Gael García Bernal has shown remarkable range over his three-decade career. He’s played heroes and villains alike in movies like Old, Ema, and Museo; historical figures in movies like The Motorcycle Diaries; heartbreaking animated figures in films like Coco; and a point of a love triangle in one of sexiest, saddest films of the 21st century, Y Tu Mamá También. Now behind the camera for his third directorial effort, his film Hombre Al Agua has a lot to say about Latin America, politics, class, and autofiction.
The mystery-tinged dramedy follows Camilo (García Bernal), a Cuban lifeguard who, by chance, saves a rich Mexican tourist who changes his life. He’s made a deputy in the man’s company and marries into his wealthy family, but problems arise when Camilo’s wife, Juana (Esmeralda Pimentel), a former professional athlete, is inspired by a Brazilian actress she’s training to make a movie about her own life story, which opens up old wounds and highlights differences between the couple.
The screwball comedy eruption between Camilo and Juana also explores the way Mexicans view Cubans in terms of class and behavior, pointing out prejudices that lie between different Latin American countries. In Hombre Al Agua (or “man overboard”), Camilo is told to sound and act less Cuban because it diminishes how the wealthy Mexicans around him perceive him. Juana’s father, Abel (Jorge Salinas), spins a near-death experience into a run for politics, which is fodder for García Bernal to mock the way businessmen see themselves as saviors. Then there’s the matter of Juana’s film; Camilo is rendered voiceless many times throughout the film, but nowhere is this as painful as being cast as his wife’s antagonist.
García Bernal spoke with The A.V. Club about nuanced Latin American relations, the need to tell our stories, and his connection with Cuba.
The A.V. Club: Where did the idea for Hombre Al Agua come from?
Gael García Bernal: It was a joyous encounter with the notion of making a film, because life gets you into certain places and positions. I got to think of something that shoots in one house only, here where I live, something that’s more manageable. It started off as a limitation of structure, a practical way to make it with less money, a more intimate exercise. Then your mind starts going around and then you start to tap into your inquiries, your curiosities, your fears, your hopes. “I always wanted to make a film about this. I always wanted to include this.” For example, I always wanted to incorporate something of athleticism in a film. I found it fascinating that the character is an athlete because so far I don’t know any athletes in my family. I wanted to know a little bit, create a character that is an athlete, and has the discipline of an athlete. The film, when it started to take shape, it was like I started to write the first three scenes, and I wanted to make a film about the crisis of masculinity, a separation, the body of politics in Latin America.
I wanted to do a comedy that opens up the possibilities to talk about the state of the world; how identity is capitalized for political, electoral means via the rampant capitalism that eats everything and whatever it doesn’t eat, discards it. How the triumph of community and communal experiences, which is impossible to put into a commodity box and sold, is something that is completely free and completely subversive and is what we need right now. The film spans into that and many other subjects, like politics in Latin America, yes, but also the role of masculinity, how it changes a lot. [There’s] a myriad different archetypes for women that exist nowadays, [like] the athlete-mother who feels a vacuum inside and does not know how to continue. [She’s] saying goodbye to the dream, loving the baby but not understanding where she’s at. Everybody’s overboard in a way.
AVC: A standout theme is the Cuba-Mexico-Brazil dynamic, and how the characters from those countries treat each other in the house. Camilo also endures criticism of how he sounds and acts “too Cuban.” What inspired you to incorporate that?
GGB: For Latin American audiences, they get the film really quickly. They understand the game and enjoy the contradictions and the juxtaposition of who we play. Nobody really is who he is. Very few people from outside of Latin America capture this wonderful ecosystem that we live in Latin America. Very few people from outside of Latin America convey the notion of what it is to be Cuban right now. Cubans are surviving. [Hombre Al Agua] is a story about survival. Camilo survives whatever way possible. One of the ways to do [this is to do] whatever people tell him to do, to be whoever people want him to be. That is a way of survival Cubans know very well. They know this very well because it is a tragedy what’s going on there.
In Mexico, when there’s money, there’s a lot of money. There’s a lot of money and the classes are very, very different. With Brazil, the supposed soap opera [in the film is] of the life of Lula [da Silva] when he was a union leader. In Latin America, we have so many stories to tell. We have so many jokes to tell with each other. We need to make more films that incorporate all these Latin American characters, because we share the same problems within our incredibly heterogeneous countries. Making this film makes me proud to be Latin American in a way, because we have a whole continent to talk about things, and we need to use that more. We need to also celebrate it more within ourselves, because we can’t expect the world to recognize us.
AVC: You’ve played Cubans before and this film nods to the culture, like references to Memories Of Underdevelopment and the poet José Martí. What was your research like for the role?
GGB: I lived in Cuba when I was young. I studied there. I did an exchange, but also I went many, many times. I had a girlfriend from Cuba. I studied cinema there in San Antonio de los Baños. I’ve been going all my life. I know Cuba really well. Mexico is very close to Cuba. There’s a friendship between our countries. Camilo started to develop little by little because he brought a little bit of Cuba with him. He brought cassettes, he brought certain figures, certain instruments, he brought his figure of Yemaya, his little picture of Martí. When he’s reading lying down [on a beach], we shot that in Cuba. He’s reading Los Intrusos by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, a wonderful book about the protest that happened in Cuba, and the crackdown that the government was doing there. Carlos Manuel Álvarez is one of the young geniuses of Cuba. That book is incredible. I don’t know if it’s banned in Cuba anymore, but I wanted Camilo to be in that world, where he doesn’t talk about La Cosas [“the things”] because nobody understands.
That reality is just so heartbreaking, because of the destruction of a country, the destruction of a community, the destruction of one of the most vibrant cultures on earth, and some of the most beautiful people ever, in Cuba. It breaks my heart what’s happening in Cuba right now. There are two big guilts there. One is obviously the United States and the whole thing there, and the other is the Cuban government.
AVC: In one of your other homages to Cuban cinema, your film’s poster is done in the style of abstract Cuban screen-printed posters. How did that come about?
GGB: It came naturally because we wanted the character to be like most Cubans, completely polychromatic and multidisciplinarian. He’s a French philologist, but at the same time he studied animation. Like Camilo says in the film, he was born in Cuba, so he didn’t have the chance to feel that he was ever going to be the person he wanted to be. Do we blame that on destiny, on the government, on the context that we live in, or on ourselves? Does social mobility exist now or does it not exist? I wanted to play with that and also give him tools to be an amateur animator and make some paintings and make some illustrations. There is a great example there that is mentioned also, which is Los Vampiros De La Habana, a wonderful movie, really funny, really modern.
AVC: This is not your first directorial effort. What have you learned from some of your collaborators as an actor?
GGB: From Alfonso Cuarón, [I learned] a lot of rigor, a lot of discipline in doing the work, in finishing it, and giving it all, and putting all the passion there. From Alfonso Cuarón, I had the most chances to spend time with him and share the whole journey of Y Tu Mamá También. I learned many technical aspects about how the camera works. From Walter Salles, the friendship, the fraternity, the loving feeling that needs to happen on a film set; from Michel Gondry, that everything in front of the camera, you can solve, you can play with. From Pablo Larraín, his amazing talent to take himself seriously, but at the same time, knowing that let’s just try it. It’s a movie. Let’s see if it works. He would be very playful with that.
And if I have to mention one particular thing from Jim Jarmusch, the fact that he doesn’t look at the monitor at all, that he’s always beside the camera. That is something I also do as a director. I don’t like watching the monitor at all, and I find it really ridiculous that in an intimate space here, for example, the new directors, they say, “Action,” and they look at the little monitor, the size of the telephone, and you’re like, “Man, but we’re here. Just look.” The director is the only one that can actually see the whole thing because that’s where you find other angles, other stuff that is happening, and you can play with that.
AVC: Filmmaking itself is a part of Hombre Al Agua, and how the act of creating one’s story can end up hurting people.
GGB: There is this sociologist, [Erving] Goffman, who talks about how we always play a part wherever we are. We always put on a mask depending on who we’re talking to. We do an act, we transform that side of us or that archetype of us into something else depending on the situation we’re in. I wanted to play with the fact that creating a film within a film is our, let’s say, fake answer to my identity. So, I’m going to make a film that says who I really am. But I also felt that it was a way to play with what we imagine cinema to be, bigger than life in a way. Why don’t you make a film about your life? The unions making a film in order to persuade [the audience], I felt that as something funny, as a provocation, as an answer to the workers’ alienation and also what we’re experiencing. We control [the images] if we show it through our telephones. We feel we are expressing ourselves and becoming who we really are.
Anything we say there can be co-opted by the structure of capitalism that we live in. I’m not saying that as a criticism, it’s an empirical fact. We’re living in that kind of democracy now. The film about our lives is becoming a commodity for businesses that can then be used for electoral purposes. It’s really strange. We need to reset the social contract in a way and go back to the very basics of common good. We’re so far away from common good right now, but I have hope. I have hope, and making a film like Hombre Al Agua gives me a lot of hope.
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