A condensation of mexican popular values - futbol, fame, & family - according to Carlos Cuaron. Two lower class brothers from a plaintain farming family achieve fame and riches through their football skills. They are signed for top league clubs, and enjoy a period of success and fast times. Eventually their baser natures come to the fore: one falls foolishly in love with a promiscuous model, the other falls prey to gambling and cocaine. The plot builds up so that the predicaments facing the 2 brothers are resolved by a climactic football game, in which quite naturally a penalty will decide it all, forward against goalkeeper, brother against brother. For a mexican, thus, life can be summed up by football. The film's central parable is that in the end, when the shit hits the fan, a narcotraficante can bail you out. In Mexico success comes through 3 vocations: politics, football, or drug dealing. When football and politics fail, the drug dealer absurdly emerges as the deus ex machina of a rags to riches drama given over to the fatalism of football.
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Cuaron directs his first feature length film, and though he shows a lesser aptitude than his brother Alfonso for camera technique, he succeeds in scripting a marketable crowdpleaser. His narrative style consists of multiple asides (made by an offscreen or onscreen narrator) that set the rhythm and background for the inner mechanics of the story; just as in Y Tu Mama Tambien, a narrator (here it is the argentine football scout who signs up the brothers) delivers meta-comments on the social and philosophical ideas that motivate the characters and that color the milieu. The usual dichotomy of a money-oriented higher class in contrast to the money-oriented lower class ensues.
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