TAKING a drama and making a melodrama requires some serious reverse engineering. You need terrific coincidences, synchronicity like nobody’s business and surpassing blindness to circumstances. It’s not enough for Abner the kid (Alex Perea) of Miguel Necoechea’s The Kid: Chamaco to discover that his sister, Silvana, is carrying on with his new coach, Jimmy Irwin (Kirk Harris), a noted Yankee boxer recuperating from a loss in Mexico City.
In fact, Abner must show up at the hotel where Irwin is staying at precisely the moment necessary to see Silvana and Irwin kissing, the two having met by complete coincidence at this hotel. Mexico City is a small world, and this boxing melodrama aims to make it smaller. Taking the part traditionally played in the genre by Irish priests, the reliable Martin Sheen is Dr. Irwin, Jimmy’s father, a gringo volunteer expiating a sin he never gets to speak of in detail. There seems to be a kind of anti-choice side to this penance—a bad abortion the doctor performed. (On the bright side, the doctor hands out birth-control pills.)
It all comes together, of course, in the boxing ring, with everyone nicely redeemed. The story’s purpose is a symbolic troubled friendship between Norte Americanos and Mexicans, with all forgiven at the end. It’s stitched together with cross-cultural subtitles in gringo and Spanish, as the conversation switches back and forth across the language line. The English-to-Spanish translations are more modest, and why? Not only can everyone in Mexico understand the phrase “fuck you,” they also know it doesn’t mean “¡vete el diablo!” Director/co-writer Necoechea brings some Mexico City flavor, for instance a cabbie asking for “80 pesitas.” The Kid: Chamaco is enlivened with some gusty moments with Michael Madsen as Jimmy’s gruffster manager. If you’re Michael Madsen, you will get to wear a Hawaiian shirt to work every day for the rest of your life.
Other contributions to your credulity are sneeze-worthy: that a brother will never figure out his sister is una puta con el corazon del oro, even if she hangs out in front of a hot-sheet hotel in fishnet stockings; that the father of an Olympic boxer will not, somehow, know how to hold punching pads for his son to train with; that when a character dies, someone else will need to be informed that “her death still affects him” even if the body hasn’t had time to get cold yet. The Kid: Chamaco shows as part of the Maya Indie Festival, about which, see page 58.
The Kid: Chamaco
Unrated; 97 min.
Friday–Saturday, Monday
Camera 7, Campbell
