moviereview - Bella

BELLA

	When Manny sacks a recently-pregnant waitress from his restaurant, Chef José takes the day off to ease her pain.	score 3+	moviereview rates films from 1 (unwatchable) to 5 (unmissable)
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Cast
Eduardo Verastegui, Tammy Blanchard, Manny Perez

Director
Alejandro Monteverde

Screenwriter
Alejandro Monteverde
Patrick Million

Country
USA / Mexico

Rating / Running Time
PG / 91 minutes

Australian Release
February 2008

Official Site

Bella is the ultimate feel-bad, feel-terrible, feel-slightly-better film. Forget feel-good, unless you like crying into your popcorn, this is not on Mexican director Alejandro Monteverde’s agenda. Yet there’s clearly a market for sadness, Bella took out the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival.

José (Mexican heartthrob and former pop sensation Eduardo Verástegui) is about to sign a deal with a big football club. Flash forward five years and he’s now a chef in his brother’s New York restaurant. What went wrong? You’ll find out after Nina the waitress (Tammy Blanchard) is fired for being late. José intervenes and learns that she’s unwillingly pregnant, drops his chef’s hat and spends the day to be a friend. It involves a trip to his parents and a revelation about his fateful afternoon, five years ago.

Monteverde has a firm hand on his debut feature, and confidently fills it with a rich and varied visual style that, choppy at first, quickly settles into its own irregular rhythm. New York is seen at ground level, no Sex in the City glamour here. This is a recognisable urban landscape common to all city dwellers. The emotional treatment is ripe (it’s a Latin story), but touching, compelling. He maintains an honesty about family and their friendship, populating the story with garden-variety incidents and encounters; some warm, some utterly tragic. Blanchard’s impressive performance spins emotional responses in all directions.

Bella is a story about ordinary people trying to deal with a particularly shitty day. Empathy is a major player, and Monteverde’s stylised authenticity is his trump card. Even when takes us to the anticipated tear-jerk ending, it has been coaxed organically from the narrative. Few would be left doubting that Bella is a beauty.

// COLIN FRASER