|
Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
OFF JACKSON AVENUE For people who live in Manhattan, the only feature that distinguishes Queens from everywhere else on earth is the possibility—increasingly slight—of finding a decent bagel. In all other respects, New York’s third-string borough defies characterization. We know it is an unfussy place, and big enough to contain the jovial ghetto of Coming to America, Peter Parker’s tree-lined block of proud duplexes, and Archie Bunker’s living room. But it is a grittier, decidedly meaner Queens that we find in John-Luke Montias’s Off Jackson Avenue. If the devil is in the details, then Mr. Montias is Satan incarnate. The borough’s numbing industrial-residential sprawl—blocks and blocks of cracked sidewalks, weeds, litter, aluminum siding, rusted chains, street signs that make no sense, nameless bars that open at 9 am—is captured with breathless authority. The camerawork, by George Gibson, betrays a kind of sober, honest attention to light and location that feels just right for this no-nonsense slice of New York. The borough is the most diverse county in the United States, a fact that Mr. Montias refuses to let us forget with his script. Olivia (Jessica Pimentel), a naïve young woman from Oaxaca, Mexico, arrives in New York expecting to take a job as a waitress. She is promptly pushed into sex slavery by Milo (Stivi Paskoski), an Albanian brute who has already pulled the same trick with some thicker-skinned Slavic beauties. On the other side of town (Flushing?), a Chinese crime boss laments all the business Milo’s brothels are taking away from his own “yum-yum” houses. He contracts a Japanese English teacher, who’s only moonlighting as an assassin to pay for his mother’s surgery, to kill the Albanian. Meanwhile, a disaffected mechanic (played by the director, who mimics the working-class swagger of Edward Burns, another Queens native) struggles to raise enough money by stealing cars to open “a legitimate fucking business,” his own tire shop. Already more than slightly indebted to The Sopranos in both casting and dialogue, the film uses multiculturalism just like that great television series did, with the experiences of outsiders treated more as a pastiche than a parable. As such, there are no buried lessons to be found in the dust-up between the Chinese and the Albanian, or between the Mexican and a fat cop (who’s also her john).
At one point in the film, the Irish-American larcenist is asked by
his creaky old uncle why he won’t open a tire shop in Florida, where
it’s cheaper to live and do business. It’s a very good question, since
the movie doesn’t seem to show a single redeeming aspect of life in
Queens. “I don't want to sell tires in Florida,” he says. “I live here.”
You can call that logic or stupidity, but it’s very hard to dispute it.
Stephen Heyman
|
