by Nick Taylor
I am both tremendously enthusiastic and a bit disappointed that I Carry You With Me is finally getting a theatrical release. Enthused because it’s a goddamn gem that ranks among the best films of last year, and sits right alongside Lingua Franca and Welcome to Chechnya as one of the very best queer films. The disappointment comes from the fact that, as far as anyone's concerned, this is a 2020 film. Distributor Sony Pictures Classics went out of its way to give this an awards-qualifying run despite pushing its wide release date further and further back. As with the aesthetically entrancing documentary Gunda or the tonally triumphant, richly acted French Exit (both also distributed by SPC), it’s a bit mystifying that this was seen as the superior strategy rather than letting I Carry You With Me’s reputation build over the course of this year. Art doesn’t need awards, sure, but it’s a bummer that Heidi Ewing’s fiction film debut won’t be able to generate the sort of grassroots attention that Isabel Sandoval, Eliza Hittman, Kelly Reichardt, and Kitty Green all earned to different degrees over the extended 2020 season.
But enough griping! Legitimate criticisms about a film’s release strategy shouldn’t totally overcome the fact that such an engrossing, formally adventurous and emotionally direct feature has gotten a theatrical release. Compared to Lingua Franca and Welcome to Chechnya, it’s by far among the most approachable of the three, which shouldn’t bely how adventurous its storytelling approach is...
All three films also share a theme of transience, of folks leaving home for other countries in the hope of starting new, better lives for themselves. Rather than Welcome to Chechnya’s threats of governmental persecution, Ewing’s film sits a bit closer to the character-derived stakes of Lingua Franca, as its romance blossoms to meet the needs and desires of two people who are wrangling with how much their lot in life is able to satisfy them, and what it might cost to change their circumstances.
I Carry You With Me opens with the sight of a handsome, fifty-something Mexican man named Iván walking through a subway platform. Juan Pablo Ramirez’s cinematography and Enat Sidi’s editing take on a form that purposefully resides somewhere between a documentarian following their subject and an intimate fiction feature, though this prologue is clearly meant to broadcast itself as non-fiction filmmaking. Iván takes a window seat and, in voiceover, begins to recount a dream he’s been having a lot recently. He’s back home in Mexico as a young man, back with the family and community he knew before he hopped the border to America and hasn’t seen in over twenty years. The dream ends, and Iván sits with the realization that he may never return home. From there, the film shifts to the mid-’90s Mexico of Iván’s youth, where he and the film take on new faces.
Iván is now played by Armando Espitia, and if you noticed I didn’t list who the older Iván was played by, we’ll get to that. Meanwhile, I Carry You With Me shapeshifts its docudrama style to present itself as overtly narrative, though this is mainly delineated via Ramirez using a different camera now that we’re in the past. The clarity of the images and concentration of the cutting are maintained throughout, allowing the film to achieve the unusually rigorous balance between documentary and fiction that Ewing is aiming for. The deep melancholy that characterizes Iván’s opening monologue will also remain constant throughout the film, though it will frequently recede and surge and change colors in the face of new potentials, risky endeavors, the eyes of the outside world, and a tenderly cultivated romance. When we re-meet him as a young man in Puebla City, Iván is a janitor at a high-end restaurant, forever waiting to be promoted to a chef position the owner has been promising him for several years. He’s separated from his wife Paola (Michelle González) and son but remains a regular fixture in their lives. We get the sense that she’s still affectionate towards him, but would like it if he was able to provide more for their family than he’s currently capable of.
From there, Iván is met by his friend Sandra (Michelle Rodríguez - no, not that one), and after some convincing, she gets him to join her at a pretty poppin’ gay bar. Bathed in the flashing lights of cerulean blue and fizzy grape purple, Iván notices a red laser pointer lazily trailing up his body and makes eyes with the handsome stranger wielding it at the other end of the club. After relocating in what appears to be the club bathroom, the stranger reveals his name is Gerardo (Christian Vázquez). From their secluded locale, the two spend the whole night talking. Gerardo begins his inquiry by asking where Iván’s been that he hasn’t seen him in any of the gay spaces around Mexico, and Iván more or less admits that this is simply the first time he’s been able to come to a place like this. Gerardo talks about his work as a schoolteacher and Iván shares his ambitions of being a professional chef. Differences in class, social status, family relationships, and experience in the world as gay men (though neither really labels their sexuality) are quickly established and will continue to accrue as I Carry You With Me continues. Right from the beginning, you get the sense that both men find themselves drawn to each other in a way they find wholly unique, despite Gerardo being far more comfortable and active in his sexuality than Iván has seemingly been. As the night goes on, the camera goes from pouring over the men's eyes, lips, and faces, to having their bodies completely share the frame, matching the way they go from staring shamelessly to becoming genuinely fascinated with each other. Their chemistry is palpable, and the kiss they share at sunrise is a clear promise of a deeper relationship to come.
And deepen it does! There’s a fairly straightforward way to frame their budding relationship, tested in different ways the more they’re entangled in each other’s personal lives. Iván meets Gerardo’s family, where he’s clearly something of a black sheep in the eyes of his authoritarian masculine father. The two make love, consummating their relationship with disarming tenderness as they grin about possibly being discovered by Gerardo’s family. Afterwards, Paola and her mother stop by for an impromptu visit with their son, and both women intuit that there’s a man in Iván’s house fast enough that one wonders if this is why their relationship ended in the first place. Paola threatens to keep him from seeing their son ever again. Iván’s shame at being discovered after finally living comfortably as a queer man, as much his ambition for a more lucrative job, seems to be what finally pushes him to try and cross the border with Sandra. Iván and Sandra’s attempt to cross the border is a harrowing sequence, communicating how horrific and physically demanding their journey is, even as it includes a gorgeous, pointedly subjective reappearance of a particular color. Roughly after the halfway point, the stakes have become whether Iván can really make a better life for himself in New York City, and if Gerardo, increasingly fed up with being so far away from his lover, will either risk joining him in America or stay with the life he’s created for himself in Mexico.
But to leave it at that belies how I Carry You With Me is able to construct such a sidewinding, increasingly expansive view of Iván and Gerardo’s worlds. Iván and Gerardo quickly prove themselves rounded, deftly etched personalities capable of unexpected depth and suspense. It’s a nice character detail that the more outwardly confident, charismatic Gerardo is the one who has a hard time uprooting himself from Mexico, while the shyer but hungrier Iván is the one who wants to go to America. Although their meet-cute rests on the chemistry they immediately have together, we see the work it takes to nurture their relationship, the choices that both men make to prioritize it and stoke it as other opportunities come calling. There’s even a few flashbacks to their childhood, which carry real weight without being flatly psychologizing about the lead’s behaviors. Sandra and Paola receive similar degrees of attention, emerging with distinct characteristics despite far less screen time. Luis Alberti makes a lovely impression as a drag queen friend of Gerardo’s. These characters have undeniable stock traits, yet they read as multifaceted figures we never completely get to know.
Elsewhere, I Carry You With Me is able to situate Iván and Gerardo in environments that viewers may experience as either textured, fragmented glimpses at various corners of their lives or underwhelming glances we don’t spend enough time with. I absolutely experienced it as the former, in part because Ewing and her team give each space such distinct visual identities that they feel concrete in spite of how little time we get to luxuriate at any given location. The kitchen Iván works at in Mexico is distinct from the one he joins in America, yet the green glow of certain rooms signals how Iván has carved out parts of both places for himself. Even its montages carry a dreamy, engrossing feel to them, like all the images and emotions within them are swirling together in one sweeping remembrance. By drawing from so many corners of their lives, the film refuses a reading of Iván and Gerardo that reduces them to their material circumstances. Rather than solely defining their identities within their external treatment under Mexico’s homophobic society or America’s xenophobic one, Ewing nimbly dramatizes their personalities within the profound desires and alienations both countries inspire.
But what about when they get to America? Well, that’s a different movie, and in some ways I mean that quite literally. It does feel silly to make a spoiler warning this deep into a review, but if you have any interest in seeing this film, stop reading and give yourself the treat not knowing what the unbelievably radical transformation I Carry You With Me performs in its final third is. Gerardo comes to New York City to live with Iván. Iván becomes a chef, eventually owning his own restaurant. Their life in New York is compressed into a pretty lively montage, and the scenes of Espitia and Vasquéz in character are eventually replaced by footage of the real Iván and Gerardo in the present day, with the film fully returning to an explicitly documentary aesthetic. It turns out that the men are real people, and the first two thirds of the film were a re-enactment of their first years together. They’re still in contact with their friends and family in Mexico, but Iván has been missing his hometown more and more lately. Learning that his son’s green card has been denied only exacerbates this tension, even as both men are aware that they won’t be allowed entry into the US again if they return to Mexico.
Before making the film, Iván and Gerardo had been friends with Ewing for about fifteen years, only a few years into their time in New York. The hybrid style was a compromise of hers, after originally intending to make a documentary about them only to get more interested in the idea of re-enacting how they met. It’s a remarkably gutsy choice, and one I think Ewing pulls off with real assuredness. Iván and Gerardo’s dilemma of whether it’d be better to go home to Mexico with the knowledge they could never come back to New York, or if it’s better to keep the life they made in the States and suffer through the ache of never seeing their loved ones again, is potently conjured. I do wish we’d spent a little more time getting a sense of what their in New York was like, especially since part of what makes the first two thirds of the film so lived-in comes from how many communities we see them fully interacting with. Nevertheless, their final decision is revealed with an emotional directness that remains the film’s greatest asset. Her control of tone, filmmaking style, and characterization is an incredible feat, and just as I Carry You With Me ends on the bold new future that awaits Iván and Gerardo, I’m just as excited to see what else Ewing has in store.
Grade: B+/A-
