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I Carry You With Me (Heidi Ewing, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-10-01 22:45:06 +0000 UTC
I turned this off after 48 minutes.
I didn't realize until after I stopped watching (and checked in with Letterboxd, where I saw Steve Erickson's comments) that Ewing has been making documentaries for years with filmmaking partner Rachel Grady. Is this provenance part of the problem? Hard to say; some directors make the transition with considerable grace.
But the bottom line here is that I Carry You With Me works overtime to display every painful, horrendous, and violent manifestation of homophobia, and does so in a way that seems to tie it specifically within Mexican culture. When we flash back to one of the main characters' experience of child abuse at the hands of his father, I found myself wondering. What is really gained by the perpetuation of this cinematic victimization of gay men? We know the violence exists. Does redoubling it through cinematic representation actually serve any theraputic function for those affected? Or is it just a melodramatic occasion for feckless liberal hand-wringing?
UPDATE: I finished the film.
Steve is right; it does improve slightly toward the end, since Iván (Armando Espitia) takes on more agency once he decides to cross into America. But the film still doesn't quite find a tone aside from liberal didacticism. The fact that Iván manages to carve out his American Dream, eventually, but has to sacrifice virtually everything else, is an undeniably real tragedy that hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants has experienced. At the same time, it's not clear how this wholly uninventive middlebrow effort -- a sort of combination of El Norte and Before Night Falls -- avails us of any real insight.
And incidentally, even for this sort of sweeping, emotionally-driven issue film, I Carry You With Me is not particularly well made. The flashbacks are very poorly handled, and the plot is actually illegible at times. I had trouble discerning if and when Iván's boyfriend Gerardo (Christian Vásquez) actually made it to the States. And aside from Iván, most of the characters remain ciphers, signifiers of The Problem rather than fully formed human beings.
Comments
The film is really mediocre, but I think it improves in the final third, when it comes much closer to being a documentary. Also, the portrayal of American xenophobia later in the film is no more nuanced than the scenes of homophobia and transphobia in Mexico . I distrust the currently popular idea that art about gay life needs to be upbeat, but turning the very real problems of queer undocumented immigrants into melodramatic cliches is a waste.
