Do any of you watch Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle? I’ve loved both seasons. Fun fact (possibly only fun for me): my son and I were at the Hollywood Bowl concert that opened Season Two. It was my son’s first live symphony and MITJ star Gael García Bernal’s appearance during the concert was a surprise to the audience.

Although I have seen many of his films, I really don’t know that much about García Bernal. He has many projects coming out, including Season Three of MITJ, which starts streaming tomorrow and is already getting great reviews. Two of his projects are getting a lot of attention because they are both being submitted for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film – Chile’s Neruda and Mexico’s Desierto. Neruda, directed by Jackie director Pablo Larrain, is about Nobel Prize-winning communist Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, evading capture by García Bernal’s character, fascist policeman Oscar Peluchoneau. Desierto is a terrifying thriller about Mexicans attempting to cross into the US illegally as a vigilante (Jeffrey Dean Morgan playing another horrible, horrible person) tries to hunt them down. García Bernal tends to gravitate to political material so naturally his interviews do as well. The Daily Beast has a wonderful interview that I swear reads like poetry in parts. You can read the whole thing here. Below are some highlights:

On the state of U.S.-Mexico relations in the Trump Age:
“I am concerned. But at the same time, knowing that for a country so huge and culturally so massive like Mexico, combined with the United States—the amount of people, the families that are interlinked between the United States and Mexico culturally and economically… with the amount of that dimension that these countries represent, Donald Trump doesn’t exist, really. It is irrelevant.”

On how Mexican-American relations will win out over Trumps plans to separate us:
“It is far bigger, the unity that exists, than what somebody can do as a president. The only problem is that his discourse can create problems, of course. It can create the empowerment of certain people that feel that they have to take matters into their own hands, and that’s really the problem. That’s what Desierto really exemplifies. But really, I would say that for the history of the world, even more. Donald Trump doesn’t exist. It is alarming. But it’s like wanting to stop air from flowing. It’s impossible. What we can do is build that fraternity even more. People from the United States should come to Mexico and people from Mexico should come to the United States. To travel! To have sex!”

On using his fame to speak for those with no voice:
“I was invited to do a visit to see what the situation of the migrants from Central America were going through, passing through Mexico. The work that we started to do was fascinating. It brought me to a head-to-head experience as a migrant as well. The experience and my fascination with being a foreigner, an ‘other.’ I get offered to work here in the United States on Mozart in the Jungle and stuff and I come every year to do it, and I enjoy it—and it’s a free circulation of labor. I do it with a work visa and the whole thing, and I’m not criminalized for doing it. The tomatoes that we eat need that free circulation of labor! The problem is that we are criminalizing that free circulation of labor, hugely. There’s something wrong there. And the fact that I have those rights means I have to defend people who have no rights.”

[From The Daily Beast]

As I said, the language in the interview is actually quite beautiful. García Bernal consistently gives thoughtful answers. He doesn’t seem to have an agenda, just well considered thoughts. I’ll admit, I don’t completely understand his point about how Trump doesn’t exist but I think he is trying to say that Mexico and America have been woven together so tightly that even Trump can’t pry us apart. Living in Southern California, I agree that our cultures will always be intertwined. And I love García Bernal’s confidence that what should prevail will, even if I don’t share in his optimism. I’m very afraid that Trump will not be irrelevant, specifically for the reason García Bernal cited, “[Trump’s discourse] can create the empowerment of certain people that feel that they have to take matters into their own hands, and that’s really the problem.” (Although I kind of want to try out his theory of having sex to make Trump irrelevant.)

Photo credit: WENN Photos