Charlie Chaplin of Mexico

This completely unheralded Latin American production, a biopic of the great Mexican comedy star Mario Moreno (aka Cantinflas), comes as a small but very welcome surprise.

The bilingual screenplay (co-written by Edui Tijerina and Sebastian del Amo, the film’s director) moves back and forth between Moreno/Cantinflas’ early days in Mexican show business and the late 1950s in Hollywood and environs, where producer Michael Todd (played by Michael Imperioli) is trying to get an all-star cast together for his much-ballyhooed production of Around the World in 80 Days, the film that would bring Cantinflas to his greatest international success.

Todd’s dominance in the ’50s sequences creates a peculiar imbalance, and at times the film seems more about the making of Todd’s blockbuster than about the life and career of Moreno/Cantinflas (played very effectively here by the Spanish-born actor ”scar Jaenada). But both strands of the tale ultimately coalesce as parallel accounts of the man’s rise to a near-mythical culture-hero status.

The screenplay is fairly standard rags-to-riches show-biz stuff, but the period-piece details are generally flavorsome and the episodic glimpses of Mexican show-biz history are especially piquant. And Moreno’s journey from tent-show scrapper to big-time mover and shaker (superstar, union organizer, movie producer, patron of the arts, etc.) is fascinating, even in this simplified form.

Jaenada’s superbly detailed evocation of Moreno/Cantinflas helps a great deal as well. Imperioli is careful to maintain second-banana status in the otherwise very dynamic Todd role.

With the exception of Julian Sedgwick, who at least sounds like Charlie Chaplin, most of the actors doing cameos of real-life celebrities are rather indifferently cast. Nevertheless, the film does offer up briefly amusing versions of such Mexican luminaries as Diego Rivera, María Félix, Miroslava, Emilio “El Indio” Fernández and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.