The Great Movies III

Despite its limited budget, the movie is bursting with energy and ambition. At 139 minutes, it is told in three sections, concerning the early life of the brother and sister, their harrowing trek to "el norte," and their life in Los Angeles. It was shot partly in Mexico, and then, after their exposed footage and an accountant were seized and held for ransom, in California. The filmmakers tell harrowing stories of cash payoffs at gunpoint, and how Nava's parents slipped out of the country carrying some of the dailies.

But the film never reflects that backstage ordeal; it chooses, indeed, to paint its story not in the grim grays of neorealism, but with the palette of Mexico, filled with color and fantasy. An early scene involving clouds of butterflies combines local legend with magical realism, and abundant life comes into the film through the shirts, dresses, ponchos, and blankets of the characters, and through the joyous use of color in their homes and villages.

Nava once explained to me one reason for the Mexican love of color: "The rich browns and reds and yellows make brown skin look beautiful; American interiors are painted an eggshell white that doesn't do much for brown skin or any other kind of skin."

The movie stars two unknowns, David Villalpando as Enrique, and Zaide Silvia Gutierrez as his sister, Rosa. They have the spontaneous, unrehearsed quality of some of the actors in neorealist films like The Bicycle Thief, and an infectious optimism and naivete that makes us protective of them. In the opening scenes, they live as their ancestors have for many generations, in a village of beauty and dignity, a true community. Meals by candlelight are followed by the evening stroll on the little local ramblas.

But the people spend long hours at backbreaking labor, picking coffee beans under the harsh eyes of intimidating overseers. Their father, Arturo (Ernesto Gomez Cruz), is trying to organize a workers' union; he is betrayed, and everyone at a union meeting is murdered by government troops. Their mother (Alicia del Lago) disappears. And, yes, events like this are the price we are willing to pay for our morning coffee; I confess when I order my first cup, I do not much think of the Arturos and the unionbusting international corporations that make their own laws.

Enrique and Rosa have hidden, and feel forced to flee. They have a good idea of America, they think, from the Good Housekeeping magazines treasured by their godmother, Josefita (Stella Quan), who gives them her savings for the journey and describes a land where everyone-even the poor-has a refrigerator and an indoor toilet.

Their progress through Mexico is hard enough, but crossing of the border is a nightmare. They hire a "coyote," a man expert at helping immigrants enter America, and have the good luck to find an honest one. He suggests they crawl into America through an empty drainage pipe, and he will meet them at the other end. He gives them flashlights, they start to crawl, and they're attacked by hordes of screaming rats. The scene is horrifying, not least because it's pretty clear these are real rats. Disease-free rats purchased from a laboratory, yes, but real rats all the same, and although Gutierrez was phobic about rats, she insisted on doing her own scenes, and her panic is real.

As they were crawling through the pipe, it occurred to me that we are fortunate to live in a country people want to enter, instead of escape. And fortunate because so many of our immigrants are the best and the brightest. It takes imagination, ambition, and courage to leave your homeland and start over again in a strange land. One reason that immigrants often seem to do well here is that they were self-selected as brave and determined.

In Los Angeles, Enrique and Rosa enter the job market, Enrique as a dishwasher and busboy, Rosa first in a garment factory and then as a maid. They are undocumented, but necessary; a 2004 movie named A Day without a Mexican is a fantasy imagining the collapse of the California economies after all the Enriques and Rosas disappear. In Guatemala, Enrique's father told them that the bosses cared nothing for a man, only for his strong arms. Now in America, trucks from day-labor contractors pull into the motels where Hispanics live, and the men hopefully cluster about, showing their muscles.

The great Mexican American character actress Lupe Ontiveros makes one of her first appearances in this movie. (Jennifer Lopez had her first meaningful movie role in Mi Familia, and became a star in Nava's 1997 film Selena.) Ontiveros plays Nacha, who becomes Rosa's confidant and protector and counsels her on how to deal with the gringos: "Just smile and say `yes'to whatever they say."

Rosa tries to smile and say"yes"when her employer confronts her with an unbelievably complicated automatic washing machine, but finally surrenders, and in one of the film's welcome laughs, simply spreads the laundry out on the grass, to dry in the sun.