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The film stars Eduardo Verastegui as Jose, a gifted athlete whose dreams of soccer greatness were shattered years ago in a tragedy that is shown to us in a series of gradually unfolding flashbacks designed to pump up the melodramatic aspects. Now he works as a cook in a restaurant run by his greedy and self-centered brother (Manny Perez) and spends most of his time staring soulfully into the distance, no doubt praying that no one from the health board will come in and order him to shave off his Jesus beard if he is working in food preparation. One day, one of the waitresses at the restaurant, Nina (Tammy Blanchard), turns up late for work again and is immediately fired by Manny. On an impulse, Jose bails on Manny and goes off to follow her and discovers that not only is she late, she is late late. Over the course of one very long day and night, Jose escorts her to an abortion clinic–which she naturally flees in horror–gets her a new job at a better restaurant, takes her to his parents’ house for a big family dinner and eventually gets around to explaining his own personal trauma–a moment that comes approximately an hour after everyone else has figured it out for themselves.

“Bella” is a film with its heart the right place but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it isn’t a very good movie in the long run. Unlike a film like “Before Sunrise,” which also featured a couple of people getting to know each other over the course of one long day, the two characters here just aren’t very interesting–their past traumas aren’t particularly traumatic (especially when it becomes clear that Jose is virtually blameless for his particular trauma) and their future decisions aren’t exactly shrouded with mystery. (If you walk into this film convinced that it will end with Nina returning to the abortion clinic to go through with the procedure, I can assure you know that you have walked into the wrong movie.) Perhaps realizing that the central storyline was a little thin, the film also includes a few additional subplots but they are either distracting (Manny’s kitchen crisis in the wake of Jose’s departure) or abandoned as soon as they are introduced (we learn in the beginning that the soccer team Jose would have been on will be visiting the restaurant but once we learn this, we never see or hear anything about them again.) Then there is the ending, a bit of film that probably sounded nice and noble in theory but which only raises more questions than it answers and is too treacly to be believed.

Under normal circumstances, I try to bend over backwards to be nice to low-budget works along these lines, even if I don’t like particularly like them–why act snarky when the filmmakers are clearly trying to tell a sincere story despite the lack of cinematic craftsmanship. However, as “Bella” plodded along, even the goodwill that I usually try to keep in reserve for low-budget indies with their hearts in the right place began to erode and towards the end, I began having the potentially irreverent thought that the entire purpose of this movie was to show a group of Mexicans with nothing better to do with their lives than to help convince a strange white woman to consider adoption. In the end, “Bella” is a well-meaning film that nevertheless turns out to be little more than an extended After-School Special involving lessons that presumably won’t come as a surprise to anyone watching it.

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originally posted: 10/26/07 04:37:35
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