RUDO Y CURSI
Written & Directed by Carlos Cuarón
Produced by Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu & Guillermo del Toro
Released by Sony Pictures Classics
Spanish with English subtitles
USA/Mexico. 103 min. Rated R
With Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna & Guillermo Francella

Carlos Cuarón makes little upfront effort to discourage the inevitably high expectations for his feature debut, which reunites the two actors whose fame swelled across international borders because of their success in his brother Alfonso’s delightful Y Tu Mamá También. Set in the same sun-crisped Mexican landscape as the previous film, it focuses on the developing competition between two brothers as they exchange their banana plantation rags for riches from the soccer field. In all fairness, Carlos has carved a reputation as a decorated storyteller in his own right—he wrote Sólo Con Tu Pareja, which his brother directed, and both wrote the Mamá script, so he is not a sibling taking advantage of his big brother’s nepotistic leanings.

While it seems unlikely that Rudo y Cursi will be greeted with the same sort of fanfare bestowed upon Mamá, the film will find a sizeable, appreciative Stateside audience if its record-breaking Mexican box-office figures are any indication. Regrettably, despite my best efforts, I cannot be counted amongst the enthusiastic.

The story is engaging enough on paper. Two poor half-brothers are discovered playing soccer by a rakish talent scout, who takes them under his wing and shuffles them towards stardom on two of Mexico City’s wildly popular soccer teams—tough Beto (Diego Luna), thus nicknamed Rudo; the other, happy-go-lucky romantic Tato (Gael Garcia Bernal), who’s given the moniker Corny (Cursi). When Tato falls head over heels for a narcissistic beauty with a prodigious sexual appetite, and Beto lets his gambling problem wreak havoc on his finances, their future prospects dim considerably and the brotherly bickering mushrooms. Cuarón chooses to set his story firmly in a soccer-obsessed world without making Rudo y Cursi anything approaching a typical sports movie. Until the climactic scene, where Beto and Tato face each other on the soccer field in a high-stakes match, game play is rarely featured as an important narrative device.

An attempted tragicomedy, the film is neither funny nor devastating. The characters, as their names suggest, comes across as broadly-drawn clownish men. Without the specificity required to humanize their hyperbolic personas, each is more irritating than sympathetic. Bernal, who spends much of the film’s latter half in a garish cowboy outfit pursuing a musical career singing precisely one song (a grating cover of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me”), resembles a coke-addled troll mugging his way through a sped up dream. Luna, while still the more subdued of the two, also suffers from the clichés of a downward spiral, forced to shout and sweat his way through an internal conflict that never translates as anything more than a plot device. Impressive from a production value standpoint, Rudo Y Cursi has some right to be smug, but ultimately it’s a brightly-lit display with nothing meaningful behind the glass. Patrick Wood
May 8, 2009