Tender ‘I Carry You With Me’ is confounded by documentary dreams
Grade: 3.0/5.0
There’s no denying Heidi Ewing is a magnificent storyteller. Her latest directorial effort is the impressionistic “I Carry You With Me,” which sees her jump from documentary to narrative. It’s an absorbing story of love separated by a border — she doesn’t linger long enough for an excess of weepy victimization to stall her engine, telling a story of complicated gay love.
Ewing’s visual style is so smooth, so beautiful, it’s easy to fall into the trap of calling it simple. It is not. “I Carry You With Me” wraps us in, alternately sensually, alternately bracingly, but always with an eye for its characters. Ewing swaddles us in neon glows and full frames so that, when tragedy strikes, it’s not completely tragic. It’s disappointing, then, that “I Carry You With Me” can’t pick between character and subject.
Ewing’s latest tries to split the difference between documentary and narrative — a worthwhile endeavor for the true story of gay, undocumented immigrants Iván García and Gerardo Zabaleta, but one that pans out in floundering, bizarre tonal shifts along three timelines. The beginning is dreamy enough, but with a twist conjured only by a documentarian. The camera is loose. Place is ingrained: A subway serves its function, but the film defines it by the dark green pillars, tracks, empty late-night station and, most of all, the reflection in the window.
Just as the place is ingrained, the people are unforgettable. We find Iván (Armando Espitia), our mostly closeted bachelor, in 1994 Puebla, Mexico washing dishes at a restaurant, taking out the trash, grabbing whatever the cooks need. This is fine. The camera swoons after him, unsteadily with swooping movements, eventually to a rendezvous with his friend and confidant Sandra (Michelle Rodríguez). This is better. And then the film finally drops its documentary pretense for a playful, glowing scene at a gay bar, where Gerardo (Christian Vazquez) flirts with Iván via some laser-lit cat-and-mouse. An improvement, for sure, but lodged in a mixed bag.
They talk about their homophobic fathers, their homophobic hometowns. The narrative is blunt, but the camera, at its best, is not. “I Carry You With Me,” describing their budding relationship, occasionally runs too close to cliches.
The film moves on, turning tense as Iván makes his way across the border, through the desert with Sandra, searching for the American Dream. His journey makes a trade: Acceptance as a gay man at the price of xenophobia. And then bam: 20 years flash by, all while Iván’s son grows up in Mexico without him, prompting him to reconsider the move. Meanwhile, Ewing turns to a true documentary approach, following the real-life Iván and Gerardo, but loses the sense of self that defined the previous two-thirds of the film.
If Iván goes back, is it regression or homecoming? What, precisely, is he rejecting? Looming large is a question of which dream he internalizes. “I Carry You With Me” raises questions that its latter shift to documentary — including one scene with the sentimental hue of archival footage — doesn’t do justice. Ewing, with the heart of an educator, taught us so much about who Iván and Gerardo used to be. Who they are now is much less clear.
Above all, that’s because very little is at stake — formally — as the film goes on. There’s a scene where Sandra, crossing the desert on her last legs, collapses, but Ewing’s style isn’t comprehensive enough to convey the full tension of the scene. The scene, jumping haphazardly, largely cuts out Sandra, focusing with tunnel vision on the generic human consequences of the U.S.-Mexico border. Ewing is unable to sew the politics in, detracting from her visual magnificence.
In the first half of the film, the question is when something will interrupt the melodramatic, hyper-digestible reverie. It takes about 50 minutes for us to get to the border. There is plenty that goes down later, but “I Carry You With Me” crumbles under the weight of time: one hour and 51 minutes to tell a decades-spanning story. Come the end, we’re forced to realize how much Iván has changed and how, like the film, we don’t know him anymore.
Dominic Marziali covers film. Contact him at dmarziali@dailycal.org.