I Carry You With Me [Te Llevo Conmigo] **** (2020, Armando Espitia, Christian Vázquez, Michelle Rodríguez) – Classic Movie Review 12,455

Directed Heidi Ewing’s haunting and heart-felt 2020 Spanish-language drama film I Carry You with Me [Te Llevo Conmigo] is a love story based on Ewing’s two close friends, Iván and Gerardo, who emigrated to the US from a conservative town in Mexico.

The beautiful, haunting and deeply heart-felt 2020 Spanish-language drama film I Carry You with Me [Te Llevo Conmigo] is directed by American documentary filmmaker Heidi Ewing in her narrative feature debut, from a screenplay by Ewing and Alan Page Arriaga. It is a love story based on Ewing’s two close friends, Iván and Gerardo, who had emigrated to the US from a conservative town in Mexico. It stars Armando Espitia, Christian Vázquez, and Michelle Rodríguez.

I Carry You with Me deals sensitively and movingly with some poignant and potent universal issues of love and loss, as well as its characters’ dreams, hopes and memories. While beginning to work on it as a documentary, Ewing realised that it would be better as a narrative film with non-fiction elements woven in, so she put her documentary filmmaking aside, and it became her narrative feature debut.

Based on a true love story between two honest, sincere and loving Mexican men, this decades-spanning romance begins in a conservative town in Mexico where an aspiring chef called Iván (Armando Espitia) meets and falls for a teacher named Gerardo (Christian Vázquez). Iván is married and has a young son. His wife and mother are less than thrilled that he has a boyfriend, and the wife forbids him to see his beloved son anymore.

He resolves to leave for the US, as an illegal immigrant, but Gerardo isn’t ready to come with him. Their lives restart after they embark separately on treacherous journeys to New York City, where Iván finds work for a restaurant, moving up bit by bit from delivery boy to eventual restaurant owner. Then Gerardo joins him quite unexpectedly. But twenty years on, Iván feels the need to return to Mexico to reunite with his son, and to say goodbye to his dying father. Obviously he can’t get a visa to get back, because he is an illegal immigrant.

It is a lovely story, told with passion, conviction and warmth. Armando Espitia and Christian Vázquez are both superb, both very sympathetic and appealing. Ewing handles it confidently and smoothly, moving effortlessly between the eras of the film.

The film is a co-production between Mexico and the US, and it is shot very strikingly in Mexico City, Puebla City, Jilotepec, Zapotitlán, Lerma, and New York City.

The cast are Armando Espitia as Iván, Christian Vázquez as Gerardo, Michelle Rodríguez as Sandra, Ángeles Cruz as Rosa Maria, Arcelia Ramírez as Madga, Michelle González as Paola, Raúl Briones as Marcos, Pascacio López as César, and Luis Alberti as Cucusa.

The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2020, and it won the jury and audiences awards in the festival’s NEXT section. Delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, it was finally released by Sony Pictures Classics in the US on June 25, 2021 and in Mexico on July 8, 2021.

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,455

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