Films: 1990s
(1993) Cronos
Monday, July 07, 2008
Cronos
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Release: 1993
In Veracruz, Mexico, a 16th century alchemist builds the Cronos device to please his Spanish superiors.
A scarab clockwork of precious metal and jewels, the Cronos device is lost for hundreds of years, until the 1930s, when the building in which it is hidden fails, and in the rubble is discovered the withered but living 400-year-old wizard.
The Mexican authorities cover up their discovery, and the statue in which the device is hidden is again subsumed by time, until it reappears in an old man's antique shop.
Federico Luppi plays shopkeeper Jesus Gris, who knows --even before local thug Angel de la Guardia (Ron Perlman) shows up looking for it--that the gold clockwork bug is a once-in-lifetime find. What he does not know is that the scarab can change the very definition of what a lifetime is, and so Jesus' journey begins.
The Cronos device forms an ugly bond with its new owner, injecting him with new and youthful vitality, but incrementally robbing him of his humanity to do so.
Meanwhile, Angel threatens, pursues, and eventually exacts a terrible toll upon Jesus for keeping Cronos from his uncle - an industrial magnate dying of cancer, collecting his own tumors in jars under glass display.
Observing all this is his silent and wise granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath).
True to her name, Aurora is a phantom of light and the representative of new beginnings (dawn, as it turns out). She hovers more than interacts, and floats between two counterpoints - Jesus, who succumbs to easy youth via Cronos, and her grandmother Mercedes (Margarita Isabel), who preserves her youth via dance and vital living.
In del Toro's fashion, the child is the conduit of action, the provider of motion in the story. Unlike "Pan's Labyrinth," or "The Devil's Backbone," however, this child is less the focal point and more the reflector of adult action. Aurora never judges, she simply introduces gentle assistance, here and there.
The film is at once a vampire tale (Jesus' youth is fueled by an increasing fascination with, and then thirst for, human blood) and a story about what the old do to preserve youth. This thirst highlights second dual representation of aging in "Cronos" - Jesus and De la Guardia.
While they voice dramatic opposition throughout the film, the old men represent not opposites, but two points along the same timeline.
De la Guardia is the end product of obsession, a man so wasted by disease that life is no longer about living - it is about dying. In the sterilized, stainless steel operating theatre of his home, buried inside the factory that made his fortune, De la Guardia surrounds himself with the tools and evidence of death, but also hoards the knowledge Jesus needs to manage Cronos. So the two are intertwined - desire and need linked.
Jesus is at an earlier place on the path to De la Guardia's condition. His body has not yet turned traitor, but he laments the graying (the "gris", literally) of things that went with younger years.
Jesus, of the two, represents greed for youth - he is the thirst that precedes the critical conditions that qualify De la Guardia's survivalism.
Notably, Jesus' experience with the Cronos device is destructive, more than it is restorative. When Angel goes too far in his pursuit of the object, Jesus embodies a dark incarnation of his first name's predecessor. No longer preventing, or reversing the process of, death, Jesus travels beyond its door and becomes something else, altogether.
Within its fantasy narrative, "Cronos" is also very much about how we die, and what we do in the face of its eventuality.
Del Toro admonishes two immediate and typical reactions - to entomb one's self in a mausoleum of clinical process, or to rail against it at any expense. He points instead to the quiet, nursing care of the family. The ultimate expression of death, del Toro recommends, occurs in their presence.
Parallel, then, to Jesus' travels through darkness, is his journey through stages of the family experience.
From the taking for granted of one's longevity, to frustration self-absorption with vitality, to mourning, to finding peace at the end of mortal existence, the Grises move through this spectrum at the edges of the story. It is an important component, however, of the overall fabric, and no accident that del Toro's final scene focuses on family and not fantasy.
Aurora, while mysterious and compelling in her silence, also poses distracting questions in the context of the action around her. Completely lacking a child's psychology, she should suggest pure metaphor - a creature patiently awaiting the moment to deliver new knowledge to Jesus. But she is marginalized after the Cronos device makes its initial claim on Jesus' body and the story blurs where she remains, somewhat diminishing the effectiveness of the grandfather's journey away from, and then back to, the home.
It's not a total loss. Del Toro sets his assembly into motion with enough economy that the narrative momentum smoothes over thematic disruptions.
"Cronos" is a clear signpost, pointing the way to "Pan's Labyrinth" from ambitious beginnings.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Cronos, 1993
[Aurora] is marginalized after the Cronos device makes its initial claim on Jesus' body and the story blurs where she remains, somewhat diminishing the effectiveness of the grandfather's journey away from, and then back to, the home.
