Romántico
If you've ever dined out in San Francisco's gentrifying Mission neighborhood, it's likely that your meal came with a side of troubadour. After the woman selling roses passed by, a pair of men arrived to serenade the entire restaurant, or maybe just you. Perhaps you slipped them a dollar or two. Maybe you scowled and returned to your empanadas. Or maybe you wondered, who are these two fellows with the guitars and sad love songs?
One of them might have been Carmelo Muñiz Sánchez , the 57-year-old Mexican musician whom Mark Becker films in the delicate documentary portrait, "Romántico ." Years ago, Sánchez crossed into the country illegally and teamed up with his friend Arturo Arias , performing ballads while hipsters, bohemians, and yuppies eat. He lives in a ramshackle room in a friend's apartment and uses a street pay phone to speak to his wife and two daughters, whom he left in Salvatierra , about 1,000 miles south of the U S border.
During one of these calls, Sánchez learns that the health of his severely diabetic mother has taken a turn for the worse. So he packs his things and flies home. This dispiriting return becomes the focus of Becker's movie, which is a sensitively made window onto a man's determination to keep his family afloat. Sánchez is a stocky guy with a thick, dolorous face, and the movie never loses sight of its etchings and creases.
Playing music in San Francisco, he earned enough to subsist. In Mexico, he has to be craftier. He plays with a traditional mariachi outfit and, in a financially risky move, decides to start making and selling snow cones (the materials are costly). Eventually, he reunites with Arias, who has come back, in part, it seems, out of loneliness -- he missed his partner. But Arias drinks himself sick.
Mercifully, the film's title is a misnomer. Maybe there is one loving slow-motion shot or extended close-up too many, but Becker is determined not to speak for Sánchez. The musician is candid about his own demons and gives the filmmakers access to his wife, two very different daughters, and, for a nicely done montage, his family photographs.
Although it's clear that, despite his attempts, Sánchez has almost no chance of working legally in the United States, "Romá ntico" is neither a bleeding-heart plea nor a treatise on immigration. Merely through the power of observation, we can see what an opportunity in America, however meager, means to this man. Sánchez's songs might be interrupting your supper. But he is singing urgently for his.
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