Alfonso Arau

Born in DF on January 11, 1932, Alfonso Arau Incháustegui suffered the death of his father when he was very young, for which he ended up under the guardianship of his uncle, who paid for his medical studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. But he did not quite see his future as a doctor clear, so he left the classroom to become a policeman.

Curiously, while doing this work, he discovered his artistic vocation when he was assigned as a bodyguard for comedian Sergio Corona , highly appreciated in the Aztec country. Both formed the humorous dancer duo Corona-Arau, which between 1950 and 1958 was successful in various countries. He fell in love with the sister of his partner, the choreographer and former dancer of the Ballet Folklorico de México Magdalena Corona, with whom he had two children, the actor and director Fernando Arau Corona, and the guitarist Sergio Arau.

Together, the Corona-Arau comedians achieved such public recognition that they went on to star in films such as Caras nuevas (1956), with Alfonso Arau himself signing as co-writer, Viaje a la Luna (1958) and Los pistolocos (1960). In those years he returned to the Autonomous University, this time to study Dramatic Art, and lived for a season in Havana, and later in Paris, where he received classes from the legendary mime Marcel Marceau , and became good friends with the comic book writer and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky , with whom he would launch the theatrical show “False Follies”.

In 1965 he was part of the rock group Los Tepetagles, who parodied The Beatles, causing a real furor. That same year, he played a businessman, one of the protagonists of In this town there are no thieves , where Alberto Isaac adapts the story by Gabriel García Márquez , about the inhabitants of a town who face the theft of billiard balls, the only fun of the place. The film is considered the initiator of the New Mexican Cinema, and has in its cast the author of the text himself, and the Spanish director Luis Buñuel .

Sam Peckinpah recruited him to play Herrera, lieutenant of the Mexican revolution general Mapache ( Indio Fernández ) in the twilight western Wild Bunch (1969), which takes place in 1911, when outlaw veterans cause a massacre during a robbery, after the ambushed by some bounty hunters. “Peckinpah told me that with my role he had wanted to honor Alfonso Bedoya , who played the Mexican bandit who attacks the protagonists of The Treasure of Sierra Madre ”, he recalls. He shared the screen with the legendary William Holden and Ernest Borgnine , among others. In his country, he intervened in Pedro Páramo(1969), by Carlos Velo , a discreet adaptation of the homonymous play by Juan Rulfo , where he plays “El Saltaperico”, a guy who used his powers as a sleep-provoker to abuse women. As an actor, he was also directed in brief roles by the American Robert Zemeckis , in his films Broken Brakes, Crazy Cars (1980) and After the Green Heart (1984), and appeared as a bandit in the discreet comedy Three Amigos (1986).

He began working as a director with El águila descalza , from 1971, also co-written and starring him. It revolves around a peculiar masked gangster. After Calzoncín inspector (1974), the documentary Caribe, estrella y águila (1976), El mojado rejado (1981) and Guido Guan, el tacos de oro (1986), he achieved enormous international repercussion with Como agua para chocolate (1992), which adapts the magical realism novel by his sentimental partner at that time after divorcing Corona, Laura Esquivel(from which it also separated in 1995). Set in the Mexican Revolution, she develops the story of Tita, the second of two sisters, who was heard crying before she was born. Awarded 10 Ariel Awards, it was one of the great successes of Mexican cinema of all time, and for many years it was the highest grossing film in the country.

He reunited Keanu Reeves , with the Spanish Aitana Sánchez-Gijón , and the veteran Anthony Quinn , in A walk in the clouds (1995), shot in Hollywood in English. But her story of a soldier who, at the end of World War II, meets a pregnant young woman and gallantly poses as her husband to her wine-growing family, is somewhat sweetened. Still, he has interesting elements in his look back. “Today’s society has become too materialistic, too corrupt, too cynical. I feel that there is a feeling of nostalgia among people, that the pendulum is now going the other way, towards the old values: family, love for the land, friendship and honesty”, he comments regarding this film. “The hero is an honorable character like the ones played by Gary Cooper. If you talk about an honorable hero and honest people to anyone, always think of the past, be it his father or his grandfather, but never yourself.

Less interesting was Little Bites (2000), a black comedy in which he directed Woody Allen as Tex, a Jewish butcher who dismembers his wife. While traveling to Mexico, he loses the hand of the deceased, considered miraculous by the locals. It has a similar tone to the Aztec films of the aforementioned Buñuel, but it doesn’t quite work. Already in decline, subsequent productions such as La trapa de la luz (2010), about the arrival of the newly born cinema in southern Italy, hardly had an impact. As an actor he has also done little in recent years, although he has given the voice of Papá Julio, in the Mexican version (the one that could be seen in Spain), one of the ancestors of the protagonist of Coco , the digitally animated film by pixar.