Good thing I chose to see Rudo Y Cursi today: with only two other people in the cinema, I have a horrible feeling this gem of a film isn’t going to make much of a showing on the multiplex circuit.  Let’s hope it fares better in its more natural home, the arthouse cinema.

I’m torn between being grateful that a Mexican comedy is there at a multiplex at all, and concerned that its poor box office take will mean whoever makes these decisions will say no to an equivalent film next time around.  If it wasn’t for those pesky subtitles, I’m sure it’d get a healthy audience, but reality is that for many people reading is not the easy and pleasant experience that it is for fans of arthouse flicks.

Tato and Beto live in rural Mexico, and both are good enough at football to attract the attention of a talent scout.  It’s Tato who gets selected, though in his dreams he wants to make it as a singer, and Tato duly heads off to Mexico City with his new agent.  A few weeks later, and he persuades the agent to give his goalkeeper brother a second chance, and soon the two of them are living the high life.

What’s striking is the stark brutality of how life functions in a society where economics shape choices more clearly than they do in the west.  Beto abandons his family without hesitation to go and live his dream, and no moral stance is taken on the drug dealers who get involved with their home town and family: they might be rough, but they bring wealth to the area, and ultimately the brothers come to depend on them when their footballing careers are over.

That lack of conventional morality adds a vividness to the story that’s there in the way it’s filmed too: the screen is a riot of colour and movement, whether capturing the greens of a banana plantation, the action on a football pitch, the chaos of urban Mexico, or a family wedding.  It’s a bombardment of the senses in the same way that Slumdog Millionaire was, an immersion in a culture where things just ain’t like we’re used to…except when they are, and are becoming more so.

Part of what’s captured is the growing Americanisation of Mexico.  The journey to the capital to make riches by playing sport is one familiar tale in that regard, and there are other narratives too.  Tato hooks up with a vacuous tv presenter and his life becomes a variation on that endured by Posh and Becks, until she dumps him for next season’s hotter player: easy come, easy go.  And Beto’s wife is reluctant to join her husband in Mexico City because she’s become a success selling health products through a multi level marketing scheme.

Carlos Cuaron writes and directs with aplomb in almost every respect.  I’d perhaps question the use of the scout as a narrator, and maybe the ending goes on a litte beyond where it could have stopped, but fundamentally this is fresh and strong filmmaking from a creator I’d like to see more of.  For now, I’ll have to work backwards, and see the same director’s much acclaimed Y Tu Mama Tambien.  He was thanked, too, on 21 Grams — which I don’t rate — and Amores Perros, which I do, suggesting that he’s one of the more influential voices in Mexican cinema and one I hope to be hearing from in years to come.