Jonas Cuarón’s “Campeón Gabacho” is a movie of grand gestures and big emotion, of symbols more than of nuanced portrayals — likely by design. Its structure resembles a constellation of moving stars all of which orbit around an extraordinary lead performance. That central heavenly body is young actor Juan Daniel García Treviño, who, in only a few years, has established himself as one of the most captivating faces in Mexican cinema today.
García Treviño debuted on-screen with “I’m No Longer Here,” a drama set between New York City and Monterrey, Mexico where he played a street dancer who migrated to escape violence. Now in “Campeón Gabacho,” he once again embodies a Mexican immigrant in NYC clinging to a new life. As Liborio, an orphan who risked his life to cross the border and ended up living in the attic of a bookstore thanks to the kindness of the gruff owner, Chief (Eddie Marsan), the actor plays a narrator who consistently breaks the fourth wall.
Liborio speaks with a mix of rage and despondence about his situation; complaining about the pejorative labels those around him call him to diminish his existence. He’s rarely known kindness; thus, his default mode is defensiveness. In the aftermath of an arson incident and surviving a brutal beating, Liborio finds himself homeless, and at the mercy of individuals eager to use him and dispose of him. And while his rigid shell begins to crumble when meeting and falling romantically for Aireen (Leslie Grace), a friendly young woman caring for her grandfather (Cheech Marin), it’s not until he finds a purpose to keep fighting, figuratively and literally as an amateur boxer, that he’s able to see himself differently.
As a director, outside from his collaboration as a screenwriter with his Oscar-winning father Alfonso Cuarón (the two co-wrote “Gravity”), Jonas Cuarón has showcased a predilection for stories that straddle both sides of the U.S./Mexico border with characters in the interstitial spaces between both worlds. His 2015 feature, “Desierto,” starring Gael García Bernal, followed a group of migrants crossing the desert while being hunted by a ruthless vigilante. 2023’s “Chupa,” a family friendly movie, centers around a U.S. born boy who travels to Mexico to meet his extended family amid otherworldly occurrences. And his directorial debut, “The Year of the Nail,” dealt with a Mexican teenager infatuated with an older American woman.
Based on that filmic trajectory, it’s fitting that he would adapt Aura Xilonen’s 2015 novel, “Campeón Gabacho,” with Xilonen co-writing the screenplay. Though economical in its depiction of New York City — most of the action unfolds within the same block under elevated train tracks, plus a couple other key locations — the overall atmosphere is still larger-than-life given its whimsical flourishes, particularly in scenes of violence, which resemble the cartoonish playfulness of a film like “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” and Liborio’s memory digressions where cinematographer Pepe Ávila del Pino is able to craft rich and evocative frames underwater or in the desert.
Other VFX heavy sequences, like when Liborio and Aireen float past the stratosphere in a scene expressing the young man’s love frenzy, amplify the film’s pulsating and unpredictable energy. That quality is reflected in some of the people the protagonist encounters, namely Doble-Ú (Rosario Dawson), a social media star whose outfits call to mind the flamboyantly futuristic costumes of “The Fifth Element.” In general, the mostly English-speaking characters (everyone throws a few Spanish words here and there with varying degrees of effectiveness) tend to come across as more theatrical or on a different dramatic register than García Treviño, who works as a grounding force in every exchange.
Both because of his biting delivery of the specifically colloquial Spanish-language dialoguev—vincluding a moment where he calls out an American police officer of Mexican descent who looks down on Liborio — and his salt-of-the-earth, no-nonsense presence, the unassumingly marvelous García Treviño prevents “Campón Gabacho” from losing its strong vein of realism amid the ornamented filmmaking on display. Cuarón clearly understood that the more extravagant choices can only function in the periphery of a sturdy emotional anchor, an actor with the gravitas to communicate the exasperation that Liborio feels in a reality that overwhelms him. Everywhere he turns, a new obstacle confronts him.
As Abacuc, an altruistic man running a home for orphan kids and who takes Liborio in and encourages him to pursue boxing seriously, Panamanian musician and actor Rubén Blades, in one of his best on-screen parts to date, commands his scenes with rugged wisdom and pragmatism acting as counterweight to Liborio’s vitriolic skepticism. Cuarón knows that this relationship between mentor and the unruly force that is Liborio is crucial, because it’s only through this adult who cares, and the playfully contentious banter Liborio has with the kids at this struggling institution, that he starts to shed the anger that courses through him.
When the inevitable final showdown comes to pass, where Liborio must defeat a more prepared opponent inside the ring, the story sidesteps the image of a girlfriend near the ropes acting as the ultimate motivation for the fighter to get up and win even if the cards were stacked against him. Instead, “Campeón Gabacho” turns Liborio into an emblem of the immigrant plight. He’s not fighting to impress a single person, but for the dignity of countless others who like him have been mistreated and made to feel invisible and insignificant while they work to survive in a hostile country. The camera pans across the humble audience to find everyday faces of Latinos and others for whom his victory could represent a sliver of vindication amid constant persecution. Among them are the children from the home that has welcomed him; society’s discarded kids for whom this foul-mouthed amateur boxer is an improbable hero, but nonetheless their paladin.
There’s no denying that Caurón leans into the sentimental here and elsewhere, yet there’s a strong gust of catharsis that García Treviño transmits as Liborio’s bloodied body refuses to surrender. To see this marginalized and dismissed underdog win, even if nothing could be further from surprising, resonates with piercing timeliness, if not with subtlety.
English (US) ·