Rudo y Cursi

I suppose that if you’ve seen or read one story that trades on the classic Faustian bargain, you’ve read or seen them all; but what you may not have seen or read is a story that borrows from both Faust and a story like Bull Durham that substitutes sports for religion. Rudo y Cursi doesn’t go all in on either tack, but bits of both are clearly on display - more Faust than Bull Durham, but that’s okay. Rudo (Diego Luna) and Cursi (Gael García Bernal) are brothers and footballers who want to make it big in the wide world, when along comes an oily-looking customer who says he can make their dreams come true - after taking fifteen percent off the top. Can it be a coincidence that he comes rolling into their lives in a shiny, red, gas-guzzling Corvette, made by that fading American icon, General Motors?

The story is couched as a fable, narrated here and there by the oily-looking talent scout in voice-overs - an allegory that speaks to two of the classical seven deadly “sins,” pride and avarice. The full range of his character traits is obvious from the moment you see the guy - this is the case with most of the film’s characters - but though these traits are obvious on sight, they are not fully revealed until the story requires them. The use of the talent scout as the narrator (in the first person) is an interesting choice, as is the character himself (in the third person) - because he is both devious and genuine at the same time; and putting such a character in a place of omniscience as the narrator foreshadows a tragic outcome, which is surely the only thing that can happen when two kids are lured to the city by someone whose primary interest is obviously only to make money.

Before the tragedy, though, there is the obligatory meteoric rise to stardom for both of the footballers, which comes with all of the bling associated with making it big in the world of sports - money, women, houses, cars, sweet powders that go in your nose, etc. Rudo and Cursi are just two more players, recruited by this talent scout, who move from rural Mexico to Mexico City, and stay in the same apartment as other kids the scout has recruited, and play for the same teams as the other kids, for the same coaches who pay the scout a little bit off the top for having done the work of finding talented new players. There have been stars before Rudo and Cursi, and there will be stars after Rudo and Cursi.

The situation is not special, and neither are the players, even if they are exceptionally good at what they do; and even though it is so much revered by the talent scout narrator, the game of soccer itself is also not the motive power for the story. The compelling factor then becomes watching how Rudo and Cursi deal with such wholesale changes in their lives, but it’s not especially compelling to watch them marinating in excess as the good times start to roll faster and faster. Fortunately, however - for the story, anyway - things do, in fact, start to go bad; Cursi gets in a goal-scoring slump and his girlfriend leaves him, and Rudo gets into trouble gambling. There’s a touch of melodrama as the downward spirals of the two brothers start to become inextricably entwined; but for the most part, watching Luna and García Bernal emote as their characters try to keep pace when life begins to move too fast is immensely satisfying.

The ending (and some of the falling action) is inauthentic and sloppy, unfortunately, but the structure of the story requires it to be so - it’s tragic, but not precisely a tragedy. It would have been way more gutsy for Cuarón to go for the real tragedy - and that might have been enough to make this pretty good film a great film. Maybe. On the other hand, the part of the ending that involves the oily-looking talent scout works really well. As a fable, the story has to stay within the bounds of certain genre conventions, and this necessarily limits the film’s potential greatness - but Cuarón and company do an exemplary job, given the limited space in which they are working.

One week only.