A Crowd-Pleasing Mother-Son Melodrama With Political Implications
Under the Same Moon (2007), alternately titled La Misma luna, is an emotionally engaging Spanish-language movie about a nine-year-old Mexican boy attempting to reunite with his mother in the United States. The filmmakers are shameless in their use of plot contrivances and sentimentality, but the heartfelt storytelling, humor, enjoyable music and appealing actors will be enough to hold the interest of most viewers.
The movie is at its best when it focuses on Carlitos (veteran child actor Adrián Alonso), who resides with his grandmother in Mexico. The boy and the old woman live on money sent back to them by Carlitos' mother Rosario (Kate del Castillo, well-known to Latin Americans through her appearances in telenovelas), who cleans houses in Los Angeles. The narrative is set in motion by the death of the grandmother, sending the boy on a difficult journey to try to get back together with his mom. The parallel stories of mother and son are skillfully interleaved, and the filmmakers do a terrific job in making us yearn for the pair to be reunited.
But Under the Same Moon gains some of its resonance from its political dimension: it depicts the American way of dealing with immigration as being ineffectual and sometimes inhumane. However, this aspect of the film is simplistic and heavy-handed, and no ideas about how to fix any of the problems are offered. Still, the movie succeeds in putting a human face on an important, thorny issue, and it manages to do so in a way that does not punish the viewer.
A Film Mostly Grounded in Specifics
Although Under the Same Moon contains some clichés, it nonetheless includes a number of memorable particulars. For example, the tension is adroitly handled in a scene at the Juárez-El Paso border, and the narrative here is quirky and has strong momentum. Actress America Ferrera (from TV's Ugly Betty) is in this scene, portraying a coyote.
Lively music plays an important role in lightening the tone of the movie. The song "Superman es ilegal" performed by Kinky is quite amusing. There's also an entertaining singing duel between young Adrián Alonso and comic actor Eugenio Derbez as they do "Yo no soy abusadora." In addition, there's a brief appearance by the enormously popular norteño band Los Tigres del Norte.
Under the Same Moon is not a gritty film, the performances are not especially naturalistic, and being pulled into the story requires considerable suspension of disbelief. Also, the movie lacks subtlety and is not particularly poetic. However, it has several powerful moments, an emotionally satisfying ending and is adeptly constructed to leave viewers feeling good.
A Pair of Mildly Interesting DVD Extras
The Under the Same Moon DVD contains a run-of-the-mill 26-minute Spanish-language making-of documentary, which gives you the opportunity of hearing from a dozen cast members, screenwriter Ligiah Villalobos and director Patricia Riggen. Riggen states that the exteriors for Rosario's story were filmed in Los Angeles, but everything else was shot in Mexico. The director characterizes her movie as a "small, unpretentious film."
Also on the DVD is a so-so 11-minute English-language featurette on a mural that was inspired by the movie. Commissioned by Fox Searchlight, the mural was painted by three artists on the side of a building located at Breed and Cesar Chavez in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles.
DVD Details
Both picture and sound quality are very good for the feature film on the Under the Same Moon DVD. Listed below are all the DVD details.
Release Date: June 17, 2008
Feature Film Runtime: 1 hour 50 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for Some Mature Thematic Elements
Widescreen (1.85:1), Color
Spanish (With Some English) Dolby Digital 5.1
English Subtitles Plus Captions for the Hearing Impaired
Spanish Subtitles for English Dialogue
The Making of La Misma Luna (26 minutes)
La Misma Luna: Mural Documentary (11 minutes)
