How to stuff a wild chorizo!

Cruzando (Crossing) 2008 U.S. (95 minutes) Written and directed by and starring Mando Alvarado and Michael Ray Escamilla.

This is no country for old men.

Like a Cormac McCarthy story, it is a taut, life-and-death drama about fathers and sons in an arduous trek that crosses the Rio Grande from Mexico to the heart of Texas, through the vast dryscapes of the Tex-Mex border area.

But rather than an austere, sun-bleached middle-aged Anglo sparing of words, the narrators of this story are a pair of Mexican-American filmmakers informed by a young man’s blithely dark sense of humor at having to start from difficult circumstances to accomplish the all but impossible.

Manuel Montes (Michael Ray Escamilla, who also shares the writing and direction credit) lives in a small Mexican town not far from the Texas border with his pregnant wife, Maia (Maria Helan), near the end of her term.

He and his wife live on what he makes cleaning a local sex club, a job that includes wearing yellow rain gear and heavy rubber gloves to clean out peep-show booths. The club is owned by a nasty Anglo bully named Earl (Tony Campisi) and managed by Earl’s nasty, half-Mexican bully son, Ignacio (Gerardo Rodriguez). A coworker (J. J. Perez) dressed as a giant chorizo bops with the b-girls as part of the club’s ‘floor show’.

Manuel’s father, who he last saw as a small child, sends Manuel a newspaper clipping that he is to be executed within a week in Huntsville, Texas, for murdering a rancher. He includes the missing half of a snapshot he took of himself with his son; the other half Manuel has kept all his life as the last thing linking him with his father.

Manuel feels that he must get to Huntsville before the execution because he cannot let his father slip away for good for a second and last time without having seen him.

But Huntsville is 450-500 miles away, across the Rio Grande River and U.S. border; Manuel has no money and only a bicycle. He visits a friend who he thinks might know a ‘coyote’—a person who guides illegal immigrants across the border.

Diego (Mando Alvarado, Escamilla’s writing and directing partner), an overweight slacker with peroxide blond hair and a goatee, knows such a person. He also insists on going along ‘to make his mark’ by filming a documentary about this story: ‘I want to capture your shit on film,’ Diego tells Manuel, ‘¡Como Spielberg!’

As for the money, the only one in town with anything near the amount they need is Earl, the nasty Anglo bully who owns the sex club…

A viewer under the age of twenty-five, especially a male, might follow the logic of where all this is hurtling merrily along with a keen sense of fun and adventure. Since this is who is telling the story, this is what the story becomes. I did not take to the protagonists right away, but they grew on me because Escamilla and Alvarado each do a grand job of developing Manuel and Diego as the story unfolds.

The other characters also are well done: Manuel’s wife, Maia; Earl and Ignacio, who make a good father and son; The Matador (David Barrera), the coyote, a ne’er-do-well, has-been professional wrestler; Grace (Janis Dardaris), an Anglo human trafficker who finds the boys dehydrated in the bush and helps them; and the Garza family who mistakes Manuel for its prodigal son, as well as many people with smaller parts. 

A number of scenes shot in black and white appear as though intended to be part of Diego’s documentary, though a lot of the color film also looks as though shot with handheld cameras. There is the chaos of hand-held alongside and linking shots so nicely framed and composed one almost does not notice them: someone here knows what he is doing.

Also of note is the original soundtrack of contemporary, hip Tex-Mex mariachi music composed, orchestrated and performed by Enrique ‘Hank’ Feldman.

In the end, the story is the process of Manuel’s journey to see his father. His response to the hardships he faces teach him who he is and what he is made of, in order to start to be the father he never had to his own new son.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0nVYQILu2M