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Rudo y Cursi
If you love the actors Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna you’ll more than get your money’s worth seeing Rudo y Cursi (translated as Tough and Corny), but what you won’t get is a film that closely approaches their first major collaboration, the great Y tu mamá también. Sometimes it seems unfair to judge films based on previous work, but with both actors starring in their first film together since that one (hard to believe it’s been 7 years!) and with the writer being Carlos Cuarón who co-authored Y tu mamá también, it’s hard not to. It also turns out to be Carlos’ first feature as a director, so one might postulate it’s too bad he didn’t get someone else to direct it; it often felt as if just when the story should have soared it seemed earthbound and leaden.
Beto (Luna) and Tato (Bernal) are brothers who work at a banana plantation and also play soccer for the village team. Nicknamed “Tough” because of his personality and football style, Beto dreams of becoming a professional soccer player; Tato’s dream is to be a famous singer, and both share the dream of building a house for their mother, Elvira.
The brothers have a change in luck when Batuta, a soccer talent scout, discovers them accidentally. Batuta is played by the wonderful Argentine actor Guillermo Francella, previously unknown to me but said to be one of the most famous actors and comedians in his homeland. Tato is the first to move to the big city where he becomes the star goal scorer for the prestigious Amaranto Club. His baroque playing style earns him the nickname of Corny. Although Beto feels he has been betrayed and left behind, he soon travels to Mexico City to become the goalkeeper for the Nopaleros team.
For a film with soccer at the heart of so much of it there is (thank God) very little soccer playing and Cuarón handles this rather seamlessly. What he doesn’t handle as well are the characters’ travails and fortune; as the film kind of sways back and forth from silliness to darkness. However, there’s this really great set piece in the middle of the film: Tato’s hilarious “signature song,” a video version of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me.” He gets this opportunity because of his stardom as a soccer player (though he is talentless as a singer which we’ve known from the start of the film) and, yet, with the soccer and singing he gets to romance a television celebrity, which only short years earlier was a total fantasy with him and his buds back home. You’ll probably remember this entire section of the film more than most of the rest of it.
It’s all tied up rather uninterestingly and not totally creditably. And, yet, having said mostly negative stuff about the film (I totally realize that) it does provide enough entertainment to be worth going to especially because of the immense talent and likeability of its stars. At last count I heard it was the third highest grossing film in Mexico’s cinema history. But, as we know, commerce and art doesn’t always equate. But, then, there’s Y tu mamá también, the largest grossing film in that country’s cinema history and that film hit both marks.
Jim Baldassare
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