David Pablos puts a gay love story into the cab of a long-haul truck and lets the highway close in around it. Frank about sex and quick with violence, tender when it counts, and only in its last stretch does it drive where thrillers usually go.
The title is a translation of En el camino and it has nothing to do with Kerouac. David Pablos’s film is about Veneno (Victor Prieto Simental), a young man who sells sex to drivers at the truck stops along Mexico’s highways, and El Muñeco (Osvaldo Sánchez), a trucker who takes him into his cab and then does not want him to leave it. It is a romance first and a thriller second, and Pablos, who also wrote it, has the nerve to make both halves dangerous. We liked it a good deal, with one reservation about where it ends up.
The two leads are doing the film’s real work. Simental plays Veneno quick and watchful, a boy who has learned to price a man in the time it takes him to open a door, and who has never once been allowed to be tired. Sánchez plays El Muñeco with almost no dialogue for long stretches; he talks to the engine more readily than to people, and when he does look at Veneno it is with the wariness of a man who knows what wanting something costs out here. The sex scenes are frank and there are several. What we noticed is that they are also the only scenes in which either man stops checking the mirrors.
Ximena Amann shoots the road as flat white heat by day and as headlights on nothing by night, and she keeps the camera inside the cab far more than outside it. Belén Estrada’s production design turns that cab into a bedsit: a curtain across the bunk, a small saint on the dash, photographs curling in the heat. Andrea Balency-Béarn’s score is low electronic drone laid under the diesel, so that for whole minutes we could not say where the music ended and the engine began, which is the right effect for a film about two people who live inside a machine. The editors, Jonathan Pellicer and Paulina del Paso, cut long on the road and short at the stops, and the rhythm tells you where the danger is before anyone on screen does.
One scene frightened us more than any of the film’s violence. The two men are washing in a truck-stop shower block, the door open, and other drivers walk past without slowing. Pablos holds on the doorway. Nothing happens. It is the not happening that did it: by then the film has taught us what these men are to the men around them, and a held shot of an open door is enough. That is a horror technique used in a romance, and it works.
The reservation is the second half, which tightens into a thriller we will not describe. The mechanics are familiar, and the men who drive them, El Eulas (Mariano López Sosa) and El Pelón (Héctor Cárdenas), are closer to types than to people; they are frightening because of what they represent rather than what they say. Pablos also cuts back to Veneno as a boy (Neydan Ricardo) with his father (Francisco Navar Carrera), and these scenes explain what Simental’s face has already told us. The women, Lupe (Obdulia Morales) and Licha (Elizabeth Infante), get a scene or two each and are gone; Morales in particular suggests a whole life in one exchange at a counter and we wanted more of it.
Pablos’s earlier films Las elegidas and El baile de los 41 were also about bodies bought, sold and policed. This is looser and faster than either, and the better for it. Diego Luna is among the producers, and the film has something of the roadside Mexico of the pictures he made his name in, minus any of the comfort.
At 93 minutes it is over before it can repeat itself. It is not for children, and the sex and the violence arrive with equal bluntness. Watch it with the sound up; the engine is half the score, and the silences in the cab are the other half.
