When we first meet Santos (Maximiliano Nájar Márquez), Lechuga (Beto Ramírez; the nickname “lettuce” refers to a short-lived diet), and Daniela (Daphne Méndez), it’s 2014, they’re 13 years old, and enjoying a relaxed summer in their Guadalajara neighborhood. Their main activities are riding their bikes and staging pranks involving dummies smeared with ketchup: Daniela films people discovering the dummies, the joke being that they usually think they’ve found a real corpse, while Santos and Lechuga just enjoy laughing at the adults looking stupid. All three at a stage in life where their small world is everything, their friendship is complete and perfect, and they think things will stay like this forever.
When an attractive young woman named Arlette (Fiona Palomo) moves in next door, both Santos and Lechuga fall in love with her while Daniela wants to be her. Oblivious of the significance of the age difference between them and her, Santos and Lechuga decide to learn everything they can about Arlette and agree that whichever of them wins her heart gets to marry her while the other agrees accept the defeat with grace.
Arlette acts as a kind of a cool aunt to the kids, flirting gently with the boys and tolerating their existence although she has a serious love life with a man her own age. Then suddenly she disappears without a trace. With the kind of confidence rooted in ignorance and innocence, she decides they will crack the case themselves, with Danielle filming their efforts. Each has something they want out of this investigation: Lechuga, who spent the most time with Arlette, wants justice; Santos, a true crime aficionado, wants to become famous by solving this unsolved mystery, and Danielle wants to make a film about it.
Jardines del Bosque is narrated by the adult version of the kids: Cristo Fernández for Lechuga, Said Sandoval for Santos, and Sofia Diaz for Daniela. This directorial choice creates a feeling of notalgia as adults looking back on the summer they ceased to be kids and share things they understand now that they didn’t then. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986) and the Stephen King novella it’s based, but the circumstances of the are quite different, however: in Guadalajara, kids face not ordinary bullying from older kids but the mortal threat of drug gang violence, with police complicity, which forms the constant undercurrent of everyday life. It’s a sign of the kids’ innocence that they can speak the words suggesting that Arlette was kidnapped and murdered but those possibilities are not real to them in the way they are to adults but rather something almost fictional that only happens to people you don’t know.
They enlist the assistance of Santos’ adult cousin Fer (Jesús Estrada Escobedo) to crack the password of Arlette’s tablet (she left it behind at the store where she and Lechuga worked, thus playing a similar role to the wedding ring in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Their investigations lead them into real danger and they end up seeing things no child should see.
Co-directors Alex and Diego Barragan, who also co-wrote the screenplay, are masters of their craft and hold up both ends of the bargain they made with the audience: the murder mystery is realistic and intriguing and the coming-of-age story is delivered with great sensitivity with natural performances from the three young leads. Paul Araujo’s unobtrusive cinematography creates a vivid portrait of the characters’ world (the film’s title is the name of their neighborhood), while Alex Barragan’s soundtrack cultivates a sense of nostalgia for a time of life and a state of being to which no adult can ever return. | Sarah Boslaugh
Jardines del Bosque will be screened on Nov. 14 at 7:00 in the Winifred Moore Auditorium at Webster University’s Webster Hall as part of the 35th annual Saint Louis International Film Festival. The filmmaker will be in attendance and take part in a post-screening Q & A. Information about tickets and the full festival schedule is available from the Festival web site.
