RUDO Y CORSI

Written and Directed by Carlos Cuaron
Starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna and Guillermo Francella


Batuto: Everything in life is a bet. The soccer ball either hits the goal post and bounces out or it bounces in and becomes a goal.

There is nothing like the bond between brothers and there could be no better screen brothers than Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna in the Mexican soccer comedy, RUDO Y CORSI. They may have only really made one film together prior to this one (that being Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN), but the two understated actors have such a great camaraderie together on screen that it seems only natural that they be paired up as often as possible. Last time out, Bernal and Luna played best friends that crossed a certain line most bromances never do. This time out, they return and reunite with the co-writer of Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, Carlos Cuaron, who wrote that film with the director and his brother, Alfonso Cuaron (CHILDREN OF MEN). As brothers, there is no line to even consider crossing so all we’re left with is brotherly love – from the comfort and confidence that only brothers can share to the intense competition that only brothers know better.


RUDO Y CORSI translates to “rough and corny”. Luna is Rudo and Bernal is Corsi, despite both actors’ pleas to Cuaron that they each felt more closely related to the other character. Cuaron, Carlos that is, cast them in the opposite roles for exactly this reason. These brothers have grown up in shacks and both have big dreams of living well someday. They run their daily game in the banana fields and their weekend games on the soccer field, where they are both discovered by wily talent coach, Batuto (Guillermo Francello). The trouble is, he can only bring one of the two to the big leagues and a penalty shot decides that Corsi will be joining. Rudo ends up going as well later but the damage has been done. The two are forced to live with each other and play against each other while the public eats them up and they fall prey to the pratfalls of a fast paced life in Mexico City. Their sincerity never leaves them though and it is their small town sensibility that gets them through their troubles even though it is arguably what got them there to begin with.


Cuaron stepped up his role from writer on Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN to writer/director for RUDO Y CORSI, and his transition is a pretty run across the field. His decisions are sometimes questionable but they are always consciously being made and appreciated. The most peculiar of his decisions is not including that much footage of Rudo, Corsi or anyone else for that matter actually playing soccer. We don’t see the game that got them noticed; we don’t see the goals that got them famous. Instead, soccer becomes this mythical place where they are both gods and we get them when they are away from where they excel and are revered. In other words, we get to see them when they’re just trying to make it all work. In doing so, Cuaron may alienate people expecting a straightforward sports film but he grounds the brothers and the movie by tying them closer to the people off the field instead. And even though we cannot see it, we know Cuaron made the goal.

PARIS, JE T’AIME

Written and Directed by:
Olivier Assayas, Frederic Aubertin, Gurinder Chadha, Sylvain Chomet, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Isabel Coixet, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuaron, Gerard Depardieu, Christopher Doyle, Richard LaGravenese, Vincenzo Natali, Alexander Payne, Bruno Podalydes, Walter Salles, Oliver Schmitz, Nobuhiro Suwa, Daniela Thomas, Tom Tykwer and Gus Van Sant



Francine: Thomas Listen. Listen. There are times when life calls out for a change. A transition. Like the seasons. Our spring was wonderful, but summer is over now and we missed out on autumn. And now all of a sudden, it's cold, so cold that everything is freezing over. Our love fell asleep, and the snow took it by surprise. But if you fall asleep in the snow, you don't feel death coming.

With the sun shining brilliantly on a quiet Sunday that is just about to fully wake up, love can be felt in the soft breeze that sweeps past my feet and can be seen in the smiles of the people I walk alongside. It is the perfect day to stop off for croissants and a café-o-lait before heading off to the city of lights and love. Of course, a flight to Paris is not reasonably in this humble film critic’s budget so I had to opt for the next best thing, PARIS, JE T’AIME, a collection of 18 short films by a variety of international directors. Each piece is named after a different Parisian neighborhood and is a reflection on love. Careful not to over glorify the most powerful and persuasive of all human emotions, PARIS, JE T’AIME explores love at the many stages of its own game. The results are spontaneously romantic and surprisingly consistent. And truly, what better way to express the fleeting nature of love and how a moment can change your life than with a collection of filmed moments.


The beautifully poetic quote above is taken from Tom Tykwer’s Faubourg Saint Denis. True to form, Tykwer (RUN, LOLA, RUN) uses time-lapse photography and repetition to demonstrate the entire cycle of love, from inception to dissolution. Originally shot in 2004 and paired down for this anthology, Faubourg stars Natalie Portman as Francine, an American actress in Paris for a part in a film, and Melchior Beslon as Thomas, a blind man she falls in love with. Here, the blind leads the blind through the most unstable of terrain, where two people consume each other to a point where their lives nearly lose their own existences. As love seems to go from dazzling to dizzying, Tykwer reminds us of the tricks it can play on our minds and the illusions it can create when we stray towards doubt.


Perhaps the most giddily romantic offering comes from Sylvain Chomet’s Tour Eiffel. Choosing the city’s most identifiable attraction for its title, Chomet (LES TRIPLETTES DE BELLEVILLE) gives us a little boy who tells the story of how his parents met and fell in love. His father, a mime (Paul Putner), finds himself falling into one surreal scenario after another and eventually lands himself in jail. This is where he meets the woman who will become the love of his life (Yolande Moreau). Miming has become something of a dying art, if it isn’t already dead. Yet by nature, it is dreamy and untroubled. Miming points its silent finger at the ridiculousness of human behaviour and what but love can make people act more absurd? We might find someone special in the least likely of circumstances if we could just take ourselves a little less seriously.


PARIS, JE T’AIME keeps the flow lively by not always focusing on love between lovers. Three memorable shorts focus on the love between a parent and a child. Walter Salles (MOTORCYCLE DIARIES) has Catalina Sandino Moreno singing lovingly to her child before she leaves him to sing the same song with a distant longing to the child she watches over for her living. Nobuhiro Suwa (UN COUPLE PARFAIT) has Juliette Binoche trying desperately to overcome the emptiness she feels after losing her son. Binoche says very little yet, not surprisingly given her immense talent, her struggle is evident in her face as she learns that love sometimes means letting go. And Alfonso Cuaron (CHILDREN OF MEN) weighs in with one continuous shot of a father (Nick Nolte) and his grown daughter (Sara Martins) walking together for what must be the first time in a long while. We see them only from across the street and we only get close to them as the distance between the two characters narrows to a place of comfort and accepting.


The last short to screen is Alexander Payne’s 14ieme Arrondissement. As usual, Payne (SIDEWAYS) takes an ordinary person and shows us what makes them extraordinary. Carol (Margo Martindale) is another American in Paris. She is there alone and for less time than she would have liked as she has dogs waiting for her at home. She is a plain person with an uneventful life who finds herself in a city that is rich and lush. In beautifully delivered Americanized French, she muses about the sights and how being there makes her feel. This woman spends so much time trying to be happy despite life’s numerous disappointments and as she sits in a city made for lovers, she realizes that she is in fact happy and loves herself more than she knew. She falls in love, if only for perhaps a moment, with life and love itself.


The characters that appear but fleetingly in PARIS, JE T’AIME find themselves at the romantic center of the universe. The moments they share with each other, be it helping someone up after a hard fall or reaching out your hand to another person without touching them or without their knowledge, are the moments that give love its flare and flourish. Outside the city of lovers, it can be easy to miss moments such as these but we must remind ourselves of their significance. It takes but a moment for love to shine through a cloudy sky. You just have to keep your heart open to see it. And if one city can be so abundant with love, one has to believe it can find its way one day to your door.

CHILDREN OF MEN

CHILDREN OF MEN
Written by Alfonso Cuaron and Timothy J. Sexton
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron


The trouble with foretelling the future in film is that you need to make it credible. The viewer must be almost instantly immersed in a world that is unlike their own, be it entirely or just slightly. If successful, the viewer has the potential to form insights regarding the world they currently live in based on where it looks to be headed. If it fails, every intention the director weaves into the film will be lost on untrusting eyes. Alfonso Cuaron’s near apocalyptic CHILDREN OF MEN opens in a coffee shop in London where the patrons stare in a state of numbed shock at the newscast that announces the death of the world’s youngest human being. Baby Diego was all of 18 years old. There is no one younger because the human race has inexplicably stopped reproducing. The film is set only 20 years from now. Unfortunately, by carefully avoiding over-explaining how humanity got to this point, CHILDREN OF MEN misses achieving that level of authenticity necessary to fully engross the viewer, albeit just narrowly. Yet as more time is spent with the characters of this future, it somehow transforms into a compelling testament to the hope that keeps humanity going no matter how dire the state of the world. Given our current sliding slope towards an increased spread of apathy and despair, Cuaron has crafted an important film that serves as both a reminder and a tool to unify the global population … or at least the film-going one.

Part of the reason CHILDREN OF MEN fails to convince from the start is because of another device designed to foretell the future, the movie preview. To draw us into the intensity of the film, the preview shows an explosion that lead character, Theo (Clive Owen), just misses being killed in. This scene takes place early in the film and, given that this particular preview has been running even longer than most as the release was delayed by three months, the knowledge that the bomb is coming detaches the viewer as they brace for the blast. Had it been a genuine surprise, the shock itself would have served to announce the severity of the times, leaving the viewer as frightened and uneasy as the Londoners of 2027. The missing desperation allows for more time to make sense of what defines this future. While Cuaron’s clues to explain humanity’s collapse are clever and creative, the viewer is still left alone to play catch-up, trying to piece everything together on their own. Of course, it becomes clear that understanding how it happened is entirely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that’s where the road leads but the ground is not solid enough to get a good bearing, making it difficult to see past the details.


Surprisingly, the film is still surprising. And thankfully, once it does catch you off guard, it continues to do so until you understand what it means to need to survive at all costs. Theo must deliver Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) to The Human Project, a group of the world’s greatest minds dedicated to the rebirth of the human race. At the risk of pointing out the film’s obvious symbolism, Kee is the “key” to this project as she is the first woman to conceive a child since Diego. Her miracle, although unexplained, inspires everyone she encounters to do right by her and protect her unborn child. As those who are accustomed to varying degrees of selfishness shed their ego-serving ways, their true colors shine through. Even those are meant to stop Kee so that they can use her baby to further their own purposes in the world ahead, from underground terrorists to an army that doesn’t care who they blow up as long as something is being destroyed, are powerless in the presence of the potential savior she is carrying. It’s as though everyone has given up and decided that their actions are meaningless and Kee’s baby gives them a hope so pure it is unlike anything they ever knew before all the trouble began, as if they too are reborn along with the child.

What was impossible to imagine at the start becomes so vividly real that the viewer cannot help but be wrapped up in the urgency of Kee’s need for a successful mission. Cuaron gives no reason at any time to think CHILDREN OF MEN will have to end happily out of a necessity to appease its audience. He makes every step of Kee’s journey arduous and exhausting. After all, she is over eight months pregnant; her odyssey would be hard for anyone. Only she is not simply carrying a child. She is carrying the fate of humanity at a moment in history that could mean the difference between a chance to begin again or an otherwise likely extinction. Being only 20 years away, there could already be a “Kee” amongst us. Though hope sometimes feels difficult to muster, CHILDREN OF MEN shows us we will find it again when we least expect to and it will keep us alive when we need it most.