In the city of Puebla, Mexico around the turn of this century, an aspiring chef named Iván (Armando Espitia) finds his culinary degree counts for little after a year in the scrub room of a small diner. Passed over for a position in the kitchen in favor of the boss's nephew, he is told that he lacks patience, and should feel grateful that he even has a job. Going nowhere fast, he struggles to keep in touch with his mother, who takes care of his terminally ill father, and to stay in the good graces of his estranged girlfriend, who maintains sole custody over their son. What's more, Iván is a homosexual, and the increasing implausibility of his protecting this secret in a society of entrenched patriarchal, cultural conservatism only compounds upon his precarious social and interpersonal position.
One night, Iván and his best friend Sandra (comedian Michelle Rodríguez, not to be confused with the American actor) decide to get wrecked at a new gay bar. It's there that he meets Gerardo (Christian Vazquez), an assistant professor at the municipal college and the son of a wealthy cattle-rancher. Passions flare, and the two become lovers. Inevitably, Iván's mother and girlfriend discover his secret, and the latter refuses to let him see their son. With no future in Puebla, Iván decides to make the dangerous trek northward in hopes of carving out a better life in New York City.
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Having premiered at the Sundance Film Festival all the way back in January, 2020, there's a certain poetry in I Carry You With Me finally seeing its limited release in light of the box-office disappointment of the similarly belated musical In the Heights. Despite their obvious formal differences, each film is basically a melodrama structured around shared themes. In both, strident protagonists find themselves torn between aspirations of personal success and their indebtedness to those they love. With a focus on Latin migrant and Latin-American experience, they are both stories about migration, the polarization of cultural identity across borders, and the profound trauma inflicted by the United States's draconian immigration policies.
In the Heights and I Carry You With Me are further bonded by the likelihood that they will fail to significantly penetrate mainstream cultural consciousness at a critical point of political and environmental transition. The Jon M. Chu-directed adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes's Tony Award-winning musical flopped both at the box office and on streaming for a number of reasons. Though the American consumer and service economy never really closed, it is far from ready to be truly "open." Even barring state and municipal ordinances, theater chains likely realize that there are large swaths of the potential movie-going public that won't return if they feel like the movie houses have relaxed their public health protocols too soon, and that many of those who can afford streaming service simply aren't coming back at all. This hard limit on showtime capacity wasn't going to do any favors for a two-plus hour film in a genre with spotty accessibility at best, and with no name stars to boot. Also -- and let's just be real about this -- even among the Hispanic/Latino audience making up roughly a quarter of regular theater-goers, there is virtually no salience to Miranda's dated brand of ersatz Hip Hop. Without an audience or the time and space to cultivate one by word-of-mouth, In the Heights was doomed to be steamrolled by a month's worth of established franchises in horror, family animation, and action.
With a much more modest financial proposition, I Carry You With Me has its work cut out for it no less. The metropolitan and university town indies find themselves in just as, if not more of a tenuous position than the national chains. For yours truly, to see the film at all required taking the trip to New York City's Angelika Film Center & Cafe, where the 5:45 audience consisted of just seven seniors, mostly older gays. Perhaps the NYU hipsters milling around outside the Angelika were there for the following showing; or maybe they were there for the competition, which included the sunnier, more nostalgic French-Belgian drama Summer of 85, opened just a week earlier; or maybe they were just hanging around. The struggle of the independent cinema isn't just a struggle against the scope and reach of the mainstream. It is also a struggle to assert itself within the panorama of urban delights, to say nothing of the culture of an atomized, digitally-fractured generation, which is at once highly introverted as well as pathologically exhibitionist. I Carry You With Me is a beautiful film, but in its own domain faces the same crisis of salience as In the Heights.
Over the last two decades, the film criticism produced by college-educated, socially conscious liberals has reinforced an obsession with content over form, and has thus eroded the critical distinction between pandering garbage and art. Rejecting constructions of high and low culture in a misguided attempt to be more inclusive, it has necessarily led to the confused framing of hegemonic media products as platforms for representational and social progress, rather than fantasist regression. Just as even the lauded In the Heights must vie for popular attention, drowned out by the roaring engines of F9, so also must I Carry You With Me and films like it compete against the notion that there is no particular significance to engagement with it as opposed to the undifferentiated "discourse" as it pertains to films "representing" people-of-color, migrants, LGTBQ+, etc. More so than Chu, Miranda, and Hudes's musical, I Carry You With Me is both culturally and geographically inaccessible, its appeal narrowed to the economically privileged. Even as an example of queer cinema, it is conceived and released at a time when the aperture of independent queer, feminist, or POC art is being rapidly constricted by the more sophisticated capitalization of media and communications industry, reinforced by a critical community perversely incentivized to give the products of the most hegemonic corporations priority. It's a serious and fascinating question as to whether or not I Carry You With Me will appeal to younger cosmopolitan audiences, or if even young queers, POC, and feminists simply no longer have the disposition of previous generations for what might now be perceived as outdated, maudlin tragedies of the oppressed.
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Semi-deceptively marketed as a pure drama, I Carry You With Me actually represents a much more audacious turn for veteran documentarian Heidi Ewing, whose previous collaborations with Rachel Grady include Jesus Camp (2006) and 12th & Delaware (2010). Ewing's first solo directorial effort is both audacious for her as a film artist as well as audacious for the documentary and docudrama formats more broadly. Since its very origins, the documentary has relied frequently upon dramatization not merely to present information, but also to variously excite spectators or center subjectivity as inextricable from even the supposedly facts-based or "objective" narrative. Not to say that they broach the same degree of spectacular license taken by the silent ethnographers of the '20s or the mondo exploitationeers of the '70s, but there does appear to be, at least in part, a trend in recent and current documentary away from observational cinema and towards the embrace of artifice. Some works play fast and loose with factuality itself in a manner that suggests even a kind of new journalistic revival. Others are so aesthetically sensual that what can hardly be disguised -- even if their creators wanted to disguise it -- is the influence of Terrence Malick rather than Errol Morris.
Malick's philosophical approach to his romantic films necessarily blurs the line between documentary and drama, the director assuming the direct cinema practitioner's hand-held, fly-on-the-wall perspective, then freely associated through montage with observations on environments and events. Especially towards the conclusion of I Carry You With Me, as Ewing intercuts more frequently between documentary cinematographer Craig Atkinson's footage of the present day and the memories she has dramatized with writer Alan Page Arriaga and cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez, Malick's dreamy influence becomes unmistakable, further compounded by Ewing's deployment of poetic rather than expository narration.
None of which is to say that I Carry You With Me comes off as derivative. Indeed, through her Malickian influence, Ewing makes good on a promise that Malick himself became too complacent to fulfill. As beguiled by material decadence as he is by sweeping nature, Malick's oeuvre has amounted to not much more than a slew of shimmering romantic epics, the perspective of which is veritably infantile for all the poetic overtures. Ewing's journalistic interest, on the other hand, lends a similar aesthetic approach to a romantic subject grounded in material, rather than neurotic emotional experience. When Iván and Gerardo make love in the loom of his family's estate, hidden from the venomous gaze of the latter's virulently homophobic father, there's a tangible emotional investment, contrasted with Malick's habitual, ponderous scenes of privileged, estranged lovers cryptically staring at one another. Malick will film a doubting Catholic priest poncing about some historic location or whatever, but there's nothing but the most vague connection between character and setting, between environment and soul. When Ewing both dramatizes and documents the fly-by-night bars and burlesques of Puebla's gay underground, these scenes of sexual and cultural modernity cast against the architecture of the city's colonial founding both inform upon the characters' unique emotional and social struggles. When Iván and Sandra cross themselves before a neon-lit, votive sculpture of the Virgin Mary before descending into the gay bar, one is led to evocative questions about how we conceive of the binaries, or borders, between the old and the new, the classic and the modern, the conservative and the progressive, the native and the foreign. The same can be said for when we see the real life Iván and Gerardo, now successful restauranteurs living openly gay lives in New York City, watching the Fourth of July fireworks. Wearing an American flag tank-top, Iván has been living illegally in the U.S. for some fourteen years, and can not go home to see his fully grown son without risking deportation. For Ewing, Puebla and New York City are not merely the pretty, historical places against which romance and tragedy happen. The framing of urban space, fashion, culture and commodity evocatively reflect upon the experiences of her characters in allegorical terms.
In a similar vein, I Carry You With Me is clearly distinguished from other, more aesthetically sensual documentaries in that it does not simply employ sensual dramatization in order to prettify information. Ewing and Arriaga go a step further, rallying the form of a pure drama in order to achieve what is, effectively, a twist ending, the reveal that one is watching a true story. Narrative twists, like dramatizations themselves, are not strange to the documentary, of course, but their deployment is typically more for shock or irreverent value. The point is not so much the total originality of I Carry You With Me, as it is Ewing's extensive use of dramatization, and the ingenious way in which she deploys it. In describing the film, one hesitates to even give away Ewing's documentary credentials. To go in blind and be carried away by a drama that turns out to be a biopic, turns into a documentary, and then settles somewhere in-between, should be one of the great surprises of the re-opening summer film season.
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Emerging from the Angelika, I lit a cigarette and took a stroll down Mercer towards 8th Street. I Carry You With Me marked my first excursion back into the city in over a year, and I was once again vibrating with that sense of sublime melancholy, that I can only describe in this way, when one comes out of a movie theater, after seeing a good movie, and is swept up by how much bigger, how much more penetrating in depth, how much more musical in ambience the world feels. It's as if one's ears remain too sensitive, and that one's own eyes still linger with the affect of the cinematographer's gaze. One is reminded what art even is, and how it has the power to revitalize our perception of the real. The vast majority of Americans would probably never see a film like I Carry You With Me even had they the opportunity, but it is nonetheless depressing the scan the current releases as they are the most advertised and the most accessible, and reckon with the fact that most of us, even the privileged, are stuck in cultural deserts. Such things are always depressing, but the experience of even our patently inadequate pandemic lockdown has only put the alienation, the cruelty, the lifelessness of America's consumer asylum into more distilled terms.
Among the supporting cast of this post-credits sequence -- my life as movie -- I hear Latino workers in a loading dock, sitting around crates and smoking, casually conversing. And needling me still about Iván and Gerardo's story is how it helps to clarify the concept of the border, which is at once totally inadequate, but in both material and conceptual terms essential to the maintenance of the hierarchies under which we live. In its own way, I Carry You With Me is a new, definitive romance of the American Dream and the great melting pot. Iván, seeking both economic opportunity and refuge for his oppressed identity, finds it in the Land of Opportunity through individual grit and vigor. But in exploration of his and Gerardo's dramatized memories, which are now so remote that they intermingle with dreams, Ewing instead presents the story of people who, both before and after their migration, lead lives "on the borderline," not on one side or the other. The material border between nations fundamentally fails to maintain any kind of coherent cultural or economic separation. Indeed, whether we're talking about queers in Puebla or undocumented Latinos in New York City, to the extent that Iván and his fellow outsiders and immigrés prove useful to both the city and the nation's economy, and contribute to the cultural diversity of its consumer pleasures, there proves to be a conspicuous tolerance. But the border is nonetheless symbolically sufficient, denoting just one line that can never technically be crossed, but connoting many other lines that can not be spiritually transgressed. These fundamental lines, these borders, persist in the service of hierarchies of gender, race, and capital. I Carry You With Me is not the type of documentary to get historically or politically specific enough to expound upon the unique role of the U.S. in creating and maintaining the inequality and instability of its neighbors to the South. But the violence of the border, and the casual exploitation of Iván and other immigrants, is clear enough that one reckons with the border itself as an inherently violent and exploitative project. Most Americans, whether they identify as liberal or conservative, can only conceive of the "immigration problem" or "border crisis" as issues of technocratic policy and enforcement; who gets in and who gets shipped out, how many or how few, who should or should not be considered "naturalized." We are protected from and indoctrinated away from considering the lives that are drawn-and-quartered every day, the memories and love languishing over the borderline.
The English title of the film is presented in both the opening credits and in advertisements with the Spanish-language translation, Te Llevo Conmigo, in parenthesis. By the film's conclusion however, the parenthetical place of the titles has been switched, subverting the conception of the Spanish merely being the "translation" of the English, and thus effectively bracketing the film's themes. Americans believe, whether they want to admit it or not, that their borders will protect them as they feel the world slipping into environmental chaos for which, again, their state bares unique responsibility. But with Iván, his love and memories, as allegory, Te Llevo Conmigo confronts us with the total fantasy of this position. Despite our borders, our fates are inextricably intertwined; and though who benefits and who suffers under the hierarchies that borders serve may seem clear in the short term, in the long term, the scope of pain and violence has no choice but to expand. The polarity of the border is in no danger of shifting. Rather, the breadth of the border itself will grow.
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