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 Entertainment | October 2007 
Screenwriter Jose Rivera on Making 'Trade'
 David Lamble - Bay Area Reporter
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 |  | To buy into Trade, you have to accept the unlikely alliance between the disillusioned grumpy cop and a boy/man who resembles a videogame character in a free-fire zone fueled by rage and a bottomless thirst for revenge |  | |
Openly queer director Marco Kreuzpaintner captivated with his tale of a young man's agonized but passionate embrace of his sexuality in the German lake frolic, Summer Storm. He makes his American debut with Trade, an emotionally conflicted melodrama about the sexual traffic in children across the US/Mexican border. Based on a sensational muckraking New York Times Magazine article, "Sex Slaves on Main Street" (January 2004) by Peter Landesman, this earnest but badly flawed film unintentionally summons the wrath it intends for its subject onto itself.
The scenes in Trade that feel truthfully observed are awash with a tawdry prurient flavor. We see women herded like cattle in front of a motley pack of men. A barren field just across the border serves as an outdoor motel, with little kitchen timers sounding the alarm when an illicit orgasm's time has come. In a busy truck-stop restaurant, a shockingly underage Asian boy is cradled into a drug-induced stupor by a disreputable older man. When a furious young Mexican implores a local crime lord to secure the release of his underage sister from Russian slavers, the old man shrugs and explains that the Muscovite mafia is a practical definition of globalization. As we watch Mexican cops take their cut and American lawmen plead bureaucratic excuses for not acting, we wonder if the old man isn't onto something.
Trade begins at a birthday party, as 13-year-old Adriana (Paulina Gaitan) is overjoyed when big brother Jorge gives her a new bike, while mom warns that their Mexico City neighborhood isn't a safe place to ride. Turns out that mom is right. No sooner does Adriana mount her present than she is overtaken by a big black limo. The girl is abducted, along with an adult Polish refugee, Veronica (Summer Storm's Alicja Bachleda), by a feral sex ring headed by Vadim (Pash D. Lychnokoff), a Russian with a venomous smile. He's the kind of guy who's usually beaten to a pulp by Rocky Balboa.
Meanwhile, 17-year-old Jorge (the ferocious newcomer Cesar Ramos) pays for the bike at his day job, mugging American sex tourists with his buddies, Lupe and Alejandro. The gravity of their mock executions is offset by the substitution of water pistols for revolvers. The boys work out of a crime stable run by the courtly Don Victor (Jose Sefami).
Tipped off that Adriana might be found in a tiny back alley where sex slaves are paraded, Jorge begins a mad sojourn north through a ghostly abandoned warehouse where he encounters a Texas cop, Ray Sheridan (Kevin Kline), searching for his daughter. Through a series of illogical jump-cuts, Jorge hops into Ray's trunk for a no-document trip across the border.
Director Kreuzpaintner and screenwriter Jose Rivera attempt suspense and pathos by flipping between perilous subplots. Adriana finds a big sis in the fearless Veronica, whose character arc is dedicated to unearthing a scintilla of human empathy out of one of her thuggish abductors, Manuelo (Marco Perez). Jorge alternately taunts and cowboys up with the taciturn, depressed Ray.
Trade's attempt to balance the moral scales collapses into the flim-flam of parallel plots, unlikely couplings, and one spectacular web stunt: an Internet slave auction whose results send Ray and Jorge on a 2,000-mile trek to a shady suburban New Jersey street. To buy into Trade, you have to accept the unlikely alliance between the disillusioned grumpy cop and a boy/man who resembles a videogame character in a free-fire zone fueled by rage and a bottomless thirst for revenge. The Ray/Jorge coupling, which carefully avoids any carnal motive, feels more like an undigested idea for two characters, although the actors do approach the foothills of some oddball daddy/son thing. Young Ramos, seductive, bilingual and cheeky, is a face that cries out for smarter scripts.
Trade aspires to moral clarity while copping a prime-time TV formula: lassoing an audience's natural outrage at primal injustice through an escalating series of false endings, each in turn sentimental and pitiless, but none wholly believable.
On the record
Trade's screenwriter Jose Rivera is best known for his moving, Oscar-nominated portrait of a young Che Guevara for Walter Salles' Motorcycle Diaries. The Puerto Rican native, currently adapting Jack Kerouac's On the Road for Salles, explained in a phone conversation the motivations behind writing Trade for Kreuzpaintner and producer Roland Emmerich.
Jose Rivera: Roland had liked The Motorcycle Diaries, and he sent me a rough outline of the story that he thought would work for this film. I liked his story, and signed up to write the script.
David Lamble: Describe developing the on-screen relationship between the cop (Kevin Kline) and the young boy (Cesar Ramos).
That was an idea that Roland was very forceful with. He really wanted that relationship to work, to show that you could take a fairly redneck character like Kevin Kline, and being around this young Mexican kid, have his own racist attitudes changed. It's amazing that there isn't more understanding between the US and Mexico.
We wanted to show that Jorge was basically a decent kid, but there's no father, and he's kind of at the crossroads. He's engaging in illegal activity that is kind of a joke, because he carries a water pistol and his targets are clueless Americans who kind of deserve what they get. Of course, we were playing with the irony that he's selling pictures of naked girls, never knowing that his sister will be abducted.
We went to a women's shelter in Mexico City that had a lot of runaway girls. Some of them had been prostitutes, and some of them had been sex slaves. It was there I did the bulk of my research. One 12-year-old girl had been a sex slave for three years. The key to me was putting a human face on the dilemma, and talking to these girls about how they survived. The film doesn't even scratch the surface of how horrific it is. And these were the girls who survived, many don't. They die of sexually transmitted diseases, drug overdoses and despair.
Why has this problem mushroomed?
Unlike prostitution, which is very visible, this particular problem is invisible because the kids are held in bondage in basements. Some of this is helped by Internet slave-trafficking, in which slaves are put up for auction. The movie makes the point that the problem is global, so you have somebody with a bank account in Switzerland, a computer in South Africa, and someone else with kids in New Jersey. No one has jurisdiction over the entire phenomenon. |
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