‘Cowboy’ lassos cross-border love

There was a study, or maybe it was a line in a movie. As men get older, they lose the ability to hear higher-pitched sounds. And as women get older, they lose the ability to hear lower-pitched sounds. The better to tune each other out, presumably. Whether or not it’s true, I was reminded of this while watching Michele Ohayon’s charming, bittersweet “Cowboy del Amor,” a documentary about a self-proclaimed “cowboy cupid” who specializes in introducing American men to Mexican women -- because next to deafness, there’s nothing like a language barrier to keep a liaison simple and stress-free.

Although he doesn’t put too fine a point on it, it’s this aspect of his love business that has probably kept Ivan Thompson in business for 16 years. A shucksy, aphoristic former horse trader with a way with words and spotty marital track record, Thompson is a font of sound -- usually hilarious -- relationship advice that he himself seems constitutionally unable to take. Married to an American woman for 17 1/2 years (“She spoke perfect English, and I never could understand her”), he found his second career at the same time he was finding his second wife -- a Mexican woman with three children whom he met by placing an ad in a newspaper. When he received more than 80 responses from young, attractive professional women, he decided to switch from the horse business to “the woman business,” saying to himself, “Self, this would make a pretty good business.”

His second marriage ended after his second wife’s second-language proficiency started getting in the way, making Thompson feel as if suddenly “she was the boss of everything.” But business is still kicking, if sporadically.

For $3,000, Thompson escorts his clients to small Mexican cities, places an ad, arranges for the services of an interpreter, sets up interviews and helps coach them through the rather dispiriting process of classified ad dating. He and his clients -- the movie features a once-divorced long-distance truck driver named Rick, and Dave, a baleful, practically mute, thrice-divorced used-car salesman in his 60s -- are disillusioned with American women, whom they find excessively “hard to please.” They also seem to dwell excessively on what they call “the change of life” and wonder what happened to the women they married.

It doesn’t take much scratching to unearth the desire for a docile, dependent and unchallenging mate, but what’s surprising about “Cowboy” is that rather than “expose” the latent colonialist, Madame Butterfly-ish impulse in these particular three amigos, it gently sheds light on the ways in which people seek new terrain in love when their familiar surroundings let them down. What seems to keep the couples who make it to marriage happy is their interpretation of each other -- interpretations that rely on hope, imagination and a certain amount of diplomatic goodwill to spackle cultural gaps.

“Cowboy” also quietly reveals how these men have in some ways conflated nonfluency in English with lack of complexity, ambition, intelligence or drive; and it reminds us of how persistently Americans tend to view these traits as exclusively American. Although the clients themselves are not condescending to their dates, their easy, thoughtless sense of superiority, ingrained over a lifetime, only seems to make them more vulnerable.

The irony here is that the women they meet and in some cases marry are not only often better educated than they are -- used-car Dave is set up with a dermatologist who runs her own clinic -- but more pragmatic as well. In part because of this, and in part because they appear simple, and lonely, Ivan, Rick and Dave emerge as sympathetic characters, neither predatory nor, oddly, particularly sexist. On the contrary, they have a lost air about them, they seem shrouded in vagueness and romantic notions. In a quietly shattering scene, the dermatologist relates a personal tragedy she suffered during the conflict in Chiapas. Then she explains how she has learned to overcome her past. “I set obtainable goals for myself,” she says. “I don’t dream. I plan.” As sad as her story is, at least her survival feels assured.

*

‘Cowboy del Amor’

MPAA rating: Unrated

A Netflix/Emerging Pictures presentation. Producer-director Michele Ohayon. Cinematographer Theo Van de Sande. Editor Kate Amend. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes.