10 · 07 · 08

Disgusta estética de El libro de piedra

Clara Sánchez/Translated by Caroline MacKinnon

[imagen]Last night the remake of Carlos Enrique Taboada’s 1969 film El libro de piedra was shown, starring Joaquín Cordero, Marga López and Norma Lazareno. The movie tells the tale of a girl who has an imaginary friend - boy who appears to be trapped in a sculpture in the garden in the mansion in which she lives.

The film was received with a lot of expectations by an audience who received a few scares and screamed a few times during the screening, though they could hardly refrain from laughing at a few of these scenes.

El libro de piedra was directed by Julio César Estrada and starred Plutarco Haza, Ludwika Paleta, Marta Aura, Mariana Beyer, Evangelina Sosa, Guillermo Larrea and Enoc Leaño.

At the end of the screening, the director, the actor Plutarco Haza and the scriptwriter Mario Pacheco answered questions from the audience.

Julio César Estrada was asked about the saturation of the whites and greens in the film’s color scheme. “We were looking for cool tones without losing the greens or any of the other colors, but there was an error at the laboratory which finally left it at 80 percent of what we wanted; it started in color, as it was outside the setting of the mansion, and later we enter another world, in silver and practically black and white tones.”

One of the audience members critiqued the film by saying, “you brought out a new version, put forward something new, and they say that it will help Mexican film, but how can this motivates you.” The director responded, “I think that there are works that deserve to be interpreted “X” number of times. If this were not the case, we wouldn’t know Hamlet or the classics. You have to go back to reinterpret it with the times. It’s not plagiarizing, it’s reinterpreting.”

Estrada said, “It’s not that we aren’t interested in new stories - actually we have four new ones to make - but this film, as a child, it struck me; I wanted to redo it for everything that it means to us and I thought that it could be interesting to others.”

The director was also asked about a sequence in which they revive an iguana which caused the audience to laugh a lot. “I don’t think that it hurts the story, my concern is at the moment that the girl jumps they were laughing, but in this case it doesn’t affect the movie, it’s something emerging, an homage to the original version, in which Marga López finds an iguana when she climbs the church,” he said.

Pacheco talked about the work he did with Enrique Rentería, Gustavo Moheno (Hasta el viento tiene miedo) and he director to write the script. “Julio was the captain of the ship and gave us freedom to tackle the story and go discover moods, surprises; we worked with that, and verified that the story could come from there or explore if we were straying from the tale,” he said.