Drinking from a world cup

SAO PAULO, Brazil -- There’s a sudden pregnant pause, a moment of anticipation. Gael Garcia Bernal, omnipresent Mexican actor and first-time movie director, is about to make an auteur-like suggestion.

Turning to a reporter, he asks politely, almost apologetically: Um, could we move to another table so we can watch the rugby match?

It’s a guy thing. It’s also a Gael thing.

The scene: a hotel bar in South America’s largest city. The occasion: last month’s 31st annual Sao Paulo International Film Festival, at which Garcia Bernal was much in evidence. He was starring in one movie, Hector Babenco’s darkly unsettling relationship drama “The Past” (El Pasado), and presenting another, the rural Mexican fable “Cochochi,” through Canana Films, the ambitious Mexico City-based production company that he founded last year with fellow actor Diego Luna and producer Pablo Cruz.

For most cinematic impresarios, that would be a pretty full load. But Garcia Bernal also was unveiling “Deficit,” his directorial debut, in which he leads a cast composed of mainly unknown actors, some with no prior film experience. The movie, which takes place during a weekend party at a rich family’s vacation home outside Mexico City, explores the sexual and class-based tensions that arise among a group of jaded, privileged young scions and the servants who succor them. It will screen Sunday at AFI Fest.

Shot on a lean budget over five weeks last year, in the hippie-indigenous-mystical town of Tepoztlan, “Deficit” is set during an era of spiritual malaise and political insolvency for Mexico’s ruling classes. Several years ago, Alfonso Cuaron’s “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” in which Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna starred as a pair of lustful, socially irresponsible friends on a road trip with an older Spanish woman, captured Mexico at the moment when it was freeing itself from 71 years of one-party rule.

Garcia Bernal, who has taken an active role in Mexican progressive politics since he was an adolescent, wanted “Deficit” to reflect his country’s current, still tumultuous social reality. “I hope this film will have that kind of transcendence, like that’s an historic document, in a way,” he says.

He was particularly pleased with how his young ensemble cast performed. “They did it with a lot of heart and a lot of courage and complete trust also. I’m really grateful for that, because that’s the way I like working also, as an actor, I want to feel that.” Asked what it was like to direct himself, he laughs. “A terrible actor, unbearable actor! Doesn’t listen to me; he does what he wants!”

Shuttling among interviews, press screenings and meetings, Garcia Bernal appeared grateful to have a few minutes to savor a beer and a Marlboro while checking out the rugby World Cup final between England and South Africa. His passion for the sport, he says, was fueled by playing scrum-half -- a job made for elusive, fleet-footed, relatively undersized guys -- during his years as a London theater student as well as in his soccer-mad homeland.

“It’s the position that everyone hates in rugby because you’re the one that gets the least hurt,” he says, scrutinizing a widescreen TV filled with large, sweaty men slamming into each other. “You’re the little prince that is able to, like, go around the big guys. It’s the guy that . . . organizes the game, and that apparently has the most -- how do you say that? -- like a superstar attitude.”

Eager to engage and quick to crack a joke, Garcia Bernal doesn’t exude superstar swagger. Despite his stature as an international pinup, he still favors rumpled jeans and T-shirts, and he sports the same longish, tousled hair and thick-framed glasses that he’s been wearing for years. But in the course of a career that first took wing in Mexican telenovelas when he was barely into puberty, he has shown himself to be a headliner who likes to take the ball and run with it, deftly zigging and zagging his way past obstacles that might impede less adroit, naturally gifted performers.

Risk-taker with roles

Still a year shy of 30, he has been recognized for his risk-taking acting choices: a male femme fatale in Pedro Almodovar’s “Bad Education,” a tormented priest in Carlos Carrera’s “The Crime of Father Amaro,” a soulful young Che Guevara in Walter Salles’ “The Motorcycle Diaries.” Despite his rapid ascent, he is fond of saying that the closest that he has come to having a “Hollywood career” was filming parts of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Babel” at the border in Tijuana.

In coming months, Garcia Bernal will be showcased in a new array of exacting roles. In “The Past,” he portrays a coke-addled Buenos Aires translator torn among three very different women, representing three clashing sets of lifestyle choices. In addition to his erotic on-screen encounters with a striking trio of Argentine actresses -- Ana Celentano, Moro Anghileri and Analia Conceyro as his spookily obsessed ex-wife -- Garcia Bernal in making “The Past” also was able to consummate his long-standing love affair with Argentina, which he calls “my second home, my second country.” Like Mexico, the actor says, Argentina developed as one of the Spanish Empire’s “colonial caprices,” and it embraces many cultures within its identity.

“I feel it has given me a lot of things, and basically I feel at home,” says Garcia Bernal, who got to know Argentina well while filming parts of “The Motorcycle Diaries” there and whose name has been linked romantically with at least one Argentine actress. “It’s also because it’s similar to Mexico, in a way. Because I had lots of friends, I grew up with a lot of Argentine exiles.”

Not coincidentally, one of the characters in “Deficit” is a young Argentine woman whose exiled family apparently was connected with the scandal-plagued Carlos Menem presidency. (Garcia Bernal’s character, the ponytailed host of the weekend bacchanal, develops an ill-starred crush on her.)

The actor has three other challenging film roles waiting in the wings. In the recently wrapped “Rudo y Cursi,” he costars with Luna in a comedy-drama about sibling pro soccer players, written and directed by Carlos Cuaron, who is Alfonso Cuaron’s younger brother and “Y Tu Mama’s” co-screenwriter.

Garcia Bernal also has a juicy gig as the head of a gang of thugs who terrorize Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo in Fernando Meirelles’ “Blindness,” adapted from the harrowing allegorical novel by the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago. And he’ll be playing the title character in “Pedro Paramo,” Mateo Gil’s adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s classic 1955 magic-realism novella about a Mexican man who travels back to his remote hometown to face the ghosts of his past.

A directorial debut

But it’s Garcia Bernal’s new role as a director that’s drawing much attention on this fall’s international film festival circuit. And as he sits chatting in the bar, as if on cue, a cinematic mentor and close friend suddenly strolls in to say hello.

“Hey!” the actor calls out to Salles, who reciprocates Garcia Bernal’s bear hug and, after several minutes of small talk, is persuaded to give his professional assessment of his friend’s directorial coming-out party.

“First, he chose a topic that is extremely original in terms of Latin American cinema, in the sense that he developed a narrative around a social class that is rarely seen in our part of the world,” Salles responds. “And you know, I’m a fan of actors’ films, because I think that the acting tends to be really superb, and it’s this gentleman’s case as well.

“So there’s an original theme, told in an original manner, and I think that the characters are never described in a reductive manner, which is also very difficult to get, because you can, I imagine the temptation of doing something would be just purely [to] treat them, treat that class, in a just prejudiced manner. . . . I think that you granted depth and ambivalence to the characters.”

Garcia Bernal, listening thoughtfully, agrees that he wanted to avoid depicting the social relations in “Deficit” as a contrast between virtuous working-class characters and pampered, selfish rich kids. Instead, the movie suggests that all Mexicans, in one way or another, are imprisoned by the inequities of their society.

“So, you know, there’s no moral judgment,” he says. “We tried to make [the characters] very responsible for their actions but also knowing that they are innocent, innocent because they’re really victims of the way things are. And of themselves as well.”

A massive cheer goes up from the bar. South Africa has won the World Cup.

Garcia Bernal is pleased with the outcome -- of the game, the experience of directing his first movie and the chance rendezvous with Salles, whom he says he learned a lot from during the filming of “The Motorcycle Diaries.”

“He calls upon the things that exist above filmmaking, that transcends filmmaking, which is what ultimately one wants to do with films,” the former scrum-half says of Salles.

When it comes to acting, as they say in rugby, Garcia Bernal’s career hasn’t been kicked into touch. From all the available evidence, he’s got a lot more transcendent scrums ahead of him.

reed.johnson@latimes.com