Do I know, intellectually, that the title is meant to be read as “Cuatro Caminos”? Yes. Do I read it as “Four Caminos” anyway? Also yes.
I did some digging (for 30 whole seconds), but was unable to find any particular background or explanation behind the thought process of making this film. I mean, obviously it was due to the insane success of Rebelde Way and Erreway but like…why this movie? Why the need to place it in an “alternate universe”, per Wikipedia, so that it has almost no continuity with its parent series? 4 Caminos in no way picks up where the series left off or even has much to do with the characters as we knew them. It seems more like it’s capitalizing off the concept of the Rebelde Way characters, and the parasocial attachment that fans had formed to the actors, than actually being about the series. (I’m not judging that, by the way — I’m just pointing out the dynamic because I recognize it. I remember watching The Lizzie McGuire movie in fifth grade and not giving a single fuck that Miranda had been written off, because I was basically only there for Hilary Duff.)
Anyway, forget 99% of what you know about the characters from the series, except for the vague archetype of what they were like at the very beginning of the show, and let’s go forth.
We open with a Mysterious Woman narrating. She dramatizes that memory is a traitor, because everyone remembers the same event in different ways. Ah, it’s been a while since we’ve had a fake-philosophical narrative opening. Mysterious Woman says that this movie is the story as she knows it.
All of the members of Erreway are packing up to go on tour. All of them look to live in different houses — none of which look like the sets from the show — which means that Mia and Marizza aren’t stepsisters anymore, I guess. (RIP to Lujan, who I assume is still wandering the streets of Buenos Aires in this version.) Pablo does still seem to have issues with his dad — he trashes his room before he leaves, and we see him pull down a photo used in the show, of Papa B and Pablo. Pablo’s wearing his Elite Way uniform in the photo, but we don’t see any indication that Erreway went to school together, although they also never explain if the band met under different circumstances in this movie. Marizza leaves a note telling her mother that she loves her, but at the last minute, she crumples it up. Don’t bother remembering any of this, though; none of the characters’ home lives actually come up at any point.
Manuel has also picked up Rocco’s trait of being a film buff, as he spends most of the movie with a camera in hand, and we’re constantly cutting between the movie footage and Manuel’s “homemade” camcorder footage.
We suffer through a really jerky, blurry montage of everyone heading towards the city center to meet up. I don’t know why they felt the need to edit it this way; I’m getting whiplash. Mia and Manuel greet each other with their tongues; Marizza and Pablo merely snark at each other. So if you enjoyed Pablo and Marizza’s character development in the show, and the way they grew to be a semi-mature couple — forget all that, we’re right back to where we started with these two.
Mia’s stuffed her suitcase with so much crap that it pops open in the street, and everyone has a hearty chuckle. That Mia is so shallow! (Also, dig her unnecessary pink cowboy hat. Remember when brightly-colored cowboy hats were on-trend for women who have never been near a cow in their lives? Ah, 2004.) (Speaking of 2004, also dig Mia and Marizza’s boho-chic outfits.)
Some janky van pulls up, driven by a washed-up musician named Benito. I guess he’s their manager-slash-driver, and he’s really overconfident and full of bluster in a way where you know he’s going to get the band in trouble at some point by like, lying to a promoter or gambling away the band money or something. Despite his suspicious lack of professionalism, we cut to Erreway on the bus. Benito apparently went off somewhere, because he then comes back, bearing snacks. File this away for later. And thus, they set off on tour — their first tour, they say, because I guess we’re not acknowledging how they played a sold-out tour all over South America in the show.
Mia gushes to the camera that she wants to be famous, again, because in this universe she isn’t already a nationally-famous popstar who’s sold out the Gran Rex. The narrator speculates on all of the members’ motives for pursuing music: Mia wants to immortalize herself through fame (hi, foreshadowing), Pablo wants to become independent from his father (though without any backstory, we’re not really sure why), Marizza sees it as a refuge because she feels powerful when she performs, and Manuel is searching for a family, as he’s the only person who doesn’t have anyone in Argentina. Again, they never actually go into any specifics about the characters’ backgrounds — like, is Manuel still from Mexico? Why doesn’t he have any friends or adopted family in Argentina in this version? Or are we just supposed to think he’s an orphan?
Pablo hits on Marizza and she shuts him down, telling him that she knows he says that shit to all the girls. Pablo cackles to Manuel that she’s right; his main objective on this tour is to pick up chicks. Who is he, Guido? Even in the show’s early episodes, Pablo was just a privileged jerk, he was never particularly pervy — at least not of his own initiative; I’ll admit that he freely cheated on all his not-Marizza girlfriends if Guido or Tomás suggested it, though. In any case, this still feels weird.
Then Pablo spies a guitar hanging from the ceiling of the bus and tries to noodle around with it. Benito yells at him that the guitar was given to him by Brian May and if any of them ever touch it, Benito will murder them in their sleep. The narrator says that they never know if Benito is telling the truth or just exaggerating, but his stories are fun to listen to. Again, you can totally tell that this guy is going to fuck things up with his grandstanding, but we’re probably going to have to think it’s quirky because he has a ~good heart~ or some shit.
Erreway runs into their first problem pretty quickly: their engine blows and they end up stranded on the side of the road. All of them despair that now they’re stuck and they have nothing to eat. Uh, what happened to all those snacks Benito brought? Did they eat all of them already? Whatever. Anyway, they try to flag down the passing cars, but it doesn’t work until Mia and Marizza pull a It Happened One Night and flash some leg. A car pulls over and Mia says that she hopes the driver is hot, because she thinks Marizza needs to get laid.
The driver is not hot, and Mia’s all, “Gross, he’s old and has a beer belly!” Nevertheless, the dude says he knows a mechanic who can come fix their engine in the morning, and he leaves them a (live) chicken for their dinner. So maybe don’t shit on him, Mia, since he just saved your asses? That said, I highly doubt any of them know how to slaughter and cook a chicken. It turns out not to matter, as Marizza (and Mia, to a lesser extent) refuses to kill it. I mean, I understand the hesitation, but like, you guys have absolutely no food, so maybe now is not the time to be picky? Then the chicken escapes and there’s a wacky interlude where the boys chase it and get covered in mud. Hijinks!
Somehow, after that, the chicken is perfectly docile and doesn’t try to run away from them anymore, so they decide to make a pet out of it. Marizza names it “Rosita” and Benito ends up foraging for vegetables for dinner. He, Pablo, and Marizza eat together, while Manuel and Mia hang out on the roof of the bus and talk about how their love is eternal like the stars above them or whatever the fuck. Mia muses that she feels like a different person on this tour, somehow. “Yeah, that’s ’cause they completely retconned our characters for this movie,” Manuel doesn’t say. They briefly discuss having kids, for foreshadowing purposes.
For some reason, they all decide to camp out and sleep outside. What, do the beds inside the bus need the engine to work? Pablo asks Marizza if she’s scared, and she assumes that he’s hitting on her (he is kind of waggling his eyebrows) and storms off to sleep on the bus. In the midst of her pique, she knocks the parking brake loose. This, of course, is the real reason why everyone is sleeping outside: so that Marizza is alone inside the bus when it starts rolling away.
The next morning, everyone freaks out when they see that the bus is gone, but apparently it rolled right into the mechanic’s garage, because Marizza drives the repaired bus back with the mechanic in the passenger seat. He tells them he replaced the engine and Erreway is on their way once more. There’s a brief montage of them rolling through the countryside, while Solo sé plays.
They make it to their first tour stop, which is a pretty small town. The band and Benito are splitting 3 rooms at the hotel: Mia and Manuel immediately decide to room together, leaving Pablo and Marizza to fight over who gets to room alone. Pablo wants the single for himself so that he can hook up with the hotel receptionist, whom he’s making eyes at, much to Marizza’s displeasure. Marizza points out that she would need to room with Benito in that case, and there is no way in hell she’s doing that. Pablo snatches the room key first and Marizza jumps him. We then start cutting between shots of them rolling around on the floor wrestling, and a semi-racy scene of Mia and Manuel rolling around the bed in their hotel room. Ha ha, get it? Do you see the parallels here? Truly a masterpiece of visual storytelling.
Anyway, Marizza manages to grab the key. The next morning, she hangs out on the hotel balcony wearing just a towel, as you do. Pablo spies her and is annoyed that she’s exposing herself to God and everybody; Marizza is annoyed that he’s…looking at her in the towel, so she goes inside to change? This could’ve been avoided if she had changed in her room to begin with? Whatever. Pablo follows Marizza into her hotel room and whines some more that he couldn’t fuck the hotel receptionist with Benito snoring one bed over. Marizza tells him to fuck off.
They eventually go over to Mia and Manuel’s room to rehearse. The band sees an ad on TV for a battle of the bands in Rio de Janeiro. They’re like, “Wow, it would be cool if we entered that” but decide not to.
Benito rolls through town promoting Erreway’s show through a microphone on the bus, except the loudspeaker is all muffled and nobody can understand him. Benito swings by the venue where Erreway is meant to play, and…doesn’t seem to like it? We don’t see what he’s looking at, but he then goes back to the hotel and pushes Erreway into not leaving for the venue until later in the evening, although they want to go early to set up. He then drives them to a sketchy “cabaret”, and they seem really shocked in a way that implies that this wasn’t the original plan. I’m not totally sure what I’m meant to make of this sequence. Like, I can’t tell if Erreway is getting schooled about all the shit places they’ll have to play while they work for a record deal, or if Benito changed the venue on them without notice. He brings up that the only cinema in the town is owned by “evangelists”, and…I thinkthe implication is that they were booked for the cabaret all along because it was the only venue available, with Benito perhaps not realizing it was a cabaret until he saw it in person. Whatever. I’ve spent too much time thinking about this, let’s move on. Suffice to say, this would never happen in the show, where Erreway was inexplicably playing the Gran Rex with no album out.
Obviously, nobody at the cabaret signed up to hear teen pop music, so the room is totally dead at first — but eventually the patrons realize what we all know, which is that resistance to Erreway is futile. Everyone gets into their performance of “Vivo como vivo“, but then some guy grabs Marizza’s hand semi-flirtatiously. Pablo flips out and punches the guy. A huge brawl breaks out, ending with everyone in jail.
Pablo tries to tell Marizza that he was defending her honor, but she gives him a speech about how he’s too immature and insecure for her. She tells him that if he wants to be her lover, he’s gotta stop trying to hooko up with hot receptionists and punching every guy that looks at her funny. All the cabaret patrons and strippers are like, “Go off queen!” and that’s the whole scene.
Meanwhile, Benito is pulled into a meeting with the owner of the cabaret, some sketchy dude named Angioletti. Apparently he and Benito go way back, and Benito arranged the Erreway show through him. Angioletti is not pleased that Erreway trashed his nightclub, and sighs that Benito owes him a lot of money. See what I said earlier, about Benito clearly fucking things up for the band?
However, lest you think Angioletti’s going to subject Benito to the rat-in-a-bucket treatment, a la 2 Fast 2 Furious, not even hardened gangsters are immune to catchy teen pop music. Angioletti chirps that he thought Erreway was just great, and he’s willing to let them work off the debt by playing a few extra shows so that Angioletti can bop to “Tiempo” some more or whatever. If they don’t follow through, though, Angioletti will make sure they’re all banished to Southern Argentina, where no one will ever hear from them again. (But hey, they can hang out with Martavio and Mansilla!)
Erreway sets off again on another cross-country montage, this time set to “Bandera blanca“. We see them play a bunch of successful shows, oddly with a backing band present, even though it’s clearly only the four of them (and Benito) on the tour. Ah, well. I guess showing Erreway playing small clubs was the most realism they could muster. We then cut to some scenes of them fucking around on the tour bus, with a close-up of Bubbaloo to remind us of the good old days:
Oh, Bubbaloo. You’re a sweet sign of familiarity in this bizarre movie.
Erreway sells out more and more shows, and Angioletti seems pleased with the return on his investment. Erreway takes turns driving the bus (Pablo crosses himself when Marizza’s at the wheel. HEE!). Pablo keeps hitting on receptionists; at one hotel, Marizza tries stealing his keys again, but Pablo ignores her. Marizza is sad and confused.
The montage finally ends on a scene of Mia crossing off Erreway shows on her calendar, then realizing that she’s missed her period. Gosh, what do you guys think will happen next?
Up next: Teen pregnancy; a storyline so good, we’re going to have to sit through it twice.
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