|
19-Mar-08: Susan Page - Rating: 3
Here's a story from the Washington Post on the film:
THE WASHINGTON POST
'Same Moon,' Seen From Cloud Nine
By DAVID MONTGOMERY
-- These unforgiving days, when a Mexican immigrant's dream may founder in the desert or a day-labor line, Patricia Riggen can deal with the surreal sweatshop to which hers has led this afternoon: A so-hip-it-hurts Times Square hotel, with an entrance like an underwater grotto, soft lights, groovy porn-movie-style music in every public space and a concierge desk labeled "Whatever."
"It's not what I like to do, but I recognize how important it is for the movie," Riggen says.
Ah, it's all for the project, the work, the cause. Don't they all say that? But actually, Riggen is fresh and new enough at this that her earnestness sounds genuine. The director's first feature film sparked a studio bidding war at Sundance last year and is about to open across the country.
It's called "Under the Same Moon," a sentimental tale about a single Mexican mom who made the painful choice to leave her son behind to work illegally in Los Angeles as a housekeeper. She sends $300 home every month, and every Sunday at 10 a.m. they speak -- from a pay phone on an East Los Angeles corner to a pay phone in a poor Mexican town. The mostly Spanish-language film follows the 9-year-old boy as he undertakes an improbable odyssey across the border to attempt a reunion.
Groan! Not another bleak immigration film! No, in fact, no indeed, not this one -- though Riggen did have to assure even some actors of that when she was recruiting a cast. Referring to the iconic, standard-setting "El Norte" of 1983 -- in which the Guatemalan characters cross from misery to misery -- Riggen says, "We are ready for the opposite of 'El Norte' right now. This is that."
By which she means something warmer and, yes, a little sappier, if still anguished in parts. "Moon" feels like "El Norte" meets "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" meets "Finding Nemo." All pluck and luck and mother love.
"Simple, lighthearted, heartwarming" is how Riggen describes her film, which opens Wednesday in Washington. "It tries to be meaningful, but it is full of light, not of darkness. Which is something that I may be criticized for, you know, because immigration is a complex subject matter, and some people are going to want to see the complexity and the terrible situation. Okay, fine. But you know, this is a movie, and it's not a political essay, and I am like this: I like to show the good nature of people and the good side of things. I think we are ready to see the other side of the coin, the human side."
Variety's somewhat mixed review described "Moon" as: "Wrapping the political hot potato of illegal immigration in the sentimental balm of a mother-son . . . drama."
Given the film's blend of crafted storytelling, political timeliness -- and potential controversy -- plus old-fashioned tear-jerking, the two companies releasing "Moon," Fox Searchlight Pictures and the Weinstein Co., say they are attempting the unusual trick of wooing both the English-speaking art-house audience and the mass Latino audience. (Called "La Misma Luna" in Spanish, the film has English subtitles and some English dialogue.)
It's all new to Riggen -- the whirring wheels of studio buzz-making machinery, the multiple interviews, the posing under white lights in a black shawl like a model in those women's magazines she says she never read as a girl growing up in Guadalajara.
At 37, she can still access the emotion of amazement. "It's all a game, a serious game, but a game after all," she says, recalling that strange and thrilling -- and "so much fun" -- night at Sundance in 2007 when executives from several competing studios prowled her sales rep's rented condo like hungry predators. "Seriously, they were circling with the car around the condo, and storming in and opening doors and spying, to listen to what's going on. Had we made a deal or not? Just a very beautiful night," she remembers.
The bargaining continued from midnight until dawn for the chance to distribute her debut effort. Eventually, Fox Searchlight and Weinstein paid $5 million -- not bad for an indie film, in Spanish, with no big American stars, except a brief turn by America Ferrera ("Ugly Betty") as a clumsy immigrant-smuggling coyote.
For Riggen, this entree into Hollywood is not exactly a welcome to America -- she's been here several years -- but it's a welcome to a very weird and special part of the American soul. So let's sit back and listen to immigrant stories, where life and art meet and diverge, over designer water and excellent chocolate cake for energy. Where are Los Tigres del Norte when we need them? The popular Mexican American troubadours could make up a song about all this, like the one they wrote for the movie soundtrack:
Por amor es que voy a cruzar la frontera sin miedo . . .
[For love I'm going to cross the border without fear . . .]
Riggen, Riggen . . . the name doesn't ring Mexican, does it?
"Irish," she says, laughing.
Turns out that generations ago her people immigrated to the United States, and her great-grandfather fought in the Civil War. Then that same loco great-gramps, William Henry Riggen, lit out to make a new life -- in Mexico. No word on whether he had proper immigration papers.
A century later, Riggen grows up in Guadalajara, daughter of a surgeon father and a poet-playwright mother. She dabbles in journalism, works in film as a writer and producer. She's frustrated that although women in Mexico are accepted as writers and producers, there aren't many paths to becoming a director. It's like being "an astronaut," she says. She gets a visa to study film at Columbia University, class of 2003. A fine school, but it's really the city that lures her: New York! Fabulous.
"I watched Woody Allen and Scorsese movies," she says. "It's the dream city for me. It meant so many things. I'm a woman from Mexico. It meant liberation in a way, and being part of the world. . . . I moved to another country to look for something better."
Her student film "La Milpa" -- "The Cornfield," about a grandmother remembering younger days during the Mexican Revolution -- wins so many awards -- Student Academy Award Gold Medal, student Emmy, student Director's Guild citation -- that she quickly scores a work visa to replace her student visa. She also makes "Family Portrait," a short documentary about a poor family in Harlem, which wins a jury prize at Sundance in 2005.
She knows how improbable and lucky this all sounds, compared with the fictional characters in her new film -- or compared with so many of her real countrymen, emptying towns to reach the United States, one way or another. "It was a very different immigrant experience because it was to find a creative place for me," she says, "not to survive." A film school contact puts her in touch with Ligiah Villalobos, head writer on Nickelodeon's "Go, Diego! Go!" She has a script that, many drafts later, with notes from Riggen, becomes "Moon."
Let's hit pause on the cake scene to give Villalobos a call.
She saw Riggen's work at a student film festival, "and I thought it was extraordinary," Villalobos says. As she would witness on the set of "Moon," "One of Patricia's strengths is the ability to communicate with actors in a way that allows them to come up with the best performance that they have."
Both women thought the story touched universal emotional issues while set in a border-crossing context. At the time, three years ago, immigration wasn't the hot topic it is today.
Back to Riggen: "What I saw immediately was the love story," she says. "The love story between a mother and a child."
The film portrays an incredible week in the life of the boy, Carlitos (Adrian Alonso), and his mother, Rosario (Kate del Castillo). Riggen weaves scenes of Carlitos in Mexico, and his adventures on the road, with Rosario's struggles in L.A. Rosario is unaware that Carlitos sets out to find her. A gruff older migrant, Enrique (Eugenio Derbez), reluctantly takes the boy under his wing. The premise is not as improbable as it may seem; in 2005, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 115,000 unaccompanied minors.
Riggen worked hard to get right little details about daily life as an illegal immigrant. And she highlights the existential dilemma of immigrants in Rosario's position: The act of leaving her boy behind to make his life better may simultaneously have the opposite consequence. Carlitos begins to question his mother's love; Rosario questions whether the sacrifice is worth it.
"I say I am not political because I am not trying to convince people of any particular idea," Riggen says. "I am just trying to be very true to these characters, and to their dilemmas."
Part of the truth lies in the cultural touchstones of undocumented life that she puts in the film. Hitchhiking, Carlitos and Enrique hop in a van filled with guys with guitars and accordions: It's Los Tigres, on tour. Riggen wanted the band in the film because it is so hugely popular with Latino immigrants and because its main subject is immigrant life.
Now, by telephone, it's Tigres leader Jorge Hernandez: "One day I was in Mexico and I got a phone call that Patricia wants to meet me," he says. "She says, 'One thing I have to make clear to you: I have no money.'
"I said, 'That's okay. I like the story.' "
In a charming scene, the band sings the soundtrack song for Carlitos and Enrique.
Similarly, Ferrera's small role captures another piece of the reality. She plays a second- or third-generation Chicana, an American citizen, who can't speak Spanish but resorts to smuggling to pay for college tuition. "Crossing the border and getting a visa is not enough," Riggen says. "There's an ongoing struggle."
At the first Sundance screening, the audience gave the film a standing ovation -- and clapped in time to the Tigres tune as the credits rolled.
"When I made it, I was always thinking of the Latino audience," Riggen says. "I never imagined that the American audience and the festival audience would embrace it like that. They were crazy. . . . I went to sleep that night thinking, 'Oh, by God, please don't let this be a dream.' "
Hearing the buzz, the studio people made sure to catch the screening the next day.
"I was just in tears," Nancy Utley, chief operating officer of Fox Searchlight, says by phone from Los Angeles. "You just want to go home and hug your kids. . . . It's a business situation, but you can't help but have a personal reaction to the films you see."
The Fox Searchlight posse tracked down Riggen in a restaurant that night, then reported to the condo for the after-midnight bargaining.
The film was screened for audiences of Cuban Americans in Miami, Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in the Bronx and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, as well as a "totally white-bread suburban" crowd outside Minneapolis, Utley says. Result: the highest test-audience rankings in Fox Searchlight's 12-year history.
Realizing they might have an unusual product on their hands, Fox Searchlight and Weinstein held the film back several months to figure out how to market it. Meanwhile, "Moon" has hit the festival circuit, from Toronto to Los Angeles to Chicago to Miami.
Attempts have been made before to tap the mainstream Latino audience but generally with films in English (think 1997's "Selena"). To reach them with a Spanish film and also capture the art-house crowd -- and maybe even mainstream English speakers -- is the marketers' dream.
"We are kind of participating in this grand experiment to appeal to the Latino audience and get them to come to our movie," Utley says. "And if we succeed, ['Moon'] would be the first one to crack the code of this audience."
The formula appeared successful at the Miami International Film Festival; after "Moon" showed there in February, a packed, diverse house of 1,600 stood and cheered. "The film is a bridge between Latino culture and American culture," says festival director Patrick de Bokay, who chose it because he wanted an opening-night film with "artsy" indie values as well as "broad audience appeal."
Still, it's not a sure thing. Notes Variety: "This stirring tale will be embraced most enthusiastically by Mexican audiences on both sides of the border, although breakout biz will depend on the Weinstein Co. and Fox Searchlight's success in selling the pic as the mainstream-friendly crowd-pleaser it is."
"Moon" is scheduled to open Wednesday in about 32 cities in more than 250 theaters -- art houses as well as mainstream mall multiplexes near Latino neighborhoods. The unusual midweek opening is to give families a chance to see it in the days leading up to Easter.
Of course, there's the chance of a backlash from those who think illegal immigrants are criminals, not worthy of this tender portrayal. "I don't expect there to be a backlash," Utley says. "It's more an emotional movie than a political movie."
Nowadays, border-crossing narratives more typically take the form of gritty documentaries shown in art houses and on public television (for example, the recent "Al Otro Lado" on PBS).
In the filmography of border-crossing immigration dramas, "Moon" is somewhat unusual for focusing on the heartache of a boy and mother separated by the border, and for adopting a more uplifting tone, says Paul Espinosa, a filmmaker and professor of Transborder Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at Arizona State University. It may be precisely because Riggen did not make another "El Norte" or "Alambrista!" (the 1977 film in which the hero gets deported) that major studios are so interested, he suggests.
"You could take the position that if a film were made like that today, the chances of getting it released theatrically would be very difficult," Espinosa says.
Riggen was not a mother when she made "Moon," but now she has a 7-month-old daughter, Francesca.
"I made the movie, I had a baby, and then I watched the movie again, and I'm like, Oh. My. God," she says. "It was painful. It hurt my heart."
Ask her if she could have made Rosario's choices as a mother, and she's at a loss: "No, probably, no, maybe I would have, I don't know. Who knows?!"
But if Rosario is out there, this movie is for her.
"To all the Rosarios in the country, to all the Carlitoses, to the father of Carlitos, and to the grandmas, and to everybody in the Latino community," she says. "I am pretty sure they are going to embrace it and they are going to love it, because finally somebody is portraying the good side of who they are, and how good-natured they are, and warm and funny and loving people they are."
| 
