111 min | R | June 25, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
Iván falls for Gerardo in Puebla, then leaves him to chase a kitchen and a life in New York. Heidi Ewing tells their true story across decades and one hard border. The romance burns hot, but the crossing is what makes it ache.
Iván works in a Puebla kitchen and dreams of cooking in a real restaurant. He meets Gerardo at a bar and falls in love. The relationship runs against a Mexico that punishes who they are, so Iván heads north to New York without papers. Heidi Ewing builds the story across decades and across a border. The film is about the cost of leaving and the way that cost compounds over a life. It asks what a person trades for ambition and for the freedom to live openly.
Armando Espitia plays Iván with a guarded ambition that hardens as the years pass. He arrives hungry and hopeful and slowly absorbs the toll of exile. Christian Vázquez plays Gerardo with an openness that Iván cannot match. Gerardo wears his desire without apology, and Vázquez makes that courage feel dangerous in their setting. The two actors build a chemistry that the film then stretches across distance and time. Michelle Rodríguez plays Sandra as the friend who anchors Iván in New York, and she grounds the later passages in plain warmth.
Ewing comes from documentary, and her script with Alan Page Arriaga uses that training as a structural engine. The film cuts between three time periods without announcing the jumps, and the editing trusts faces and gestures to mark the change. Childhood scenes in Puebla bleed into adult longing and into the cold present of New York. Ewing then breaks the fiction and lets documentary footage of the real subjects enter the frame. The seam between staged drama and recorded life becomes the film’s boldest move. It also exposes the limits of the device, because the performances are stronger than the reveal that follows them.
This is a love story told as an immigration story, and the two halves do not always carry equal weight. The early romance has urgency and heat. The American chapters trade that heat for melancholy and repetition. Ewing honors her subjects, but reverence sands down some of the tension that the opening builds. The film lands its emotion. It does not always earn the structural ambition it reaches for.