Yo, también
***/****
starring Lola Dueñas, Pablo Pineda, Antonio Naharro, Isabel García Lorca
written and directed by Álvaro Pastor & Antonio Naharro
by Alex Jackson Daniel (Pablo Pineda) is a 34-year-old man with Down Syndrome who has recently graduated from college and gotten a job as a social worker connecting persons with disabilities with home- and community-based services. (I served my internship at a state-run agency like this.) There he meets and grows infatuated with the blonde, slightly older, sexually provocative Laura (Lola Dueñas), who does not have Down Syndrome. They find themselves developing a strong friendship, with Daniel trying to push it towards something more and Laura wading very cautiously, worried about exploiting him. I'll grant you: Me Too is kind of a Down Syndrome version of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. I didn't realize how bizarre that sounds until I typed it, which should indicate that the film serves some kind of legitimate, socially-redemptive purpose. The college-educated Daniel is an outlier, made as unthreatening as possible, and we're ambivalent as to whether or not he should be aspiring to join the ranks of "normal" people instead of just accepting himself for who he is. But to its credit, Me Too neither ignores nor dodges any of these complaints–though it's very gentle in the way it triggers and then assuages our liberal guilt. Following a point-of-view close-up of Laura's cleavage, I became terrified that Daniel was going to assault her. Of course he doesn't. The filmmakers seem to be telling me I was wrong for feeling that way, to relax and not get too embarrassed about it. Daniel treats people's assumptions about him with great patience and humour; he appears to believe that we all mean well. Complicating things wonderfully, the film sources Laura's promiscuity to childhood sexual abuse by her father. Her attraction to Daniel is then explained by the fact that she doesn't think of him sexually. Not only that, she has an additional vested interest in not sexually exploiting him. But as Laura's abuse has rendered her, in a very real and unironic way, possibly more retarded than Daniel, the line between who is exploiting whom becomes significantly blurred. Would he be attracted to her were she not excessively sexualized as a result of her past? Remembering that something like ninety percent of pregnancies with the diagnosis of Down Syndrome are terminated, I'll admit that my eyes watered a little when Daniel details that he's come as far as he has because his mother read and talked to him as a child and essentially treated him as a normal, perfectly intelligent person capable of understanding her. The simple, effortlessly humanist message of Me Too is that nurture matters more than nature. And nurture is something we can actually do something about.
