Surreal take on a Mexican museum heist
The entertaining, stylishly executed “Museo,” a heist pic with a visual flair and a lot on its mind, uses a real-life art theft in Mexico City as the starting point for a tall tale that gets more surreal with each passing frame. It’s impressive filmmaking.
Juan (Gael Garcia Bernal, in top form) is a slacker who lives at home, trying to ignore barbs from his family that his long-delayed college thesis should be on masturbation, not his chosen field of veterinary medicine. When Juan was a boy, he was highly affected by the story of a giant, mystical artifact being removed from its ancestral home and placed at a museum.
It’s 1985, and for reasons that escape us – and Juan, for that matter – the privileged loser has planned a heist of artifacts, with the help of his impressionable best friend, Benjamin (Leonardo Ortizgris, very good). These misfits are codependents slowly going nowhere, but somehow they pull off a Christmas Eve caper at the National Museum of Anthropology, where their escapades are dazzlingly shot and edited.
After the heist, Juan and Benjamin run into huge obstacles trying to sell the stolen treasures – problems that everyone else but them could have anticipated. Their misadventures take them all over Mexico, including a drunken night at the beach with a porn star, a visit to a Mayan tomb and a sobering visit to a crooked art dealer.
“Museo,” though, is much more than a heist movie. It’s a rueful reflection on the value of ancestral heritage, the restlessness of the middle class, the mysteries of human behavior, the art of friendship, and even the ethical morass that museums face in their desire to preserve antiquities.
Even if his story meanders from time to time, talented director Alonso Ruizpalacios is able to juggle all these themes, pour on the visual flourishes, and keep us caring about the characters. That’s a sign of great things to come.