over scenes, the Mariachi (never named in the film) introduces himself, as, in perhaps the film's most iconic (and just one of its many unplanned moments) shot, a tortoise crawls past. The visual symbolism, chanced upon as it is, is clear-neither it nor the Mariachi is going anywhere fast, and, like a number of the moments in the film, is reprised once the guitarist has undergone the hardships of the rest of the film.

He enters town, and here, Rodriguez' script is at its most pointed-when looking for work, he is dismayed to find, in the film's most comical scene that the bar already has a musician, in the form of a keyboard player, who uses stock loops rather than an instrument. Together with Rodriguez speeding the camera up to give this figure a jerky, almost ridiculous movement, there's something ultimately pathetic about this moment, all of the years, and the generations before our protagonist, replaced by a toy keyboard and its bored looking player. He exits the bar, and here, for the first time, his and Azul's paths almost cross, as the gunman, guitar-case in hand, arrives, and brutally dispatches the hapless clientele of the bar. Once again, Rodriguez' economic shooting style uses its budget smartly; we only see two of the shooting, whilst sound-effects and editing tricks cover the rest.

It's here that we need to simply admire Rodriguez's economy-the entire film is shot on a single camera, all of the voice acting, gunfire, and even music added on either from recording alongside the film and painstakingly editing voice and film together, whilst much of the filming itself is single-takes, strange moments of veracity such as fluffed stunts or the guitar-case dropped or the Mariachi bumping into a post giving the film a sense of (at points amusing) realism. The score itself, from the songs that the Mariachi sings-actually cleverly dubbed from a local performer-to the taut, largely synth and guitar soundtrack, only adds perfectly to the tension, Morricone's western twang run through keyboard and amp. Even in moments of action, where the camera whips along following a running figure, Rodriguez's efficiency and out-of-the-box thinking has dolly shots replaced by Rodriguez pushed at full-tilt in a wheelchair, a technique, that like many others originated from his debut short film, Bedhead.

From here, the film rapidly progresses-there is, undeniably a leanness to the narrative, a momentum that Rodriguez's films always possess, no matter what their budget or scale, and Moco soon sends men on the trail of Azul, only for the Mariachi, also dressed in black and carrying a guitar case, to get caught up in this. His subsequent escape from the hotel four gunmen ambush him in, and eventually reluctantly killing them is a flat-out, heart-pounding chase, as the panicked figure of our hero has to out-manuver and outwit his would be killers. Yet, there is something undeniably comic about moments of it-we see the Mariachi leap aboard the front of a bus in a positively Buster Keatonish moment, we see the quartet break into the wrong room at the hotel, only for its owner to resignedly re-direct them to the escaping guitarist. Not that El Mariachi is necessarily a dark satire of action cinema-its roots are far straighter and closer to Mexican police movies and American Westerns-but there are moments of undeniable dark comedy.

The Mariachi soon meets Dominó, the owner of a local bar, ultimately owned, as seemingly with every major business in town by Moco, whose own telephone conversations with Azul grow increasingly strained as the gunman lies low. Their relationship kindles, following a tense, and beautifully shot scene where she confronts him, and makes him play for her, convinced he is in fact the gunman, before deciding to employ him as the bar's musician. This blooming love, unknown to the guitarist, puts him on a collision course with Moco, who is also romantically interested in Dominó, a tangled web that only becomes more complex once Azul arrives at the bar, and accidently takes, not the case that contains his weapon, but that containing the Mariachi's guitar.

And it is in the finale, in which the film's ideas of violence, of death, and in the loss of innocence that the guitarist suffers, eventually becoming a shadowy figure on the run and wielding the case of weapons, not his guitar to live, are expertly placed together, where the film explores the idea of, as it has hinted in its dreams of cemeteries, of death. From severed heads-bizarrely based on Rodriguez himself, and the figure of the boy that plays basketball among them, the inescapable idea of violence and death in the Mariachi's life, till the final moment sees him maimed and unable to play guitar, armed, astride a bike and with Dominó's dog in tow, heading off into an uncertain life, as a tortoise crawls past.

There is something utterly admirable about El Mariachi, in the dedication to his vision, in the smart cost-saving efficiency of it all from start to finish, in just how this man made a full-blooded action movie with a single camera, a small Mexican town, a few actors, many of whom have either retired from acting, only appear in Rodriguez's own films, or have simply never acted again, and barely $7000. It's cinematic bottled lightning. Whilst we see sparks of it everywhere in Robert Rodriguez's filmography- hell, the pure heft of his episode of The Mandalorian in which he restores one of the series' great icons to their rightful place as a nigh-unstoppable gunslinger is simply El Mariachi's totally one-sided opening gunfight on grand (and expensive) scale, never has he quite reached the pure cinematic joy of El Mariachi.

As the young guitarist enters town, armed only with his instrument, so Robert Rodriguez enters Hollywood, armed only with a film. Like perhaps no other film of the 1990s, it changed the landscape of cinema, proved that digital film-making was the way of the future, especially in low budget cinema, and proved that the underground could make a film every inch as exciting and action packed as the by-now bloated mainstream blockbuster. El Mariachi proves to be the first salvo in the coming of 90s independent cinema, introducing the world to Rodriguez's indomitable style, in the form of a taut, masterfully made, and no-budget tale of revenge, mistaken identity and two black-clad strangers walking into a small Mexican town.

Rating: Highly Recomended

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