Netflix Has Made A Miraculous Adaptation of ‘Pedro Páramo’

You have no idea how much I wanted “Pedro Páramo,” Rodrigo Prieto’s adaptation of Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece (and one of the seminal novels of the Latin American boom and magical realism that premiered on Netflix on November 6), to end up being crap. Seriously, I really wanted the movie to be hateful and not even remotely honor the book. And although I don’t like magical realism at all, Pedro Páramo has always been a very personal book for me, a challenge as a reader and loaded with many memories.

Because if Prieto’s film turned out to be as good and wonderful as it is, it would finally take me to the town of Comala, where the complex story written by Rulfo and published in 1955 takes place, it would mean I have been wrong all my life when I said that this book was impossible to adapt to film. But someone did it and did it in style.

Yet before talking about Prieto’s film and directorial debut, let’s point he is one of the best cinematographers of our times -Amores Perros (2000), 8 Mile (2002), Frida (2002), 21 Grams (2003), Alexander (2004), Brokeback Mountain (2005). Babel (2006), We Bought a Zoo (2011), Argo (2012), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Irishman (2019), Barbie (2023), Killers of theFlower Moon (2023) among others-.

But I also think it is necessary to write a few lines about Pedro Páramo, the novel, an almost sacred text for all Mexicans. And if you haven’t read it, you should. Although I warn you, it is not an easy path. Don’t let its 122 (or 140, depending on the edition) pages fool you: in those 63 chapters or narratives, you’ll find something remendously complex, fascinating, terrifying and real: a photograph of the Mexico of that time of the Revolution, of the pain, of the greed, of patriarchal hegemony and its consequences; of the search for the origins that can explain who you are and why you are like that.

A wonderful tribute to a legend

In the book, a man, Juan Preciado, promises his mother on her deathbed to look for his father. She was his first wife who abandoned him and took Juan with her.  Let’s put it this way:  if we want to imagine a really vile, bad guy; the patriarchal stereotype that has been the source of the distortion of our society: that nasty man who craves for money and land and violence and leaves children scattered around every corner… for whom he feels nothing… because they mean nothing to him. Well, such a man is Pedro Páramo and, to a large extent, the omnipresent narrator of the novel.

So Juan wants to meet him and claim what belongs to him. That is the beginning of a journey between the living, the dead, memories… bad memories and the arrival to a town where only the pain of the past exists: Comala. With abundant and intriguing monologues–very close to Joyce and Kafka–the novel moves through all the territories of human existence: the beginning of life, the end of it and everything that happens in between.

And why do I tell you the plot of the novel? For the simple reason that Rodrigo Prieto makes an impeccable adaptation of a story that is full of emotions and sensations, more than a simple conventional plot. And look, the man achieves his goal. Many of the dialogues and monologues are verbatim from the novel.

Which brings us to this journey of Juan Preciado in search of the town of Comala, which is now desolate, full of ghosts and horrible memories…all because of his Father, the man he searches for but who, at a certain point, loses importance. On his journey, he ends up confronting his own existence as well as that of those who lived in Comala, which ends up being his last resting place.

Prieto does not move away from the original work: the essence, the mystery, the suffering and the intrigue are there. It does not reveal more than what we read in the novel. It is like an incestuous companion to Juan Rulfo’s text… which is not surprising considering that incest is also a theme in the book. And I don’t want to tell many details about the plot itself, because they are worth reading and watching. Just enough to say: this is a story that captures a time that in some way or another is still present and causing the same consequences… Yes, I am as cryptic as Rulfo and Prieto.

Dignity and decadence

Here is, perhaps, the great meeting point between the novel and the film. And it has to do with the passions of both Rulfo and Prieto: photography. Juan Rulfo traveled throughout Mexico photographing the joys and sorrows of his country. And Prieto is a master cinematographer. Why is the novel so short in number of pages but so immense in content? Because Rulfo links narrative to images  that two sentences become an endless scene. Prieto, meanwhile, took the attention that every detail required: costumes, locations. Nothing is missing. And the score, by another giant, Gustavo Santaolalla, covers with mystery and affectation what is actually a horror story.

But none of this could have the precise level without the performances of Manuel García Rulfo (yes, he is a relative of Juan Rulfo) as Pedro Páramo, embodying and giving life to the Pedro that, at least I, always imagined. And Ténoch Huerta embodies his son, Juan Preciado.

In the same way that I believe that people should read the novel several times, this film deserves to be experienced at least a couple of times. It’s not a spooky horror story; There are worse terrors; like what women suffered at that time and the poor and bastard children and all those who did not have respected surnames and many bullets.

Pedro Páramo, as a film, achieves everything, including making me proud of magical realism. And that’s something I could never have imagined.