The best scene in Below Dreams comes to you early on: a single shot of a small gas station, flanked by empty lots, where a black man asks a young white man for a light.
It takes him about thirty seconds to find his matches in the coat he has slung over his arm, and as their mostly one-way conversation unfolds the camera stands steady, with the aged green-beige tone of the station standing out in a pink dusk behind them. The shot lasts three and a half minutes, and the conversation seems to unfold naturally into one about homelessness in post-Katrina New Orleans and the Arab spring and money and America. There seems to be a trust placed in us that we will listen to the men, and we want to, because the topic is unforced yet interesting, the camera artful yet restrained.
It’s a disappointment, then, when that level of enriched naturalism is relegated to a few rare moments throughout the next hour. Most of our time is spent bouncing back and forth between three wandering youths: an African-american convicted felon and family man, a single mother, and our bearer of light from the gas station, a recent college graduate who’s come south to Louisiana. Their lives are most compelling when we are allowed to sit with them and observe their environment as they do. The setting holds plenty of power: this New Orleans, bright and varied and very poor, feels worthy of redemption. The main issue of the film lies in the way it guides us through this place. Exploring the streets is a roller coaster of an experience. Like many a film these days, lack of focus and shaky frames are mistaken for realistic imagery. I couldn’t help but long for scenes like that early one, where the colors and ambient noise aren’t forcing themselves on you, but enveloping you because sinking into them is pleasurable and fulfilling.
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These walks through the city and its outskirts are interspersed with scenes possessing more monologues than conversations, which is the big flaw in the writing. It’s clear from very early on what the film is about, and the reiteration of those themes of poverty and work and millennial struggles never blossoms into an intelligent or emotionally impactful discussion, because there are so few scenes where both people have something to say. Thanks to some of these near-soliloquies, it almost feels at times like you’re watching a documentary, until a line of dialogue comes up that is just clunky enough to remind you that words are certainly not being constructed on the spot. The camera loves these people – they’re attractive (in their specificity, not necessarily in the Hollywood way) everymen and women with enough grime to be clearly and sympathetically in trouble – but my ears were turned away by much of the dialogue.
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Still, there’s a marriage of energy and image here that creates moments of real beauty and understanding, when channeled with control. The fact that the Bradley so clearly has something to say is not itself the issue, but the more ardor a filmmaker has for their subject matter, the more space must be made for patience and restraint. This is her first full-length feature, and it shows. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The film opened in New York (Cinema Village) on April 17 and will be available on VOD (iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Google Play, VUDU) on April 21.
