Mexican actor and producer Gael García Bernal has been an impactful screen presence for 25 years. It began with his breakout role in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2000 film Amores Perros and became undeniable thanks to his magnetic performance alongside lifelong bud Diego Luna in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (2001). Their friendship also extends to their professional lives, as Bernal and Luna co-founded the production company La Corriente del Golfo in 2018.
Bernal has won a Golden Globe for his lead role in the Amazon Prime series Mozart in the Jungle and a BAFTA for his portrayal of the iconic revolutionist, Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries. Recently, Bernal teamed with Luna once again for the Hulu series La Máquina. In the show, Bernal plays an aging boxer navigating the end of his career and the shadowy underworld tied to the sport.
More: Jonás Cuarón and Gael García Bernal on Desierto (The Business, 2016)
For his Treat, Bernal discusses his deep admiration for Ettore Scola’s 1974 classic We All Loved Each Other So Much. He discovered the Italian film as a young teenager — first on television while watching Canal 20 in Mexico and later cemented his devotion by seeing it in the theaters in both New York and Mexico. He praises the film’s non-linear storytelling, its theatrical and surrealistic elements, and its ability to capture the evolution of both the characters and their hopes… which ultimately collide with the harsh realities of life.
More: Gael García Bernal on re-teaming with his pal Diego Luna for La Máquina (The Treatment, 2024)
This segment has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I want to talk to you about this incredible film. It's called We All Loved Each Other So Much by Ettore Scola.
The first time I saw it, I was very young. I saw it on the cultural channel in Mexico, Canal 20, when I was, I think, 13 or something. The second time I saw it — because it was one of those films that you saw, and you were like, “where am I gonna be seeing this again?” [The second time] I saw it [was] at the Lincoln Center. They were doing a whole retrospective of Ettore Scola, and it was a great opportunity to see it on the wide, like, huge screen. And then I saw it again in the cinemateca in Mexico. And then I saw it again in my house. I've seen it again, like over, and over, and over.
It's such an epic because it spans around 30 or 40 years, more or less, in the life of three friends. And obviously, you know, these friends have many things in common. They have the first experiences in life, or the first cathartic experiences in life – being part of the resistance against the German occupation, and that's where they form the first bond, the first hopes, the first… everything. And everything begins there, but then in the film — which is not linear at all — there is this kind of revisit[ing] of: Where do they come from, how do they end up, and what's happening now in their lives [throughout]? … How the one that was the most hardcore revolutionary transformed into the most bourgeois, sort of status-quo-driven person … All with this theatrical and very surrealistic mise en scène situation. There is a soliloquy, there is a transference in time, there is a jump in time [that is] constant.
Among the many things that unite them, there is a friend of [theirs], a woman. She's like the interlocutor of all their problems, worries, and desires. She's been the object of [all of their] desire, but at the same time she's not with any one of them. She doesn't want to be with any one of them. And it's just beautiful to see how everything kind of shifts and evolves, whilst we see also Italy, and maybe the world becoming completely different from their hopes that they started with — after they kick out the Germans after Nazi occupation.
It is a film that could last more hours. I love watching it and revisiting it all the time. I adore this movie because it's the type of movie I like doing.