I'm Gonna Explode

Imagine if Bonnie and Clyde were Mexican, ten years younger and didn’t go anywhere or even hurt anyone but just camped out on the roof of a large house owned by his father, a distracted politican, and fumbled with each other in a series of stalled steps towards the loss of their virginity and the realisation of their repressed fantasies of teen rebellion. This third feature from director Gerardo Naranjo was produced, among others, by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna and shows the same fascination with youthful upheaval and the European filmmaking tradition with which those actors have been associated when taking Mexican film to the global stage.

Teens Roman (Juan Pablo de Santiago) and Maru (Maria Deschamps) – he privileged, she not – meet in detention at school, fake her kidnapping and retreat to the top of his home while their unsympathetic parents work with the police to find out where they’ve gone. The search is incidental, though, compared to Naranjo’s impressive infiltration of the pair’s dubious world of make-believe, inner narratives and flawed ambitions. The film amusingly makes a mockery of the adult world, while its teen protagonists remain pleasingly ambiguous: they’re at once spoilt kids who believe they’re more mature and wild than they are and romantic spirits who are sticking two fingers up at a stuffy, hypocritical world. The nods towards the Nouvelle Vague are a little too emphatic (we hear Georges Delerue too often) and its momentum and themes of play-acting dry up before the end, but this is mostly an unusual and imaginative, if overlong, love story.