Carlos Cuarón Reunites García Bernal, Luna

Del Toro, Iñárritu, Cuarón—Mexico has had no shortage of talented filmmakers lately. Fans of Mexican cinema may recognize that last name from 2001’s “Y tu mamá también,” which featured Carlos Cuarón as screenwriter and Alfonso Cuarón as director. Now with “Rudo y Cursi” (translated as “Rude and Corny”), younger brother Carlos makes his first attempt at directing a full-length film, a tale of fortunes won and lost in the world of Mexican soccer.

In “Y tu mamá también,” Carlos Cuarón’s screenplay paired two sexually-charged teenagers—played by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna—on a road-trip through Mexico alongside a more mature female companion from Spain. Eight years later, “Rudo y Cursi” reunites Luna, as goalie Beto, and García Bernal, as striker Tato, in a tragicomic tale of two Mexican “campesinos” in the city’s professional soccer world. When the sports agent Batuta (Guillermo Francella) stumbles upon two spectacular soccer-playing brothers at a pick-up game, he promises them a shot at a spot on a professional squad.

With such promises of fame in Mexico’s Division I soccer leagues, Batuta unleashes the naïve farm boys into the capital city’s urban jungle. “The movie is a social portrait of Mexico today,” Cuarón said in an interview. “The people on the streets, the soccer teams… ultimately the way these guys operate is the way it is in Mexico.”

The city bears many wonders for them—free SUVs and beautiful supermodel girlfriends, among them—but it also brings a host of dangers: corruption, luxury, vices, and unsavory loan sharks.

And from the sprawling metropolis of Mexico City to the rural banana-farming communities of the state of Oaxaca, the movie depicts Mexico in a variety of contrasting locales. One great challenge was to film the final soccer match, which is played out in Estadio Nemesio Díez, an old stadium in Toluca, Mexico.

“We obviously have a plan, and we had a schedule, but we had to improvise,” Cuarón said. The shooting faced both heavy rains and sweltering summer heat. “Every single day we had to improvise something. We all had a lot of fun doing it.”

One of the film’s most memorable moments is the corny but endearing opening tune. The audience is greeted by García Bernal’s character, Tato, crooning a Spanish cover of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me,” complete with an accordion and cowboy outfit against a karaoke green screen. “I read through the script, and I came to a point that [Tato] wasn’t working,” Cuarón said. The script went through multiple revisions to give Tato a more comical desire to use soccer to fuel his fantasies of a successful musical career.

“His secondary passion is his real passion,” Cuarón explained. “He has a talent for soccer but a passion for singing, and that is the problem.”

“I knew I needed a rock and roll hit for this character,” he added.

One unexpected result of the movie’s release is the popularity of García Bernal’s Spanish-language cover of Cheap Trick’s song, entitled “Quiero Que Me Quieras.” The song has gone on to become a hit in radios and karaoke bars in Mexico. According to Cuarón, the song choice was improvised.

“One day I was driving my kids to school,” he recalled. The song then struck his ear from the car radio. “At the end of the first stanza I was like, ‘This is it!’” he says. “If someone sings ‘I Want You to Want Me,’ they have an attention problem. That is the character.”

With “Rudo y Cursi”—which is slated for limited release in the United States on May 8th—Cuarón hopes to show the multiple layers of Mexican society through the bond between Beto and Tato.

“Ultimately, the main theme of this movie is brotherhood, and I think American audiences will relate to this,” he said. “Nothing is as endearing as brotherhood.”

—Staff writer Alec E. Jones can be reached at aejones@fas.harvard.edu.