Coapa Heights: The Movie That Never Existed and That We All Dreamed Of

 

By 1999 I had already finished school, and my days were split between work and the gym all week long. The weekend held only one sacred appointment: the video club. I came and went in an old red Atlantic, my first car, the kind that would stall if you drove through a puddle. It was the era of video clubs, and every Friday I rented four movies to watch at a leisurely pace on Saturday and Sunday.

Coapa Heights was born in those same years and never made it into the video clubs. It was shot on video. It was an experimental, underground film that found distribution only in the legendary El Chopo market in Mexico City. From there it resurfaced and survived, years later, thanks to the internet.

What’s curious is that Coapa Heights, despite its almost imperceptible existence, ended up having a later impact that surpassed any money it could have generated. I’m sure there wasn’t much money involved. It was a labor of love for its producer, Edwarda Gurrola, and its director, Yibrán Asuad.

It came in the period after the urban trash counterculture cinema of the late 80s and after Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction of the early ’90s. To me it feels closer to Roger Avary’s Killing Zoe. The film might seem to resemble Quentin Tarantino’s postmodern cinema, but in reality it is closer to Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless, the true source of Tarantino’s inspiration. It also aspires to be a successor to the brilliant Los Caifanes by Juan Ibáñez, that moment when Mexico managed to make a film very close to Godard’s cinema.

So Coapa Heights could well be a mix of Breathless and Los Caifanes, but made on such a low budget that it almost looks like a school project. Asuad was twenty two at the time, the same age as me. He had no academic training in film, but he had an enormous love for movies. He wrote, directed, and shot Coapa Heights handheld with the lowest budget imaginable, yet with boundless attitude, little shame, and a huge willingness to take risks.

A little over sixty minutes of pure cinematic malevolence. A couple of young guys in a red Atlantic cruising through Villa Coapa in fin-de-siècle Mexico City, looking for drugs, guns, and trouble. Pure decadence.

In purest Godard style, the film had a beginning and an ending, but they weren’t structured in that order. The voice over narration is hallucinatory, like DJ Screw’s music. The structure is pure anarchy. It inserts sounds foreign to the plot, kitschy electropop of the era (Titán’s album Elevator, a record I love, was released the same year as Coapa Heights), music from old 70s TV series, and people who happened to be walking by and never even realized they were part of a movie.

The performances are casual and natural. There is black humor and absurd humor, close to the Panic movement of the 70s. I remember seeing many shorts with this aesthetic when I was in school, but none with the spirit of Godard and of Los Caifanes that Coapa Heights possesses. There is also a bit of the films and the bad taste of 1970s John Waters.

Because of its scarce distribution, Coapa Heights is a cult object that seems as if it never existed. Many of us dreamed it and woke up wondering whether it had really existed.

Personally, Coapa Heights touches a very close nerve. It was the Mexico City I first knew in those years. Those were the streets I walked. That was the music I heard in taxis, on buses, and in the clubs downtown.

Coapa Heights is a sister film to Los Caifanes, but made by John Waters. It is the moment when Jean Luc Godard walked through Mexico City.