We talk a lot about “capturing a moment.” It’s an oddly aggressive term, but one that conveys urgency, necessity. And there is an urgency to capture the moment, the way of life, the particular cadence of the everyday, that Haitian-American director Monica Sorelle captures in her distinguished debut feature, “Mountains.” It’s one of IndieWire’s favorite films from Tribeca 2023 and last year’s fall festival season, and now finally getting a release in 2024. More than capturing it, though, Sorelle holds this moment in a warm, loving embrace.
“Mountains” gives us Xavier (Atibon Nazaire) and Esperance (Sheila Anozier), two Haitian immigrants in mid-life who are deeply embedded in the fabric of their Miami community. They’ve built a meaningful life — but need to work ever harder to maintain it. Esperance already works two jobs (one at a school, another making her own custom clothes) and Xavier is literally employed in a line of work that represents the massive changes happening around them. He’s a demolition-crew worker, spending his days knocking down homes that he himself might have aspired to live in someday. But this is a city where change — the kind that can leave people behind when they barely realize it’s already hit them — is a defining feature. The treasure you aspire to at one time can become a rubble pile before long. How do you fight for your piece of the future?
Sorelle has said she thinks about gentrification every day. Growing up in Miami and studying film at Orlando’s University of Central Florida, she’s certainly attuned to the unique tempo of Florida life where realtors’ flyers (always adorned with smiling headshots they could submit to casting directors) arrive in the mail everyday and hang off walls and telephone polls in most public places. Where you may actually recognize the names of certain realtors more than local government officials. (The fact that Sorelle hired her crew entirely from within the Florida filmmaking community only helps guarantee the authenticity of what she’s put onscreen.) And so Xavier starts to think that success for him and his family means buying a bigger house. He already has a cozy home, but space means “making it” in this calculus. And maybe he and Esperance actually could use it: Their son, Junior (Chris Renois), has moved back in with them after dropping out of college.
Junior’s an aspiring stand-up comedian and assimilated into American homogeny in a way that Xavier and Esperance maybe aren’t interested in. Much of his set, when we see him performing at a comedy club, is about what it’s like to have immigrant parents, and how they’re different from American-born mothers and fathers. One bit is particularly funny about how, when playing soccer, he’d always see the American parents being endlessly encouraging while his dad would point out every flaw in his performance. But you can see how that would happen: When you’re on the endless treadmill toward “making it” you don’t really have time for fridge-magnet feel-goodery. And so Xavier continues critiquing his son’s life into his 20s: How can Junior be happy having dropped out of college and barely making his ends meet? Junior’s feeling of oppression in this household means he even avoids speaking Haitian Creole, the primary language of the film, any longer.
Xavier is not blind to the inequities and ongoing indignities of what “making it” means in America, though. He sees firsthand the racism casually directed at him and another Black colleague by their demolition foreman, regardless of his boss being a member of a minority community himself. The ways in which certain opportunities are just closed off. As Xavier, Atibon Nazaire delivers one of the finest performances of 2024 — he was nominated earlier this year for Breakthrough Performance at the Indie Spirits — full of anxious striving and world-weary tics (he has very much brought the “teeth-sucking” sound, so commonplace across the Caribbean for conveying contempt, with him), but deeply imbued with quiet charisma and a rock-solid sense of who he is. It’ll be a challenge to find another film character this year with a richer, more realized internal life.
Nazaire’s work is a performance of true dimension, and it’s key to fulfilling the aim of “Mountains”: Sorelle may think about gentrification every day, but this is in no way “Gentrification, the Movie.” It’s too tapped into, too appreciative, of life in Miami’s Little Haiti. Sorelle lets her shots linger, getting moments with her DP Javier Labrador Deulofeu’s camera that feel like they’ve wandered into the frame naturally, not shoehorned into it. There’s a lot of downtime here, moments when “nothing” happens — except for that most crucial thing of all: Inhabiting the feeling of a space and time. “Mountains” deploys very few manipulative tricks of editing or scoring to emphasize its emotional takeaways. It drops you in and lets you navigate a bit for yourself. Sorelle finds joy in a Ra-Ra street party, in the serving of food at a little girl’s first-communion gathering in a backyard, in the bright Caribbean colors of this shining city. All of this allows dimension that ensures this is not a “problem picture” like a white director surely would have made. Xavier, Esperance, and Junior are always people in this film, not walking personifications of issues, not vessels for conveying “a point.”
Sorelle has said that she created “Mountains” as a movie where “between plots lie moments.” How refreshing. Especially since those moments really feel like they exist, more than just “being captured.” Maybe this moment for life in Little Haiti will be lost in time — Florida is a state changing so rapidly, with such new waves of development and migration that it’s likely to pick up three to four new congressional seats after the 2030 census. But the feeling of the moment conveyed in “Mountains” will last forever.
Grade: A
‘Mountains’ is being released by Music Box Films in New York City and Miami on August 23, with a national rollout to follow beginning August 30.
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