Director Mark Becker's moving documentary follows Mexican mariachi singers Carmelo and Arturo, who pour their passion and talent into their music, performing for largely unappreciative audiences on the streets and in the watering holes of San Francisco. But despite the hardships and meager income, the two immigrants persist in pursuing their art, chasing the dream of a better future for themselves -- and their families.
Romántico would be nothing if it were just a hard-luck story. The movie is something else: the revelation of a way of life, of a whole area of human experience going on right under our noses -- or standing over our restaurant tables.
Romántico is a quiet, admirable slice-of-life documentary, giving us insight into the human condition without claiming universal knowledge of larger questions involving immigration or family responsibility.
The movie's interests tend more toward the personal than the political. Cultural differences notwithstanding, Sánchez is the archetype of the overachieving dad, sacrificing his present to provide for his family's future.
No one would pick Carmelo Muñiz Sanchez, itinerant mariachi singer and champion of his own lost cause, as a romantic movie hero. Yet, in Mark Becker's beautiful, intimate Romántico he is exactly that.
It is like a duet in which both men work together to achieve a kind of cinematic harmony, and out of it comes a beautiful recording of the universal struggle that is life.
A low-key personal portrait that helps you understand an illegal immigrant's desperate psychology. But mostly, it fills you with an aching empathy for this profoundly decent man, who numbly (even heroically) soldiers on.
There's nothing extraordinary about mariachi singer Carmelo Muñiz Sánchez, and nothing extraordinary about Mark Becker's documentary profile Romántico. At times, that seems to be the point.
Becker's movie is subtle, unsentimental, but heart-rending all the same in its portrait of a kind man's single-minded focus on providing a better life for his children.
"Romantico" is a documentary about Carmelo Muniz Sanchez, a 57-year old man, who works as a mariachi with his friend, Arturo, in San Francisco. To make ends meet, they also work in a car wash. Illegally in the United States for the past three years, Carmelo sends money back to his family in Mexico. But he is
homesick, and wants to return when he hears that his elderly mother's health is declining. "Romantico" is a sober counterpoint to the hysterical hyperventilating of the anti-immigration movement that has been shameless enough to bring terrorism up in the debate. In a poignant manner, the film puts a sympathetic face to illegal immigration, detailing Carmelo's life on both sides of the border(allowing he and his friends and family to tell their story without any commentary), thus giving very good reasons why a person would emigrate. Ironically, Carmelo is much more able to support his family far away from home. For example, he can earn $100 in a night here in the states while much less in his home country.
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