It’s just “a typical New York moment,” or collection of moments, this movie “Bella.” Girl meets boy at work. Girl is pregnant. She’s fired. He walks off the job and spends a day trying to talk her out of an abortion, maybe by sharing his “deep dark secret.”
“Bella” is a strained dollop of Latin “magical realism” injected into a realistic American indie movie.
We meet a soccer player who has just signed the big American contract and is riding off to his New York press conference in his 1950s-vintage Cadillac convertible.
We drop in on Nina (Tammy Blanchard of “The Good Shepherd” and a recent TV Judy Garland biography), late for work again, this time scrambling to find a home pregnancy test.
Manny (Manny Perez) preps his swank New York restaurant where his brother, José, is head chef. Bearded, disheveled José (Eduardo Verastegui) may have sensitive, soulful eyes that cry out behind that beard. But he looks like a street person.
The high-strung Manny fires Nina, José runs after her. And “Bella” is about their day, dining out, visiting his family, hanging out on the beach, ruining Manny’s lunch hour rush.
José flashes back and forth to the “big day” (and big tragedy) of his past. Sometimes, he flashes forward and seems able to take Nina into this vision of the future. He needs to. Because she doesn’t want a baby.
“I can barely take care of myself.” There’s more technique and heart than credibility or mystery here.
Mexican co-writer/director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde finds warmth when he connects with how feuding brothers make up (José cooks for Manny) and catches odd little bits of New York life – the blind origami artist-street person who offers to give away his art if “the lady can tell me” what she sees all around her on “this beautiful day.” Her answer? New York is “like a huge clock. Nothing ever stops.” We learn what happened to José years before, but the too-chatty script talks away the emotional impact of that revelation.
Still, this New York story makes “Bella” an engaging failure, an inversion of some New York movie cliches, a sweet if incomplete movie about love with the proper stranger in the city that never sleeps.
“BELLA” PG-13 for thematic elements and brief disturbing images. 1 hour, 31 minutes. Written and directed by Alejandro Gomez Monteverde; starring Eduardo Verastegui, Tammy Blanchard, Manny Perez. Opens today at area theaters.
