Film: Bella
Release date: 7th February 2011
Certificate: PG
Running time: 91 mins
Director: Alejandro Gomez Monteverde
Starring: Eduardo Verástegui, Tammy Blanchard, Manny Perez, Ali Landry, Angélica Aragón
Genre: Drama/Romance
Studio: Kaleidoscope
Format: DVD
Country: USA/Mexico
This is a majority English-Language release.
Mexican director Alejandro Monteverde’s first – and so far only – feature length film is a cross cultural story of love set in New York City. Unambiguously belonging to the indie school of filmmaking, its softly paced tale envisions pain as a path to redemption. In the words of the director, “Each person’s pain becomes each person’s medicine. It becomes each other’s redemption.”
José works as a chef in a restaurant owned by his brother Manny, who trades on the chicness of their Mexican ethnicity for the restaurant’s fashionable reputation. Manny conducts himself with the air of a mini dictator in his small kingdom, indifferent to the personal lives of his staff, and oblivious to their daily trials and dramas. When one of the waitresses, Nina, is late one too many times, he fires her, unaware that she has just discovered that she is pregnant.
Nina flees the restaurant in angry despair, but José, unlike his brother, is unable to stand by and watch another human being suffer without trying to help. Amongst the urban chaos of the city, José begins to earn Nina’s trust, and gradually draws out her story.
Retreating to the tranquillity of José’s parents’ beach house, he eventually reveals, in piecemeal flashback, the story of a traumatic event in his own mysterious past. Why did he throw away a successful career as an international footballer to work in anonymity in his brother’s restaurant? Why is his brother Manny so insecure in contrast to his warm hearted family? Reflecting upon the painful events of their past, José and Nina discover an unexpected symmetry in their experiences which enables both to achieve redemption…
The film – with the exception of the flashbacks and the final scene – takes place over the course of a day and a night, with its emphasis on emotional revelation and reflection rather than any dramatic occurrences. The very gentle pace at which the relationship between Nina and José progresses reflects how slowly trust builds between two wounded individuals. This structure, and the film’s contemplative, poetic mood make it reminiscent of Before Sunrise, but while the chemistry between the two leads is convincing and tender, the film’s attempts at profundity and soulfulness are heavy handed, and lack the originality which made Before Sunrise a more authentic stab at conveying the questioning nature of youthful love.
The film’s opening shot gives a fair indication of Bella’s tone of folksy contemplation. Against images of seagulls careering over sunlit waves, José says, “My grandmother always said, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” José takes Nina to meet his parents, whose warmth and fierce love for their children clearly helped to form his open-hearted and generous character. The home life of his Mexican/Puerto Rican parents is full of dancing, laughter, tears, good food and tequila - more clichés than you could shake a maraca at, making it hard to take the intended point, regarding the importance of family life in developing character, seriously.
Eduardo Verastegui as José sports a magnificent beard in the manner of a biblical prophet, which, together with his stained chef’s overall, fails to hide his film star looks, all twinkling and crinkling eyes. His character’s unremitting goodness, while admirable, stretches the bounds of credulity, but Verastegui expresses the humility of remorse and the courage of compassion with conviction. Tammy Blanchard also puts in a solid performance as Nina, switching between prickly anger and a fierce independence and sorrowful vulnerability, although she is let down by the film’s most pedestrian dialogue when she talks about the moral dilemmas of her pregnancy. There is a strong supporting cast, whose contributions help to build the director’s vision of how the accident of personality and chance encounters create the narratives of these people’s lives.
Bella was panned by critics on its release but won the People’s Choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006, and that gives a fair indication of what can be expected from it. Visually Bella is not particularly striking, and it has some hoary old clichés in its script writing and some over familiar scenarios. But the performances are of a high standard and there is some effective intercutting between past and present scenes which give immediacy and drama to the revelations of José’s former life. It’s a wistful vision of how we should treat each other, rather than a deeply soul searching exercise; its openly and perhaps naively tender hearted approach is likely to divide viewers one way or another.
A sentimental and thoughtful rather than groundbreaking love story, Bella is the filmic equivalent of hot chocolate and churros, dabbing at emotional wounds with a cotton wool touch. KR
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