Iconic, provocative, and influential Mexican director Jaime Humberto Hermosillo died yesterday at the age of 77 in Guadalajara, where he lived for the past decades. A key figure of Mexican cinema, Hermosillo directed over thirty feature films in which he subverted traditional melodrama and use sexual farce to criticize the hypocrisy of the Mexican middle class and its moral double standards.
Hermosillo was born in 1942 in Aguascalientes in a conservative family. He studied film at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC) in Mexico City, where he made his first short films. In 1969 he directed the medium length film Los nuestros, which received critical acclaim by the local press.
In 1972 he made his debut feature film Magdalena’s Calling / La verdadera vocación de Magdalena starring popular soap opera actress Angélica María. The film is an indictment of marriage as a matter of economical and social interest. Hermosillo had a prolific decade during the 70s establishing him as one of the leading filmmakers of the country along with Arturo Ripstein, Felipe Cazals, and Jorge Fons. Some of his most renowned titles of this period are El señor de Osanto (1974), El cumpleaños del perro (1975), Passion According to Berenice / La pasión según Berenice (1976), which established him as a major filmmaker and was long considered one of the best Mexican films of all-time, Matinee (1976), Naufragio (1978) and Amor libre (1979).
In 1979 he directed Mary My Dearest / María de mi corazón, starring Héctor Bonilla and María Rojo and written and adapted by Colombian Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez (who makes a cameo appearance). An unsettling and tragic love story in two parts, the film follows the capricious reunion of a cat burglar and his former mistress, as they become partners in a traveling magicians show. The second part begins with the separation of the lovers by pure destiny.
When the financial crisis hit Mexican cinema in the 80s, Hermosillo was able to keep himself active making low-budget films, but without sacrificing his style and narratives. His 1985 provocative sex comedy Dona Herlinda and Her Son / Doña Herlinda y su hijo (1985), about a mother who organizes her gay son's life by arranging a marriage for him, then having the new wife, their new baby, and his gay lover all move into her home, became an international queer cinema classic.
In the early 90s, Hermosillo was able to join the so-called trend of ‘New Mexican Cinema,’ along with newcomers Alfonso Cuarón, Carlos Carrera, María Novaro, and Guillermo del Toro, with titles such as Bathroom Intimacies / Intimidades de un cuarto de baño (1991), Homework / La tarea (1990), Forbidden Homework / La tarea prohibida (1992), and Esmeralda Comes at Night / De noche vienes, Esmeralda (1997).
Hermosillo remained active through the new century with titles including eXXXorcisms (2002), Ausencia (2003), Dos Auroras (2005), Rencor (2006), Juventud (2010) and Un buen sabor de boca (2017). In 1990, The Museum of New York presented the joint mid-career retrospective “Ripstein and Hermosillo.” He was the winner of Mexico’s Ariel Award for Best Director back to back for Naufragio and Passion According to Berenice, winner five times of the Ariel Award for Best Screenplay, plus numerous nominations.
In twitter, Academy-Award director del Toro said “My mentor passed away—one of the greatest and one of the people who transformed film culture in Guadalajara. Jaime Humberto Hermosillo was always a dignified, brave, transgressive and coherent man. Watching Passion According to Berenice made me believe that you could be a filmmaker in the Mexican province.”
