There’s a particularly jarring structural moment right as Heidi Ewing’s I Carry You with Me opens. A Latino man, at the early end of middle age, rides the New York City subway. Wistful, somewhat regretful voiceover invites the viewer to journey back from this present-day scene to an unspecified time in the recent past. A younger Latino man, whose voice and story mark him the same man on the subway, ekes out a listless existence in Mexico, washing dishes at a restaurant. From his present to his past in extended flashback – nothing peculiar about that. Yet something’s wrong. The casting department seems to have made some odd choices. These two men look barely alike.
Yet for those aware of Ewing’s formal design, there’s nothing jarring about this discrepancy at all. Ewing, one of America’s leading documentary filmmakers, reimagines the stale, typically very corny genre of docudrama with this portrait of Iván, a Mexican restaurateur living in NYC, having entered the US some 15-odd years ago via illegal means. He left behind a life leading nowhere and now tries to make something of himself in America to provide for his young son. Yet he also left behind his son (whose mother won’t let Iván see him) and a new boyfriend (the reason for that refusal). Iván’s departure is for him a tough, tormenting but necessary one.
Narratively and thematically, I Carry You with Me is no stronger for being based in fact. It’s a story told with sincerity and compassion. Ewing maintains the same delicate, observational style she brings to her documentary scenes in the earlier, fictionalized scenes and constructs a remarkably assured mise-en-scène for someone with so little experience in this medium. Indeed, Ewing is even better at depicting Iván’s past than his present, imbuing the film’s first hour with a beautiful, lived-in lyricism that her later doc content can’t quite match. As a formal gambit, it’s handled adequately, giving depth and breadth to Iván’s recollections that a simpler, voiceover-centered approach might have lacked. Yet paradoxically it works too well, leaving the film’s final act feeling deflated and inconsequential.
It really shouldn’t feel like that. Iván’s story is one all too common in countries like the U.S., which boast obscene levels of wealth and opportunity compared to most other North American nations. When I Carry You with Me pivots into the documentary half of its format it’s already undergone a number of surprising transformations – what would be unexpected narrative choices were they not, alas, the truth. Iván’s boyfriend, Gerardo, has after over a year awaiting his return, decided to make the journey north himself and has settled alongside him in New York. Iván’s circumstances have improved considerably since leaving his home country; he graduates from dishwashing and delivering to cooking in a restaurant and, by the present day, is now the owner of his very own establishment. Yet he’s now missed the vast majority of his son’s childhood and the authorities won’t grant his son permission to travel to the US. If Iván wants to see him ever again, he must leave the successful life he’s built for himself in the States with the knowledge that he’ll likely never be able to return.
I Carry You with Me develops the sentiment in its title not with narrow intensity but with lateral generosity. Iván enters a profound, promising relationship right as he’s decided to turn his life upside down; he also carries a paternal love, the memories of a home he’ll possibly never see again and the damaged relationships between himself and his family. He swaps one painful existence for another, substituting one type of pain for another. The film ought to throb with that pain. The viewer ought to feel Iván’s pain as their own. And indeed that pain is conveyed through poetic voiceover and most poignantly in the fictionalized flashbacks. But Ewing’s real-life snapshots of Iván and Gerardo’s life in New York feel almost flippant in how simply and straightforwardly they examine the couple’s wrenching dilemma.
It’s nevertheless a heartfelt film, made with considerable artistic integrity and opening up a promising new route for Ewing’s career. She’s always been a most perceptive documentarian with a world-class feel for evocative, sensorial detail and a resolutely compassionate manner toward the everyday struggles of regular people. I Carry You with Me reflects a development that’s surprising and a little disappointing. This may not be a great documentary. But it’s a damn good live action drama, with a fine central performance from Armando Espitia as the younger Iván. So what if he looks nothing like his older counterpart? If anything, he’s better at telling Iván’s story than Iván is himself.
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