To flatten the curve of the coronavirus, all New York City movie theaters are indefinitely closed, and New Yorkers are urged to stay indoors except when absolutely necessary. For those who miss being able to venture all around Brooklyn, here are four easy-to-find, contemporary films set in the borough’s neighborhoods that don’t typically get featured in cinema all too much.
En el séptimo día
Jim McKay’s modestly scaled but incredibly rich En el séptimo día achieves a true portrait of a multicultural New York City, not the least for the majority of the dialogue being spoken entirely in Spanish. An undocumented delivery driver living with a group of friends in similar situations, José (Fernando Cardona), criss-crosses Brooklyn for a week, as he tries to formulate a way to get out of work on the upcoming Sunday, his soccer team having made it to the championship game to be held in Sunset Park that same day (he’s their best player). José also weathers the all too common mistreatment of delivery couriers, as trips to Gowanus, Dumbo and Carroll Gardens highlight a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn, of which Sunset Park remains a contrastingly vibrant center. Shot with an unvarnished simplicity, much of En el séptimo día follows José’s silent, pensive rides, during which he attempts to sort out his dilemma: he can’t jeopardize his standing at his job, as he’s trying to save enough money to bring his wife Elisabeth over from Mexico, but the match offers the possibility of a potent sense of victory that he can’t ignore. As the film races towards its expected climax on the day of the match, its true thematic concern becomes clear. As much as José is battered about on his delivery runs, there’s also a chance to maintain a strong sense of community among his friends, whom he visits at their jobs scattered across Brooklyn, and even of fostering such deeply rooted empathy anew, such as with a benevolent spectator at the match, or even just a fellow soccer fan.
Available on Amazon, Hulu and HBO.
It Felt Like Love / Beach Rats
Eliza Hittman’s excellent Never Rarely Sometimes Always is another victim of theater closings, being dumped straight to video-on-demand after spending only a scant few days in release. Those who caught the film, however, are encouraged to seek out Hittman’s first two features, 2013’s It Felt Like Love and 2017’s Beach Rats, both of which situate themselves within southern Brooklyn milieus that are rarely committed to film, much less by a director so refreshingly fascinated by the ways in which the regional attitudes of a neighborhood influence the everyday decisions of its inhabitants. Born in Flatbush, and an alum of Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood, Hittman brings a particular know-how to the ways in which adolescents and teenagers of Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay pass their hazy, loping summer days, as they navigate a network of deadbeat friends, absent parents, and doomed relationships.
It Felt Like Love follows high-schooler Lila (Gina Piersanti) struggling to emulate the romantic exploits of her close friend (she’s often third-wheel on trips to Coney Island, and even some petty theft in what appears to be Sea Gate), which results in her self-insertion in increasingly unsettling and potentially unsafe situations. In Beach Rats, the young Frankie (Harris Dickinson) tragically tries to reconcile his façade of heteronormativity with his internal desires that lead him to hooking up with anonymous men met online. Hittman trades in a casual realism, a filmmaking mode which trains the camera on mundane and thoughtless gestures as opposed to a blunt sense of drama. One doesn’t watch her films as much as one is overtaken by them.
Available on Amazon and iTunes.
Two Lovers
Another film set in southern Brooklyn, Two Lovers – James Gray’s 2009 adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights – transports a classical sense of Hollywood romance to 21st-century Brighton Beach. It’s the rare studio film of the past two decades to so casually subvert tried-and-true love story conventions while still retaining their inherent heartrending appeal. Joaquin Phoenix bends his visceral mode of acting to an impressively emotive effect as Leonard, a depressive young(ish) man who’s moved back into his parents’ apartment after a broken-up engagement and subsequent attempted suicide. As his family gently – and relatively successfully – pushes him in the direction of the daughter of a potential business partner in their dry-cleaning business, Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), Leonard finds himself equally infatuated with his new next-door neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), set up in the building by her married boyfriend. Gray tastefully squeezes the circumstances for all their worthy melodrama, luxuriating in a detailed atmosphere of impossible longing that is only strengthened by the underlying tension between the enclave-like community Leonard, his family and Sandra hail from, and the larger, more superficially cosmopolitan Manhattan Michelle longs to return to. Gray’s modestly burnished directing gives ample space for a performance by Phoenix that gracefully pivots between touching inwardness, and overly-earnest, even embarrassing, declarations of love. Two Lovers’ elevates its Brooklyn backdrop beyond simple window-dressing to something much more personal for the director, its location and unspoken customs inextricable from the film’s universally recognizable, much welcome beating heart.
Available on Amazon and iTunes.
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