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| Director/Writer/Star Ana Asensio embodies the strong yet vulnerable Luciana in Most Beautiful Island (2017) |
Since I've had the pleasure of residing in Canada for the last few weeks, I've found myself describing my home country with a degree of shame and horror. Trump's America is a place where difference elicits both hostility and resentment, and where a shockingly large number of people both wallow in bigotry and make people fear for their safety just for walking down the street. Women, People of Color, Queer folks of varying gender identity, and Immigrants do not feel at home anymore (imagine being all of the above). People here often respond that it's just another four years, but what this election has made crystal clear is that these tensions and hatreds have been everpresent, and that perhaps some of the more privileged just were not paying proper attention (or cultivating a denial bubble). It's hard to explain how a big chunk of the population now lives in a state of terror, as bullying and hate are the norms, and are politically sanctioned.
Ana Asensio's brilliant debut film
Most Beautiful Island gives spectators a powerful sense of what it's like, specifically for attractive female immigrants, struggling to make ends meet within particularly gendered circumstances. Its slice-of-life approach is so jarringly real, that these days, this film can pass for a fu**ing documentary.
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| Luciana works a "party" with the promise of making a couple thousand bucks |
The film follows Luciana, as she struggles to pay the rent for the sh**hole she lives in, where her roommate sensitively labels the food in the fridge "not yours," and giant cockroaches slither out of duct taped holes in the bathroom. She juggles multiple odd jobs as an undocumented woman, including underpaid au pair to super-annoying brats, and dressing up as a sexy chicken to hand out fliers on the street. When her "friend" Olga (Natasha Romanova) clues her in to a party where she can make $2,000, she sees a way to make her problems go away temporarily. Her need for cash outweighs her practical knowledge that in a culture where immigrant women are treated like human garbage, what she might have to do for that money may carry too steep a price.
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| Luciana proves she's calm and cool under the most dangerous conditions |
What starts off as a handheld camera exploration of Luciana's day, quickly transforms into an excruciatingly tense and gripping thriller as Luciana shows up for the "party," held behind a locked door in the basement of an isolated warehouse off the West Side Highway. Women of various races, all dressed in little black dresses and stilettos, with matching bags on their shoulders, wait with curiosity, suspicion--and for those in the know, downright terror. Genre favorite Larry Fessenden is even on hand to play a thuggish guard, leading women one-by-one in and out of the room. To explain what goes down would be to do the film a grave disservice, but I will provide this teeny spoiler--if you suffer from arachnophobia DO NOT see this film.
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| Where can I get this gorgeous poster?? |
While Asensio started working on this film a good four years ago, this film is so stirringly timely that it's no wonder that it won the Grand Jury Prize for best feature at SXSW this year. The film is so disturbingly real, that if you look carefully, you'll see POTUS part of the crowd attending the party. Asensio deserves enormous accolades for this riveting film that had my heart racing long after it ended. Please see it ASAP.
