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Since I really loved ‘Half Nelson’, I was quite eager to see what Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck did afterwards. The first interesting thing is how this movie completely stood out with the rest of their filmography and I wonder how they ended up directing this. Anyway, what I enjoyed the most about it was the raw and realistic approach. It reminded me of many things, for example, when I spent a week of holiday in the Dominican Republic in an all inclusive holiday resort. Already at the time, even though I saw nothing of it, I could sense that, behind the walls of this resort, the life of the average people living in the Dominican Republic was probably not so great. While this trip in the Dominican Republic was more than 20 years ago, it also reminded me of another trip I did only a few months ago to Cameroon. Indeed, how everything looked and how the people lived here was such a contrast with what we see in Europe or other Western countries and it was very similar to what was displayed in this movie. Finally, it reminded me of my girlfriend who fled Eritrea to live in the Netherlands about 10 years ago. With this movie, I got a pretty good sense of how alienating it must have been for her when she ended up in a rich country like the Netherlands. Indeed, she obviously didn’t speak the language, she knew pretty much nothing about this country and she had no connection or contact there whatsoever. So, all of this was very well handled in this movie and the end-result was quite intriguing but, to be honest, it was still missing something to become really remarkable though. I won’t blame Algenis Perez Soto who gave here a really solid performance. It was also really commendable how they kept his trajectory so down-to-earth instead of making him the next baseball wonder which might have been more uplifting but definitely so much less believable and realistic. I think it might have to do with how the main character developed (or failed to develop) connections while he was living in the US, especially with the people who didn’t speak Spanish. I mean, it was realistic, that’s for sure, but I was missing some growth there. The best and worst example was his rather deplorable and pathetic attempt to hook up with some American girl. To be honest, it felt rather half-baked and also like it belonged to a completely different movie. I thought it might derail the whole thing but it had very little impact after all so you might wonder what was then the added value. Anyway, to conclude, even if it was maybe not a masterpiece, I still really enjoyed the damned thing and it is definitely worth a look.
7/10
