No accounting
for taste

>> Award-winner Bella is manipulative,
meandering and maudlin

by MATTHEW HAYS

Over the past two decades, the Toronto International Film Fest has emerged as one of the most important in the world.

But the audience award at TIFF proves there’s something foul amid all the accolades. Two Septembers ago, a New York independent film, Bella, would take the People’s Choice Award at the fest, which meant at least some people liked it (or director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde had friends and family stuff the ballot box).

In the competently shot film, one hot young stud (Eduardo Verastegui) plays a rising soccer star who’s about to sign a whopping $2-million contract. Then, tragedy strikes (we don’t know the precise nature of this tragedy until mid-way through the movie via flashback). Verastegui’s footie career is sunk as a result, and he ends up a cook in his hardnosed brother’s restaurant. Which is where a gorgeous waitress (Tammy Blanchard) shows up, only to be fired by hardnosed bro due to repeated lateness.

Verastegui is upset to see Blanchard get canned, so he tosses in his apron and follows her, inflaming his bro’s anger. Then the two basically hang out for much of the rest of Bella, in a way that can only occur in a truly badly written movie. They wander about, flashbacks occur occasionally, they open up to each other and it’s fairly obvious where everything is headed.

Undoubtedly the worst, most glaring part of Bella is that key moment at halftime, when Verastegui reveals his inner most self to Blanchard, in the apparent hopes that if he tells her his devastating secret, she’ll be easier to bed.

Obviously, all film is, on some level, manipulative—the director and writer undoubtedly want to make us experience something emotionally. But this sequence has got to be the least subtle bit of filmmaking I’ve seen in recent memory, with Monteverde milking it for everything it’s worth. So extreme was this endless sequence of emotional hardcore porn—it’s essentially a kiddie snuff movie—that I had trouble sitting through the rest of Bella.

Some films raise deep philosophical questions. This one left me asking: large droves of people actually liked this thing?

Bella opens this Friday, April 11

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