All the Fires
Written and Directed by Mauricio Calderón Rico
Starring Sebastian Rojano, Natalia Quiroz, Ari Lopez, Ximena Alaya
Runtime: 96 minutes
Unrated
Playingy GuadaLAjara Film Festival (GLAFF), taking place November 1-3 in Los Angeles

by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

All the Fires keeps it still and simple for the most part. Bruno (Sebastian Rojano), its teen protagonist, is a wallflower who keeps his computer for company. There are few extremes: the frame is small and the shadows are soft; the angle only diverges from eye level to put Bruno and his mother (Ximena Alaya) on an equal plane. The stress it produced in me is excruciating.

I don’t think this has anything to do with director Mauricio Calderón Rico’s aesthetic choices, and it’s only tangentially related to the plot: simply its subject matter. As an ex-teen/ex-boy, any teen boy depicted with a hint of realism is going to freak me out. I just happen to find anything close to my adolescence deeply unpleasant.

Bruno lives alone with his mother. His father has been dead for who knows how long, but it’s clear that Bruno is trapped in a state of mourning. We aren’t meant to commiserate with his silent indignance, yet we still feel it.

The slight affective distance we’re kept at is reflected literally in the setting: All the Fires is a period piece, taking place during the information age’s adolescence. Bruno talks to his best friend Ian (Ari Lopez) over a flip phone and makes chatroom sexts through a CRT monitor, with his girlfriend, Daniela (Natalia Quiroz). Daniela knows him exclusively through his YouTube page, where he and lights things on fire, sometimes with Ian—methodically arranged matches, a soccer ball. This sort of thing is a universal constant, the missing link between Jackass and those hydraulic press videos that peaked three years ago. Where’s the line between pathology and a good gimmick?

Bruno will claim that fire is special to him because it casts no shadow. Fire goes against the logic of reality, provides an escape from what follows us. Bruno doesn’t like how often her boyfriend Geraldo (Hector Illanes) pays visits to his mother, doesn’t like that she can move on. A match strikes phosphorous and falls into a vase to delay the inevitable.

Fire doesn’t care about consequences—it is its own consequence. Think of all the metaphors it spawns: danger, Promethean discovery, hearth and home. As with a fire, we aren’t put too close to Bruno. There is something deep inside him, which we aren’t allowed to understand. One of the best images in the picture is of he and Ian on the train tracks together, distant and greyed out by the dusk. Another is more piercing, less nostalgic in tone: a lens flare dancing across the screen, consuming the image as Bruno drifts asleep. For these few seconds, we inhabit his dream—nightmarish in intensity.

This takes place as Bruno is on the bus form Mexico City to Durango, to pay Daniela an impromptu visit. Meanwhile, Ian’s about to move in with his mother in LA. Anywhere but here.

Ian talks about LA as an Eden, where people are allowed to be their true selves. He says this in a whisper as he and Bruno sit together in his bedroom. His face peeks out through the shallow night; narrating from above, into the distance, with all the subtlety a teenager is capable of. He asks if Bruno has ever been with another man.

Everyone but Bruno seems to have their life together. Daniela is no catfish, but she also has a life of her own: tennis lessons, friends who Bruno now has to acclimate to. Even when seeing them together, blowing up beer cans on camcorder with glee, I could never quite relax, feeling how hormonally dazed the relationship is. Watching Bruno’s silence under the halogen heat of his first punk show, his confusion as one of Daniela’s friends (Hannah Romen) describes herself as “queer”, which he promptly googles the morning after.

I fell in love with All the Fires’ slow burn (the pun’s unavoidable); at times it engages with an online mysticism like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair did last year. It opens on a long shot of Bruno’s apartment while he lights a fire, forming what feels like an invitation to a cult ritual. But when it gets down to brass tacks and Bruno has to come of age, the tension was cut dully. It turns out that I craved the tension and couldn’t stand the idea of self-discovery via search engine. There are what feel like five distinct endings, which end up slowly transforming the burning confusion into warm intimacy. These vignette resolutions never fail in their beauty, even if they’re a tad unnecessary. I’d far rather revel in youthful confusion.