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SUMMER WHITE, by Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson or THE 400 BLOWS in Tecámac

Rafael Aviña

In October 2013, the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) screened Paradisio, a Mexican short film by Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson, a student at the CCC Film Training Center. In this short film, Xabiani Ponce de León, the main character, played Michel, a young bourgeois who followed a spiral of violence and desolation after the suicide of a female friend, in a splendid and brief portrait of the horrors of the elites and the impunity with which some young Mexicans from wealthy families act, which connected, in turn, with the nihilistic intentions and characters of the American writer Bret Easton Ellis.

Seven years later, the filmmaker also exhibited in Morelia his debut feature film Summer White (2020), supported by the CCC, recently commercially released and in which he returns once again to the adolescent universes of melancholy, helplessness and pessimism. However, on this occasion, he abandons the atmosphere of the upper classes to concentrate on the inner world of a young boy from the outskirts, inhabitant of one of those hundreds of identical houses of huge and impersonal working-class housing units, settled very close to the road to the Pyramids of Teotihuacan, in Nextlalpan, State of Mexico, near Tecámac, where the reign of an only and pampered son is about to collapse.

Rodrigo (the splendid Adrián Rossi in his first film work) is a 13-year-old junior high school student, unsociable and shy, who nevertheless lives a sort of permanent chaste romance with Valeria, his young mother (remarkable Sophie Alexander-Katz), in that intimate family world of codependence that both have built. This is demonstrated, for example, by the disturbing opening scene in which the two brush their teeth and the mother has no shame in showing herself half-naked in front of her son. However, everything is turned upside down when she decides to live together with Fernando, her new boyfriend (the always reliable Fabián Corres). The teenager's tolerance will be brutally tested and, therefore, he will be torn between accepting the relationship or regaining his kingdom, even if his mother's happiness is at stake.

Written by Ruiz Patterson himself and Raúl Sebastián Quintanilla (assistant director on The Darkness and A Monster with a Thousand Heads), the film maintains disturbing parallels with notable European dramas of the seventies, such as: Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart (1971) and Bernardo Bertolucci's Luna (1979), which proposed intimate stories of mothers and children showing a sort of emotional incest between the protagonists. However, Summer White connects even more with other sensitive and sincere stories of adolescent affective loss and gain and youthful growth, as would be: Somos Mari Pepa (2014) —screened in Morelia— and Los lobos (2019), both directed by Samuel Kishi Leopo, as well as several of French filmmaker Francois Truffaut's stories, in particular: The 400 Blows (1959).

Rodrigo immediately clashes with the resigned Fernando, who does the impossible to show his affection and trust, as he tries to demonstrate with the vacations in Acapulco or the driving lessons that serve the boy to explode with the intruder who captures his mother's attention, not only in intimacy but also in everyday acts. The teenager's rebelliousness grows and he decides to stain the boyfriend's suits with the “Blanco de verano” [Summer White] paint with which they renovate the house and the mother threatens to send him home to his biological father who is nothing more than a distant voice in his emotional spectrum. In his school runaways, Rodrigo unloads his anger and frustration in pyromania and in a junkyard where he locates an abandoned and dilapidated car-trailer that will serve as a refuge for him. 

The subtlety with which Ruiz Patterson directs and co-writes was not only present in Paradisio, but also in the feature documentary Bad Hombres (2019) about a series of marginal characters and outsiders on the U.S.-Mexico border. It is an intimate epic of loneliness and sadness that universalizes to a large extent Mexican teenagers in a country without opportunities, where young people whose families are reacquainted, fail to understand the reason for so many abysmal differences between them, not only economic, but affective. Summer White is a minimalist, emotional and endearing story, as is its effective and sensitive ending, after the couple of mother and son have gone through a difficult and sobering path full of thorns and fire.

Translated by Adrik Díaz