Movie Reviews
The latest from talented filmmaker Jim Mckay focuses on the lives of soccer-loving Mexican expats living in a pre-trump New York. EN EL SÉPTIMO DÍA
Starring Fernando Cardona. In English and Spanish, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
Maybe God can afford to rest 2
on the seventh day, but for the Mexican-born helpers in the restaurants, flower shops, and bodegas of Brooklyn, Sunday means futbol!
Beautifully told, without a hint of Hollywood gloss and using a mostly nonprofessional cast, En el Séptimo Día centres on José (Fernando Cardona), a bike-delivery guy for a classy Mexican restaurant. It’s unclear what his legal status is, but the men he hangs out with at an overcrowded but lively apartment, all from his part of Puebla, Mexico, have a generalized anxiety about their paperwork. (The film was made in 2016, before anxiety turned to terror.)
His young wife, pregnant with their first child, is due to join him in New York, and he’s been at his job long enough that he’s due to be promoted to a better position. José’s big problem, when we meet him for what will turn out to be one eventful week, is that his boss (Christopher Gabriel Núñez) needs him to work the following Sunday—normally his day off—when he’s hoping to lead his soccer team of fellow Poblanos to victory in finals against another amateur team of Mexican expats. A handsome, gentle fellow with a deceptively severe haircut, José is their best player. And when another team member sustains an injury that will keep him from playing, he sets out to find a couple of subs while mollifying his boss, friends, and coworkers. Sometimes, a game is more than a game.
There are some jerk moves here and there, but no real villains, and that’s it for dramatic conflicts in this judiciously low-key film. The naturalistic settings, pace, and acting belie the fact that writer-director Jim Mckay has an advanced degree in big-budget TV drama, having helmed many episodes of The Good Wife, Treme, In Treatment, and the various Law & Order iterations. His three previous features (the most recent from 14 years ago) all dealt with the higher aspirations of working-class people in multiethnic America. Reportedly, this project came from him getting to know young immigrants in his own neighbourhood, listening to their stories, and workshopping them as actors.
Among the cast, our lead is quietly charismatic, but Abel Perez, who plays José’s most hotheaded teammate, seems ready for prime time. Also look for Veracruz singing star Zenén Zeferino Huervo, who gets the last word in this bittersweet love letter to everyone working eight days a week to make a home away from home. > KEN EISNER
digs into everything but her music. Even true fans may feel cheated by a fairly well-made movie that seems to be missing its own star.
In any case, spending this much time with the late singer’s too-brief life story is an exercise in ghostclutching. A sense of absence is evident right from a childhood apparently built on neglect, deception, and some pretty traumatic abuse. Her father was a philandering, wellconnected crook in Newark, New Jersey, and mother Cissy Houston was part of a musical family that also includes Dionne Warwick and her more troubled sister, Dee Dee.
Cissy had a significant career singing backup for Aretha Franklin and other top talents, was a lifelong church-choir director, and was never short of paying jobs. Real fame eluded her, however, and this drove relentless efforts to mould her only daughter into the perfect superstar. Whitney’s brothers and other relatives—all on the Houston payroll during its heyday—attest to the ruthlessness with which that shaping took place. Now 84, the elder Houston offers little here but tired platitudes, underlining the sense that she never really took interest in Whitney except as a vehicle for greatness.
This obsessive yet essentially disconnected relationship was repeated in Whitney’s relationship with her own child, Bobbi Kristina, who only survived her mom’s 2012 death by three years, and weirdly died in the same location: a bathtub. (The movie doesn’t mention that Whitney was due that night at a Grammys tribute to mentor Clive Davis.) Husband Bobby Brown is even more tightlipped than Cissy, and comes across as a pathetic figure, even if it’s made clear that Whitney started snorting coke long before she met the New Edition singer, always destined to dwell in her shadow. Also notably silent is Robyn Crawford, Whitney’s lesbian best friend and sometime business manager and roommate, whom the homophobic brothers (who little resemble her) seem to blame for some of their problems.
The implication that Bobby was used as a beard for Whitney’s more fluid sexuality remains unexplored in the new film, written and directed by Scottish-born (but Vancouver-connected) Kevin Macdonald. Crawford likewise didn’t address the camera in Nick Broomfield’s earlier Whitney: Can I Be Me, but she was likely one of
A documentary by Tim Wardle. Rated PG
When teen star Patty Duke 2
played improbably identical cousins—one from England and one who’d “only seen the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights”—they at least knew they were related. The main joke of her Show, which ran for three seasons upon the advent of Beatlemania, is just how different twins could be. Three Identical Strangers runs in the opposite direction, and yet somehow ends up in the same place.
Intriguingly well organized by British documentary director Tim Wardle, this new film tackles the exceedingly strange case of triplets separated at birth but raised within 100 miles of each other, in New York state. That state of mind is underlined by their resemblance to the young Billy Joel, as they discovered when the three bushy-haired, round-faced suburbanites found each other in 1980, almost by accident, after 19 years apart.
Eddy Galland, David Kellman, and Bobby Shafran were all raised by Jewish families of different social standing—a factor that came into play later in their lives, and later in the doc, which takes darker, ever more unexpected turns as it covers its increasingly complex 90 minutes. Initially, the reunited siblings, their families, and media mavens of all kinds were delighted by their beyondcoincidental similarities. Their tastes in cars, music, clothes, cigarettes, and girlfriends were as alike as the colour of their eyes. Eventually, they cashed in on their notoriety by opening a triplet-themed restaurant in the coked-up Manhattan of the Studio 54 era. You can imagine how well that went.
Let’s just say that the siblings and their adopted clans and lifelong friends—many of whom address Wardle’s camera frankly, and at length—didn’t find the reunion entirely joyful. One of the most interesting talkers here is Lawrence Wright, whose 1995 New Yorker piece on separated twins, “Double Mystery” (later spun into several books), was the first to examine a New York City adoption agency that placed a curious number of curiously separated twins into curiously
Starring Esther Garrel. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
Don’t invite your noncinephile 2
friends to see Lover for a Day, if you don’t want them thinking all French movies are black-and-white talkfests about attractive people smoking Gauloises while discussing affairs in cute Parisian cafés.
The effect is not entirely unintentional. Writer-director Philippe Garrel, born in 1948, has been making Godardy-looking movies since, well, the new wave was new. His recent efforts—like the similarly themed Regular Lovers and In the Shadow of Women—have been high-contrast, low-action character studies that centre on older, academic men who hook up with sprightly young women still finding themselves. C’est bizarre!
Here, 50-ish philosophy professor Gilles (Éric Caravaca) is newly shacked up with Ariane (handsomely freckled newcomer Louise Chevillotte), one of his former students. The movie makes extravagantly clear that he resisted her seductions until the end of the school year. That matters little to Gilles’s daughter Jeanne, played by the excellent Esther Garrel, the neglected girlfriend in Call Me
and this filmmaker’s daughter, adding to the Freudian mix.
Jeanne says she’s been dumped by her live-in boyfriend and needs a place to crash. The script allows for modernday cellphones, but these aren’t the kind of people who call ahead. She’s initially upset to find someone her own age with dear Papa, but both women eventually realize they should be BFFS, sharing secrets and even hooking up with random guys together.
Ariane has a thing for boffing strangers while standing up in bathrooms and broom closets, and she really hopes that won’t be a problem for Gilles. He wants to be down with the young people, and impresses her with his open-mindedness. Still, she can’t quite understand why he loses his cool after accidentally stumbling onto one of her public assignations. When Jeanne asks him about such things, he says, “No one has ever come up with a real definition of infidelity.” Right. Rare topic! He also
A documentary by Corneliu Porumboiu. In Romanian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
Infinite patience is required of 2
viewers who stumble upon Infinite Football, which struggles to find its cinematic feet, even at a paltry 70 minutes, all shot carelessly on a consumergrade camera. That said, followers of the Beautiful Game and eastern European history won’t be unduly penalized by time spent with a true eccentric who intersects both subjects.
The film will garner some attention from fans of Romanian upstart Corneliu Porumboiu, who directed such festival hits as 12:08 East of Bucharest
and Police, Adjective. The subject here is bland-looking, middle-aged Laurentiu Ginghina, a promising high-school footballer until two devastating injuries took him out of the game. He ended up a midlevel administrator in the post-communist government. (We see him sitting passively as an elderly woman pursues her claim to regain seized property.) But his real passion has been refining and reinventing the game of soccer toward increasingly obscure ends.
The director is happy to let him elaborate his ever-shifting theories. These include shaving off the corners of a standard field and putting a barrier between halves, with five players from each team cordoned into sections. It’s hard to know what the point might be, except that everything seems to restrict the motion of actual footballers, and increase what he calls “the freedom of the ball”.
“I’m still working on how to get the ball from one half to the other,” he adds later, as an afterthought. He even gets some amateur players to try his alternate plans, to frustrating effect. “It’s clear that FIFA will never accept anything like this,” Ginghina admits. The film ends, unexpectedly, with a long disquisition on Plato and the perils of translation, with Jesus’s New Testament exhortation to “Repent!” actually intended to mean “Change!” This is followed by credits rolling over a Soviet-era cartoon. Rules, like religions and political systems, are meant to be bent and then broken.
> KEN EISNER