Film Review: "I'm No Longer Here" ("Ya no estoy aquí") (2019).

Guillermo del Toro called it "A jolting, timely piece of cinema. I urge everyone to see it." This is I'm No Longer Here (Ya no estoy aquí). This Mexican musical drama film written and directed by Fernando Frías de la Parra. In Monterrey, Mexico, a young street gang spends their days dancing to slowed-down cumbia and attending parties. After a mix-up with a local cartel, their leader is forced to migrate to the U.S. but quickly longs to return home.

In 2013, before the it was ultimately adapted into a film, the script was originally published in short story form and won the 2013 Bengala award. In 2014, the script was selected for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab won the Gabriel Figueroa Development Grant at Los Cabos Film Festival.

The film stars Juan Daniel Garcia Treviño, Jonathan Espinoza, Angelina Chen, Coral Puente, Adríana Arbelaez, Leonardo Garxa and Yahir Alday. Garcia Treviño has a compelling intensity in the role but it's still hard to believe that everyone would fall quite so hard and fast for Ulises's devil may care charms and unpredictability, especially with so much on the line.

Director Fernando Frías de la Parra intersperses the film with beautiful dance sequences and crisp cinematography. If this drama provides no easy answers, at least it's a delight to behold. This is, among other things, a vivid musical. So what if the story ultimately stretches credibility? Fernando Frías de la Parra is not bothered about social realism; his film is more like one of the heroine's balls of flame, hurtling towards our comfort zones. Fueled by eye-popping visuals by Damian Garcia, the film is a scathing character study of a woman dancing to the unmatched rhythm of her own chaos. The film stands as a harbinger for the 2020 spirit of revolution, with her ingenuity and the tearing asunder of the conventions of patriarchy and bourgeois family structures. Fernando Frías de la Parra turns back with a new and necessary frame about our social relationships, our self respect and the path to our happiness. Fernando Frías de la Parra's ambition, daring and relentlessness in the film feels startling and powerful when measured against many of his contemporaries. It is a singular piece of filmmaking. Fernando Frías de la Parra's jugglery of colors, music, dance and visuals overtakes the emotional undercurrents of the story. But I would urge you to stay with the film. Beyond Fernando Frías de la Parra's visually stunning compositions, the narrative sparks that gradually ignite into a fiery story. The film is an astonishing one. Constructed of peppery conflicts and passionate affairs, emotionally fraught speeches and tender embraces, most of them elicited by Ulises herself. In the hands of a lesser director, the film would have seemed merely preposterous. Here the contrivances are intriguing. The film confirms -- and even takes it to a new level -- Fernando Frías de la Parra's investigation about the image and its capacity to become a story.

Simon says I'm No Longer Here (Ya no estoy aquí) receives: