Bella

"If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans" - Opening line of dialogue in Bella.

This is an appropriate line to open a movie such as this, as Bella is about two people who think they have their lives planned out, only to have fate throw a wrench into their plans. The two build a friendship together, and as they spend the day together, their friendship grows. I can see this material working, but Bella is far too laid back and uneventful for its own good. This is a movie that I desperately wanted to work, as there seemed to be plenty of opportunities for good scenes and drama. But it doesn't seem to want to build to anything, and never engages. Bella is not a terrible movie, but it is an unmemorable one. Sometimes that can be even worse.

The two friends in the lead roles are Jose (Eduardo Verastegui) and Nina (Tammy Blanchard). They both work at a Mexican restaurant in New York City - He as a cook, and she as a waitress. The owner of the restaurant (Manny Perez), who is also Jose's brother, fires Nina early on because she's been late for work a lot lately. We learn that she was late on this day, because she found out she was pregnant. Jose leaves his work station in the kitchen to follow Nina, and the two begin to walk around New York City as they talk about their lives, and how they both wound up at this point. We witness in flashbacks that Jose used to be a rising soccer star, until he accidentally ran over a small child who darted out into the street while he was driving to a press interview. He went to prison for a few years, and never played again. This is the kind of movie where a lot of things trigger flashbacks of that fateful day Jose's life changed. Every time something reminds Jose of the accident, we see a little bit of the story. We don't get the full story until he actually tells it to Nina, but we have figured it out long before he tells it. A majority of the film deals with the two friends talking about their lives, a large family dinner, and Nina contemplating if she should keep her baby or not.

All of these elements could work in a movie, but director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde doesn't know how to grab our attention. The movie kind of meanders right along with the characters. They're talking about interesting things, but the dialogue between them never comes alive and never grabs our attention. I quoted the opening line at the beginning of this review, because it's the one line of dialogue that actually grabs our attention. Pity it comes right at the beginning. The characters fail to grab our attention as well. They don't seem to have any personalities, and don't even seem like people in the first place. I never felt the illusion that a good movie creates that I was watching two people. The entire time, I felt like I was watching two actors pretending to be friends and reciting scripted dialogue to each other. There's nothing particularly memorable about Jose and Nina. They seem like nice people, sure, but they never seem interesting enough that anyone would want to make a movie about them. Nina has a sweet smile, knows how to tear up on cue, and that's about it. The most distinguishing thing about Jose is that with his shaggy beard and hair, he looks like he's auditioning for the title role in a local production of Jesus Christ: Superstar.

A lot of the people I've heard praise Bella say that they liked it because there was no swearing, no nudity, and aside from a tiny bit of blood displayed during the accident scene, no violence. In other words, they like this movie for what it doesn't have rather than for what it does have. I never quite understood this way of thinking. Are people so desperate for entertainment that they like a movie just because it didn't make them feel anything? Despite some dramatic aspects to the story, there's surprisingly very little tension or actual drama to be found. We get a couple scenes where Jose and Nina tear up, but then the movie cuts to the next scene. When Jose is telling his story about the day that changed his life, the movie eventually cuts out the dialogue, and we just see him sobbing and pounding his fist over and over while Nina looks at him with concern, then it's over. After all the build up, the movie constantly interrupting the story every 15 minutes or so with small flashbacks, it seems like a bit of a tease that we don't even get the full scene, or hear the entire conversation. All the negativity and sad thoughts have either been smoothed over or edited out, so we wind up feeling nothing.
Bella is such a curiously understated and bland movie, I'm surprised it's being labeled as a crowd pleaser. The movie doesn't make an ounce of effort to get us involved, and nothing stands out about it. That's not the kind of movie you want to make if your plot involves such life-changing things as abortion and a man feeling guilty over the death of a child. This is the kind of film where you remember watching it, but nothing about it stays with you. This movie, and the characters who inhabit it, deserved better than that.

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