Watch: Alfonso Cuarón’s Quartet for the End of Time (1983)
Now that Roma is available for all on Netflix, it’s as good a time as any to revisit the earliest work of Alfonso Cuarón. Made in 1983, when he was a 22 year-old film student in Mexico City, Quartet for the End of Time bares a strong semblance to the to the classics of the French New Wave. Named after the featured chamber music by Olivier Messiaen, the film explores the solitary life of a young man in and around his apartment. It was Cuarón’s last credited short before his 1991 feature length debut, Solo Con Tu Pareja.