Alejandro González Iñárritu

Abstract

Celestino Deleyto and María del Mar Azcona present an in-depth study of the first three feature films of Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, "one of the most powerful voices in the cinema of the new century", as the authors maintain in their Preface (ix). This is the first volume devoted exclusively to the Mexican director and it is part of the series Contemporary Film Directors edited by James Naremore. Every volume in the series is dedicated to a filmmaker, from Wong Kar-wai to Pedro Almodovar to Jim Jarmusch, to name but a few, and they all contain a critique of the director's work followed by an interview. In the present volume, the authors busy themselves with an important aspect of Iñárritu's oeuvre, namely, his dimension as a transnational, global artist, whilst devoting ample attention to his use of the multiprotagonist film and what the authors describe as "scrambled narratives" (xi). Well known for using a number of common themes and a somewhat unusual narrative structure, Iñárritu concedes in the final interview that he cannot "expand the pattern [of multiprotagonist films] anymore" (131) and so his next film, Biutiful (released in 2010), will be a linear narrative concentrating on the story of one character. We now know that this was indeed the case, but Deleyto and Azcona's study proves that in order to reach the linearity of Biutiful, the fragmentation of the multiprotagonist film had to be explored to its ultimate consequences."I was always an outsider," Iñárritu claims in the interview with the authors (123). Deleyto and Azcona set out to investigate the reasons for such a presumed