I Carry You With Me
“I Carry You With Me reveals the intersection of misogyny and homophobia that exists among traditionalists.”
Title: I Carry You With Me (2020) / Spanish: Te llevo conmigo
Director: Heidi Ewing 👩🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Heidi Ewing 👩🏼🇺🇸 and Alan Page Arriaga 👨🏽🇲🇽🇺🇸
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 3.75/5
Adapted from the true story of her friends’ epic romance, Heidi Ewing’s I Carry You With Me proves that nothing beats reality for sweeping tales of love, perseverance, and the pursuit of happiness. Audiences follow Iván (Armando Espitia) across decades, meeting him as a wide-eyed culinary school graduate who struggles to be seen in Puebla, Mexico to his eventual accomplishment as a chef and restaurateur in New York City. All the while, he balances a relationship with Gerardo (Christian Vázquez), a university teaching assistant he’d surreptitiously met at a gay bar in Puebla.
What follows is a grandiose story worthy of cinematic treatment, complete with dangerous border crossings, violent run-ins with homophobic society, and the ever-present fear of living in America as an undocumented immigrant. It’s impossible not to root for the two men you get to know over the course of the film, as Iván and Gerardo’s desires are universal: safety, acceptance, economic mobility, and the right to love whoever you want.
Alas, I Carry You With Me reveals its seams through meandering, nonlinear storytelling that makes the almost 2-hour runtime feel even longer. While Ewing has about ten feature-length documentaries to her name, I Carry You With Me constitutes her first foray into narrative storytelling and a resulting sense of trying to compress the full breadth of two people’s lives into one movie feels indicative of either inexperience, or at least of being too close to one’s subject matter, compelled to include everything.
The film touches on too many themes that could each constitute their own film: working life in Puebla; coming of age as a gay man in 1980s Mexico; immigrating to the United States; opening a restaurant in New York City; reuniting with a long-distance boyfriend; being estranged from your son for 25 years; and the list goes on. A documentary could perhaps contain such disparate facets, served coolly and at face value, but a narrative film needed more space to breathe so that viewers could fully experience the depth of such an enormous tale. Ultimately, I Carry You With Me struggles under the heft of its ambition but thanks to an intrinsically moving tale, it still works overall.
Gender: 3/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE
The film charts a gay romance between two men, so women fall by the wayside. We do get to meet supporting characters like Iván’s best friend Sandra (Michelle Rodríguez), who he affectionately calls chulita, or minor characters like his ex-wife Paola (Michelle González).
Sandra sees a decent amount of screentime, but only when it runs in parallel to Iván’s life. The most character development occurs after she and Iván hire a coyote to help them cross the southern U.S. border, but she slows them down—with her weight unfortunately equated to a lack of physical fitness, mostly by characters within the film but neither refuted by the narrative. Her strength gets called into question again after they’ve made it to New York City, but this time it’s emotional. Sandra says miserably to Iván, “They hate us here,” and she gives up and returns to Mexico after a year in the States.
Meanwhile, unlike Sandra’s sympathetic rendition, Paola garners no love as a tropey ex-wife. Seen only in a childrearing role, never an arm’s length away from their son, she represents society’s broader homophobia—someone Iván must hide his sexual preferences from. She isn’t demonized though, merely one-dimensional.
Behind the scenes, however, we see a different story. In production notes shared with the press, I Carry You With Me boasts 7 women among 9 department heads—4 of them of color. While the story may revolve around men, it’s encouraging to see that the director, writer, producer, editor, production designer, costume designer, and casting director behind the work were all women.
Race: 5/5
While I Carry You With Me does feel unwieldy given its tackling of multiple themes across four decades and different geographies—from Puebla to Texas to New York City, and then back to Mexico again—it perfectly showcases the legal and emotional messiness of migration.
Partisan headlines about immigration are given a heartbeat by Ewing, who hones in on the dreams and motivations of two individuals. Iván and Gerardo happen to be undocumented immigrants, but more vividly, they’re human (and sweetly in love). They want to secure a safer future for themselves, and in the case of Iván, he’s eager to put his culinary degree to use instead of being a dishwasher for the rest of his life.
During this transnational story, the diversity within Mexico also comes to the fore. Iván and Gerardo aren’t rootless Mexicans—they’re from urban Puebla, which looks starkly different from the deserts just south of the Texas border where Iván and Sandra make their fraught crossing. Meanwhile, the southernmost state of Chiapas contains the farm Gerardo grew up on and behind the scenes, Iván’s actor Armando Espitia hails from nearby Mexico City while Gerardo’s actor, Christian Vázquez, was born in Guadalajara.
In fact, production notes share that “except for Ewing and a handful of other crew, the entire main cast and production crew was Mexican.” This simple fact backs up the words of film critic Carlos Aguilar, who writes, “[Ewing’s] work is an example of how a foreigner can make art about those outside of her own background with utter respect. No trite renderings of Mexicans, migrants, or queer people here ... ”
Bonus for LGBTQ: +1.00
The film centers an LGBTQ story, and while a cisgender gay romance between two men confronted with 20th century homophobia does feel like covered territory, I Carry You With Me brings with it all the specificity mentioned above plus the added gravitas of being based on real people.
In addition, Ewing reveals the intersection of misogyny and homophobia that exists among traditionalists in Mexico, as seen through the fathers of both Iván and Gerardo. During flashbacks to childhood, we see how the men punish their sons for exhibiting any behavior not firmly in line with conservative notions of masculinity. Even as young adults, when Iván meets Gerardo’s family as “a friend”, he’s derided by Gerardo’s dad who says that washing dishes is women’s work.
Thankfully, I Carry You With Me avoids the pitfalls of so many earlier queer films that end in violence and tragedy. It’s a joy to flash forward to documentary-style photographs as the credits roll, and to see photos of the actual Iván and Gerardo smile widely for the camera.
Mediaversity Grade: B+ 4.25/5
The hazy sunset colors of I Carry You With Me and dreamy voiceovers by an older, ruminative Iván combine into an evocative portrait of two richly lived experiences. While its snaking tributaries and experimental format can stymie momentum, Ewing’s first narrative feature neatly plugs into broader themes of migration that resonate widely. As a result, I Carry You With Me impressively manages a sense of both timeliness and timelessness.
Best of all, you’ll have a chance to see for yourself. Shortly after its premiere at Sundance Film Festival, Sony Pictures Classics and Stage 6 Films snapped up the rights to distribute the film globally. Expect to see it come out sometime this year.
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