I have been working on polishing my Spanish competence and this led me to Netflix, where I found Rudo y Cursi on the “watch instantly” tab, perhaps put there because of the World Cup is stirring up interest in soccer. What I found was more than a reflection on the lives of soccer players. It is a story about brotherhood and the impermanance of wealth compared with the durability of the family, even a broken and dysfunctional family.

The movie tells the story of two soccer playing brothers, Rudo (“Tough”), a goalie, and Tato (who later is branded “Cursi,” or “Corny,” by the press). The two have grown up in the sticks, and have been working on a banana plantation. But on weekends, they are stars for the local futbol team “Tlachtatlan.”

They are discovered by Baton, a roving talent scout, who recruits them to come to Mexico City to try out for the big leagues. When they get there, they make the cut and become futbolisticos professionales, but they soon find they cannot concentrate on soccer. Each one pursues his own idea of wealth and stardom that he began before he became a paid athlete — Cursi is trying to make a singing career, while Rudo tries to roll up a stake by gambling, with disasterous results.

Over the course of the movie, the brothers fight and make up, fight and make up. It’s hard to say what has fascinated me most about this story — perhaps the tragedy of the brothers’ misunderstandings of their own strengths and weaknesses, perhaps the idea that wealth is just another opportunity for new and bigger problems and sometimes even more dangerous ones.

At the end, I had to admit that the movie had a lot of “heart.”  And it was funny, in a strange, sidewinding way. It did present a kind of view of redemption, a making of peace. It illustrated well that concept of vacillada, the idea that we’re only here for a little while and death is coming so we might as well make the most of it and laugh, that is quinticentially Mexican. I’ve pasted in the trailer below.