Bella is billed as a love story, but that’s a misnomer; the crux of the film isn’t love but rather those intense and unexpected events that punctuate life and change one’s course. Where a typical love story is often fantastical, the characters and situations in Bella are penetratingly real, with the grit, glare and sorrow that so often invades reality. Mexican director/writer Alejandro Gomez Monteverde, a new talent to watch, has developed a strong style of close-ups, sharp angles and other techniques that are fresh yet seamlessly poetic. Even more impressive is Monteverde’s ability to portray a feeling, thought or a full moment in a scene with nothing but camera angles, sound and an actor’s expression or gesture. Above all, however, Monteverde has succeeded in eliciting deep empathy and emotion, and that is what makes this film a winner.I took my brother, who's not Catholic, and more cynical than I, and he liked it. He did notice one thing that didn't ring true. As Ebert points out, there is
a lot of cooking in the movie. Jungles of cilantro are chopped. The restaurant's staff luncheon features quail in a mole sauce.Mexican food as haute cuisine? Please.
Update: Not everyone loves it. Barb N. says all the right things about Christianity & the Arts and she knows way more about film than I do. Then again, it's because of her I saw Over The Hedge, for which I have not yet quite been able to forgive her. And she hasn't been above a little theological bullying, herself:
Every Christian who loves Jesus, your mission, if you will accept it is to buy movie tickets. We need to bring our kids, our church groups, our youth ministry clubs, our seniors groups - and buy tickets for the homeless for after we feed them. And we all need to go to see THIS!
And my aforementioned non-Catholic cynical brother leaned over to me half-way through the film and told me the "obvious" plot ending...and was mistaken. So. There.
