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Most Beautiful Island
Most Beautiful Island, a film about an undocumented female immigrant on one of the worst days of her new life in New York, is perhaps the most restrained film you’ll ever see at the BUFF. It’s a working-class primary document as much as a thriller, loosely based on the lived experience of its director and star, Ana Asensio, and it rightly found an audience at SXSW, where it won the Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature. Asensio counts the Dardenne brothers and Andrea Arnold among her influences as a filmmaker, and aspects of those directors’ styles can be best seen in the first 40 minutes of the film, where her stressed out and cash-strapped character Luciana is scattered about from errand to job (from the doctor to being a chicken-flyer tout in Midtown to being a nanny, et cetera) in a sea of murky and uncaring faces. She’s running from some sadnesses in her past (wisely, they’re only ever hinted at), and struggling, as the film takes pains to point out early on and at the end, like hundreds of other women from similar backgrounds. Over coffee, her friend Olga offers her a gig, and winds up leading her down a pretty dark path with promises of easy money without much work.
It’s at that 40-minute mark that the film begins to become truly remarkable. She’s led to a pretty creepy warehouse, where other girls are waiting, and eventually she’s forced to play a bizarro game of chance with potentially fatal consequences for rich gamblers. A Bunuel influence overtakes the film, with its more explicitly class-oriented criticisms and surrealist tendencies, and it makes Most Beautiful Island infinitely more interesting than it might have been (though it still would have been good) The whole film was shot on Super 16, which gives the colors a rich crispness, and occasionally notes of Lynchian cinematography rise up to the surface, with beautiful reds contrasting with dark clothing and horrible imagery. Perhaps the most eloquent summation of Most Beautiful Island can be found in a scene early on where Asensio’s character takes a bath; she peels a duct tape patch off the beautiful red wall in the bathroom she shares with others, and out fall dozens of giant roaches which flounder and drown in the bath. Behind every pretty surface lies something pretty dark, and Asensio does one hell of a job peeling away the masking for us to see it raw.
Most Beautiful Island screens at the Harvard Film Archive on Saturday, March 25 at 3:45 p.m. Really, don’t miss it.
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