06 · 26 · 25

Rafael Bernal and his Mongolian conspiracy

Rafael Aviña

Rafael Bernal, a native of Santa María La Ribera, Mexico City, was born in 1915 and died in Berne, Switzerland in 1972. He wrote the novel The Mongolian Conspiracy in 1969. Undoubtedly, the bitter experience of the 1968 student repression partly influenced his story, if we consider the military characters in it. Like other Mexican authors of the genre such as Antonio Helú, who wrote detective stories and novels before he was thirty, or María Elvira Bermúdez, another great promoter of the genre who conceived her first crime stories at the age of 32 in the magazine Selecciones Policiacas y de Misterio (a publication created by Helú himself), Bernal also published a couple of novels and some short stories in those same pages of police enigmas at the age of 31: Un muerto en la tumba [A Dead Man in the Grave] and Tres novelas policiacas [Three Crime Novels] around 1946. As Vicente Francisco Torres notes in the web page Enciclopedia de la Literatura Mexicana, these novels star “the amateur detective Teódulo Batanes, a myopic and awkward man who has the vice of using synonyms in everything he says”.

In 1946, Bernal, together with Enrique F. Gual and Antonio Helú, founded the first literary club of the detective genre in Mexico, called “Club de la Calle Morgue" [Rue Morgue Club]. Later, certainly influenced by the hard boiled work of American writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane and by the film versions of their works, Bernal somehow conceived the first great Mexican-style noir crime novel with a cynical and wild language loaded with a lot of black humor, very different from the solemnity of his first works, in which he bets on the interior monologue and the fascination for the chaotic, dangerous and corrupt metropolis that was Mexico City at the end of the sixties: "You have to take the knife out of his ribs. You can't spend a knife for every dead person. Martita better not see it. Sometimes the dead people squeeze the ribs. They get kind of greedy. And I've grown fond of that knife. It already knows how to do its job".

The first film adaptation of his novel was directed by the Spaniard Antonio Eceiza: The Mongolian Conspiracy (1977), with a cast that included: Pedro Armendáriz Jr. as the detective Filiberto García, Blanca Guerra as Martita, Ernesto Gómez Cruz as the alcoholic and shady guy better known as El Licenciado, Tito Junco as El Licenciado del Valle, Claudio Obregón as El Coronel and Fernando Balzaretti as the U.S. agent Graves. This is one of the best Mexican crime films of the seventies, whose protagonist is a cynical and tough detective skilled with his fists and pistol, involved in an intricate international plot that takes place in Chinatown on Dolores Street in the Historic Center, and Guerra is the beautiful young woman of Asian origin in danger, in a film in which the director portrays a particularly brutal environment not without irony, in a story that is full of violence and sensuality.

Unlike the false scenarios of La mafia amarilla (dir. René Cardona, 1972), for example, built in the Estudios América, Eceiza places his story in that disturbing alley of Dolores Street in the heart of the Chinatown of Mexico City, with its street lamps, its Chinese import stores, its restaurants and laundries, even an opium den, and places like the Shanghai and with Noé Murayama in the role of the Chinese Liu. A tale of suspense and violent action with which Armendariz Jr. became the central figure of this renewed Mexican-style crime film or neo-noir, as would soon be shown in Life Sentence (1978), or Days of Combat and Easy Thing, both released in 1979, starring Armendariz himself.

Eceiza, a Basque filmmaker from San Sebastian, had shortly before filmed the Mexico-Cuba co-production Mina, viento de libertad (1976), focused on the life of Francisco Javier Mina, a soldier from Navarre who collaborated with the insurgents in Mexico's War of Independence. The adaptation of The Mongolian Conspiracy was made by Mina and Tomás Pérez Turrent, in which the black and acid humor of the original work was eliminated in favor of a violent thriller, very much in debt with traditional film noir but with a cruder and more disenchanted tone.

The stylization of film noir reached an effective nostalgic and ironic tone in Sebastián del Amo's 2018 remake of The Mongolian Conspiracy: at the beginning of the 1960s, Soviets and Americans are convinced that China will take advantage of the gringo president's visit to assassinate him. In their attempt to stop this international intrigue, the Mexican authorities seek Filiberto García, a detective and thug in the old style, always with the word “pinche” on his lips. Garcia (Damian Alcázar) uncovers half-truths and secrets as he delves deep into the heart of Chinatown and crosses paths with the beautiful Chinese-Mexican Martita (Barbara Mori).

Sebastián del Amo was able to update the plot of the novel to current times and to the style of today's graphic novels. However, he decided to take a risk with a thriller that immerses itself in a violence that is more parodic than brutal, without leaving his taste for period recreation stories of a naïve, popular and cinephile Mexico as he did in: El fantástico mundo de Juan Orol (2010) and Cantinflas (2013).

The satire and disdain towards the Mexican political system, the theme of the substitution of the military for civilians in power, the betrayals in the high political spheres, the intrigue of espionage involving Russians, Cubans, Mexicans, Americans and Chinese and the marginalized characters among second-class thugs, the gringa lover of one of them, the extraordinary drunkard embodied by El Licenciado who assures that: “being right is worth a shit, what matters is to have friends” and above all, Filiberto García himself who only has loyalty to himself and only follows orders make Bernal's novel a masterpiece with an ending as emotional as it is raw and heartbreaking.

Translated by Adrik Díaz