Nothing more intimidating than watching a contender, wearing a pair of thick glasses, passively waiting for his interview, while reading a formula loaded physics book. You are putting your life on the line to enroll in the Filmmaking Training Center and René Peñaloza shows up. A rejuvenated Carlos Monsivais who, wearing a cat hair free sweater, knows that he is sitting on an infinite mountain of knowledge. This is how I recall René… the intimidating contender… Kind, warm, suspiciously educated… A UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) student with a chauffeur? Film-lover, music-lover, physicist, ironic, with a sense of humor that reminds us that it is a talent proportionately linked to intelligence… A dear friend, tormented artist that many times would let himself be swirled by the hideous wave of comparisons. A wave as huge as the French or the Danis one, or any wave… The affinities were some times more powerful than his will to create, be he knew how to overcome them… And he gave us that honest throwing eggs from a car with a chauffeur, while the adolescent dreamed about sleeping with the cleaning lady, anti-classist erotism documented in a Buñuelan manner with a cell phone… Sex, middle-classers and video… René throwing eggs from the window of a chauffeured van… Mea culpa… At some time we did an exercise with Jorge Fons in which I was a priest and René was a dangerous criminal who came to intimidate me… Unforgettable class, trapped somewhere in a 3/4” tape… René using fiction to escape for a while from the character he had to portray in this life… Product and heir of the system… Escape artist… from the PNR and his Lomas de Chapultepec to the small and graffitied apartment on Metropolitan Avenue y Brooklyn… No space to fit a pin was available among so many books and albums… Nostalgic video maker, a filmmaker of a future that could no longer be… With René I learned the hard way that we all have a time, and his was never enough… Too many things left out… An eternal lovesick… How to forget the gorgeous Asiatic girl who served us in a two-table, small place? You fell in love with her and you certainly did not see her again. She was more shy than you, therefore her punishment, her tragic mistake… Just like a French film, the most wicked adventures were the best excuse to tell a complex love story… Always in love, always with projects, always creating, playing bass in front of small crowds… GAMBORIMBO… Always and forever… I had to say good-by to you with a video… and you who quoted the one who said that There is more video than life… A decade has gone by and here we are, thinking of you… Always… I have walked once and again alongside that pool where you swimmed… I walk, reach the corner, and walk back… And you do not come out with your wet hair… I patiently wait for you, hoping that you will come out of that door… The dirty streets, the noisy subway… Brooklyn… So far from the Lomas de Chapultepec… I keep that trip to the Chepe… The last one, with another escape artist, Manuel Llaneza… The three of us wearing our hats, traveling over the sleepers… A silent trip… The Sierra Tarahumara, the 3 friends, but without any advertising.
Álvaro Curiel
