La delgada línea amarilla (2015) Reviews

• Men at work, Mexican style...

  HedgehoginPS2016-01-08

  The Thin Yellow Line just played the Palm Springs International FilmFest. Having lived and worked in Mexico many years ago, I was immediately struck by its ring of authenticity. Everything about it reflects workaday life in "blue collar" Mexico. The story centers around a down-on-his-luck working stiff, Toño (Damian Alcaraz), encountering an old acquaintance who hires him to ramrod a crew of misfits (four guys who might have been picked up at some Home Depot parking lot) to paint a centerline on a back-country road in northern Mexico--210 km. in 15 days. The five of them, a beater pickup, an antiquated walk-behind spray painter, a wheelbarrow, and a dog undertake their own little odyssey. The task is simple; new challenges appear daily. Over a couple of weeks, what starts as a band of bothers becomes, slightly twisted, a band of brothers. The language, the horse play, the problems they encounter and their solutions to them are totally, characteristically, the Mexico I once knew. Because work pivots the plot, Thin Yellow Line exalts the working man in a way that few films of this genre do. Billed as a comedy (and occasionally quite funny), it's a minor-key Homeric, authentic slice of life in working class Mexico. An enjoyable film to watch, its awards are well deserved.

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• Life as it is for workers painting the highway lines from San Jacinto to San Carlos

  nuribecalvo2017-03-17

  I have to admit that I absolute adore movies that embrace the ordinariness of life, and this movies definitely does so. A simple working man who gets fired, or better said gets replaced by a dog, from the surveillance of a car dumpster, starts a journey looking for a new job. He finds one easily at a gas station, where he meets up again with an old employer of his. An engineer who still remembers him as a hardworking man and he offers him a job to coordinate the painting of the lines of a highway between San Jacinto and San Carlos for a total of 217 km. The job has to be finish in a total of 15 days with an inexperienced crew of 4 (Gabriel, Pablo, Atayde and Mario). Gabriel who used to drive trailers is falling blind, Atayde a family man who used to work at a circus, Mario a former convict for robbery, and Pablo a misfit boy with a troubling family history. The days pass by with nights on the outdoors in the Mexican desert, where each one of the characters starts slowly to share their story of life, love, and misconceptions. The narrative is simple and subtle, as subtle as the desert and the heat itself. The characters remain true to their own personalities and essential qualities throughout the movie, while embracing the present moment of their lives and jobs, and acknowledging the experience of sharing and learning from one another.

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• A good Mexican film

  gamermx-738302017-04-20

  Nice movie about ordinariness of life. A man who has lost everything, founds a new reason to keep living. A travel watched from 5 different points of view. A Well made sound and photo work, showing Mexican desert in its whole beauty. A very watchable movie. If you like to see something different, watch it.

• Preciosa.

  briefexistance2019-01-05

  Overall, was a beautiful journey, but I do have a major complain: I wished the last 20 minutes were longer, maybe another extra hour to unfold the story in a more organic and intense way. I felt like they run out of money and speeded the velocity of the storytelling, giving me as result a dissatisfying feeling of watching a unfinished film. The first hour was beautifully performed, this is the struggle of rural and uneducated population here at Mexico. The hard work of painting the divisive yellow line in Mexico's highways, serves as an analogy for guidance. The yellow line is a guide in the road, and in many ways all the gentleman working here are lacking some main guidance towards self-realization. I just loved it, it was poetic and a truthful portray of rural Mexico in so many ways, that it deserved 3 hours of 2:30 of duration. Beautiful work.

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• Eight steps to recitation

  EdgarST2017-12-28

  A gang of five road laborers has the task of painting the discontinuous yellow line between two Mexican towns, under inclement sun, camping during cold night and finishing the work before the rains come. The crew consists of a watchman, a waiter, a circus worker, a thief and a truck driver, all previously unemployed. The instruction is to take five steps painting the line with a machine that atomizes the paint on the road and then take another eight steps without painting. This strategy is similar to the structure of Celso García's script, who debuted as a director with "The Thin Yellow Line", under the auspice of producers Bertha Navarro ("Reed: Insurgent Mexico"), Alejandro Springall ("Santitos") and Guillermo del Toro ("The Labyrinth of the Faun"). The idea is valid. The problem is that every eight steps equates to pauses in the action so all five men can make forced statements of their personal pasts. In contrast, the five steps of work are the most interesting. When the five men work or solve obstacles, their actions define them better than their (often-overemotional) recitations of what happened to them in the past. The five actors are very good and they do the best they can with their dialogues. But besides this weak point of the script, you have montages of scenes of "camaraderie" with gay music, overused resolutions and shots (for example, when a patient is carried in gurney, we the audience watch the ceiling and lights), a bitch that adds the "Disney touch ", a short flirt with a beautiful girl, plus a gruesome ending. As a result it turns into a poor drama instead of a plausible first work.

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