AQUÍ Y ALLÁ (Here and There) B+
Spain USA Mexico
(110 mi) 2012 d: Antonio
Méndez Esparsa Official site
I just want to be
humble with real people. —Pedro De
los Santos Juárez, from one of his songs
This is a small but slowly affecting film, ultimately a
tender Mexican family drama that has more than a few missing pieces due to the
long absences of the men searching for work in the north, forced to cross the
border into America in search of better opportunities, where the family
experience is reduced to weekly phone calls and money orders sent in the mail. Told in a social realist style, what’s unique
about this film is the perspective of those left behind, both young and old, where
the camera never ventures over to the other side, but remains affixed on
Mexican ground, where people are forced to endure a different form of hardship,
not knowing what lies in store for any of them, on either side, as it remains a
continually evolving mystery wondering whether any of these men will ever come
back or if they’ll take up with American women and start new lives, where the
uncertainty of it all creates an anxiously developing reality. It’s hard to even define what constitutes
success under these circumstances, as it all plays out under continually
shifting circumstances. The film
suggests the worldwide financial uncertainty is playing havoc with people’s
lives, where this migratory pattern to follow the flow of work opportunities
that comes with a seasonal harvesting of crops, for instance, both in Europe
and America, lends itself to a nomadic lifestyle of built-in cheap labor, where
people will endure the unbearable heat and the unforgiving long hours just to have
something in their pockets, as the alternative back home are families that could
be thrown out into the streets and left destitute. This is the new age responsibility, where
leaving the family in search of work is the responsible thing to do, but with untold
emotional consequences that largely go unspoken.
Divided into four segments, The Return, Here, Horizon, and
There, with the last one being the shortest, becoming an ambiguous tone poem
that objectively looks back upon all that has come before, this fictional film
documents the hard realities of scraping out a living in some of the poorer
regions of the world, where despite Mexico’s close proximity to their wealthy
geographical neighbor to the north, once outside the sprawling metropolis of
the big cities, the isolated and more rural regions, like this small town in
Guerrero, continue to languish in third world poverty. While economic circumstances stain the lives
like a plague, this is not the central focus of the film, which instead
examines how distance effects ordinary relations, where Pedro is seen returning
to his family after spending a few years abroad. While his wife Teresa is overjoyed, she holds
back her long built-up suspicions about who he's been with, while his two daughters barely recognize
him, Lorena and Heidi, and are more concerned with their own age groups,
thinking he may leave again, not really trusting him. Pedro is a singer and guitarist with ambitions
of starting a local band called the Copa Kings, having already cut a CD in New
York, that generates awkward laughs of giggly affection from his daughters, where
he has to restore a sense of trust and camaraderie with each of them, with the
sullen and emotionally reticent Lorena giving him the hardest time, as she’s
deeply bitter about his being gone. The quietly developing family
interplay between them is among the most heartwarming aspects of the film, as
Pedro is a decent and responsible man, whose humble origins have stuck with
him, as he’s a completely unpretentious man whose interior character is
expressed in the songs he writes and sings, becoming part of the narrative
stream of the film.
But Pedro’s initial optimism is thwarted by the day to day
realities, as the men he’d like to play in his band work from sunup to sundown
in the fields all day, never having any time for rehearsals and playing on the
road. At one of the few performances we
do see, playing guitar and electric piano, it’s a euphoric experience to be
singing your own songs, but the debt he owes for renting the musical equipment
has come due and it’s a hefty price. At
the same time, Teresa has a difficult pregnancy and seeks immediate help in the
nearby town. The hospital sequence is
unlike anything most of us will ever encounter, a life-altering, cataclysmic
event where lives are literally hanging by a thread, where he’s required to go
searching through town to find the various medicines the hospital doesn’t have
in stock, while at the same time he’s expected to
provide the needed blood donors to counteract the heavy loss of blood, which
only sends him spiraling even more into emotional turmoil and debt, playing out
as the central moral dilemma facing families, where the economic reality is
stronger than love, and where the circuitous path of his life is once more
forced to seek opportunities elsewhere, as there’s nothing he can earn locally
that can remotely come close to paying the bills.
One of the constants in this film is seeing men at work,
including Pedro, working in the fields, doing temporary construction work, usually
until the money runs out, and then spending days on end looking for more work, even
traveling to nearby towns, but the inevitable reality is he’ll have to look
elsewhere, where the entire cycle starts all over again. The director met Pedro after casting him for
a student film at New York University, learning about the life he left behind
only to struggle to make ends meet in New York, deciding to return to Mexico
with Pedro and make a film about his life, using non-professionals except for
the newborn baby which is his own. The
final sequence somberly reflects upon this border, almost as a postscript, beautifully
shown with a quiet devastation, as on the surface it looks so peaceful and
tranquil, belying the underlying dangers associated with its history, where the
other side is seen as a promised land, yet so many men die making the attempt,
where families are forced into even more dire circumstances. This is a thoughtful and contemplative film
that omits the devastating effects of the headline grabbing, narco drug trade
wreaking havoc on the murder rate in Mexico, as seen in Miss Bala
(2011), and instead exposes with a delicate simplicity the equally threatening
and potentially ruinous effects of poverty.
