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Most Beautiful Island is a psychological thriller examining the plight of undocumented female immigrants hoping to make a life in New York City. Shot on Super 16mm with an intimate, voyeuristic sensibility, Most Beautiful Island chronicles one harrowing day in the life of Luciana, a young immigrant woman struggling to make ends meet while striving to escape her past. As Luciana's day unfolds, she is whisked, physically and emotionally, through a series of troublesome and unforeseeable extremes. Before her day is done, she inadvertently finds herself a central participant in a cruel game where lives are placed at risk, and psyches are twisted and broken for the perverse entertainment of a privileged few.
| Directed by | Ana Asensio |
|---|---|
| Produced by | Ana Asensio Larry Fessenden Noah Greenberg Chadd Harbold Jenn Wexler |
| Written by | Ana Asensio |
| Starring | Ana Asensio Natasha Romanova David Little Nicholas Tucci Larry Fessenden Caprice Benedetti |
| Music by | Jeffery Alan Jones |
| Cinematography | Noah Greenberg |
| Edited by | Carl Ambrose Francisco Bello |
Production
company |
Glass Eye Pix
|
| Distributed by | Orion Pictures Samuel Goldwyn Films |
Release date
|
|
Running time
| 80 minutes[1] |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
s
Release[edit]
The film premiered at South by Southwest on March 12, 2017.[1][2] On June 20, 2017, Orion Pictures and Samuel Goldwyn Films acquired distribution rights to the film.[3] The film was released on November 3, 2017, by Orion Pictures and Samuel Goldwyn Films.[4]
Reception[edit]
On review-aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 100% based on 13 reviews with an average rating of 7.5/10.[5] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 76 out of 100 based on the reviews by 8 critics indicating "generally favorable reviews".[6]
Cast[edit]
- Ana Asensio as Luciana
- Natasha Romanova as Olga
- David Little as Doctor Horowitz
- Nicholas Tucci as Niko
- Larry Fessenden as Rudy
- Caprice Benedetti as Vanessa
- Anna Myrha as Nadia
- Ami Sheth as Benedita
- Miriam A. Hyman as Bikie
- Sara Visser as Katarin
- Natalia Zvereva as Ewa
- Sorika Horng as Mai
- Fenella A. Chudoba as Alina
In Ana Asensio’s Big Apple-set “Most Beautiful Island,” a cash-strapped but model-gorgeous undocumented immigrant agrees to attend a dangerous party for rich and ruthless New Yorkers. For think-the-worst Trump haters, this gritty low-budget drama could be seen as a dark spin on last year’s “Southside With You,” dramatizing an alternate history of how the Donald first met Melania. In truth, the inspiration behind Asensio’s high-suspense, dread-infused debut was a peculiar eye-candy assignment the Spanish-born Asensio endured herself, heightened to show the lengths to which outsiders will go to make it in America.
Awarded the top prize at the 2017 SXSW film festival, “Most Beautiful Island” is a modest first feature, spanning less than a day in the life of a tough yet brittle-looking woman named Luciana (Asensio), but it makes quite an impact on very limited means — enough to score its impressive writer-director-producer-star more film work, even if it’s barely seen upon eventual release. Though it’s set against a bright-lights, big-city backdrop, the movie offers an illicit cockroach’s-eye view of New York, in which nearly all the characters scurry about wary of being crushed by anyone with the power to enforce their arrest or deportation.
The story sprung from Asensio’s own early immigrant experiences, specifically the period when she overstayed her visa and found herself taking degrading jobs for cash. In this case, we see the clearly-stressed Luciana juggling a thankless nanny job with one of those rump-shaking street-corner gigs where she advertises a local fast-food joint in a skin-baring chicken costume. Burnt out and barely able to pay her bills, Luciana turns to her venomously escort-esque Russian friend Olga (Natasha Romanova) for advice, never suggesting that the too-good-to-be-true job — for which she’s supposed to report to a shady basement wearing nothing but a sexy black cocktail dress — Olga offers could have potentially fatal consequences.
Of course, we don’t know that either, although Asensio orchestrates it such that our Spidey senses start tingling long before Luciana’s, and by the time she finds herself in said basement, surrounded by half a dozen other tall, nervous-looking foreign beauties, it’s too late to change her mind. Shooting in the coarse handheld style on scrappy 16mm film (the sort that recalls classic John Cassavetes movies, or the more recent work of “Daddy Longlegs” directors Josh and Benny Safdie), DP Noah Greenberg never ventures far from Luciana’s side, resulting in the distinctly anxious impression of being trapped in her skin — which, as we’ll soon see, is no place we’d want to be, and all the more nerve-wracking given the director’s stripped-down neorealist approach.
The movie’s payoff is every bit as delicious as its build-up, during which Asensio allows our imagination to do its worst as the other girls are called away one by one to do whatever their sadistic hosts have in mind. The first emerges from a back room, visibly shaking, while the second lets out a piercing scream that merely exacerbates Luciana’s already tense state of mind. But what’s a woman in her position to do? When the authorities don’t even know she exists, what’s to stop these creeps from snuffing her out and dumping her body where it will never be found? And just how much resistance can a spindly-limbed stunner like herself possibly put up?
Plenty, as it turns out — and that’s where “Most Beautiful Island” earns whatever trust audiences have put in its unproven storyteller (assuming that you’ve never seen one of Asensio’s one-woman shows): The easy-to-underestimate star effectively conveys her character’s exasperation, but not what her actual skills or potential might be. In addition to being unusually resistant to a pest problem in her squalid New York apartment (her lack of reaction to a stomach-churning roach infestation speaks volumes about her iron-willed character), Luciana is also slyly resourceful in several early scenes, as when she scams the little black dress from a high-end Manhattan shop.
Still, there’s not much to suggest what Luciana might contribute to society, which is just the sort of judgment Asensio intends to upend when the moment is right — and that she does, demonstrating the same spirit of fearlessness in character that she did when translating this belief-straining, reality-based story into her big-screen debut. Stepping in to make Asensio’s self-made statement possible, indie horror legend Larry Fessendennot only produces, but appears as the toughest of the basement bouncers, and the ironically titled “Most Beautiful Island” proves a worthy addition to his Glass Eye Pix catalog, especially where the work of insect and spider wrangler Brian Kleinman is concerned. In the end, as with the Black Widow and many other species, Asensio’s female heroine is much deadlier than the male.
https://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/most-beautiful-island-review-sxsw-1202011752/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/most-beautiful-island-sxsw-2017-986603
The hypnotic opening sequence of Most Beautiful Island — shot with a penetrating eye by Noah Greenberg in handheld Super 16mm and effectively interweaving the thrumming soundscape of New York City with the quiet strains of Jeffery Alan Jones' unsettling score — subtly identifies seven different women among the Manhattan crowds in various locations. All of them are young and attractive, though seemingly unrelated. How much you buy into the dehumanizing spider web that later draws these women together will depend on your willingness to go with writer-director Ana Asensio's lurch from lucid naturalism into queasy quasi-horror.
The no-budget indie's distinctive take on the harrowing experience of undocumented women immigrants gives it a timeliness that possibly contributed to its win of this year's SXSW Grand Jury Prize, the top narrative honors at the fest. The thumbprint of genre auteur Larry Fessenden as a producer (he also turns up onscreen as a sleazebag thug) could help secure some niche theatrical play, but home screens will be a better fit.
A seasoned Spanish TV actress stepping behind the camera for the first time to tell a story inspired by her own life, Asensio plays Luciana, whose troubled past is alluded to only briefly in a phone call from New York to her mother, who urges her to return to Spain. A family tragedy that appears to involve a daughter weighs heavily on her.
She lives in an outer-borough apartment for which she can barely make the rent. In the one substantial bit of foreshadowing of the disturbing developments to come, she rips off the landlord's duct-tape repair on the bathroom wall while she's soaking in the tub. This uncovers a nest of roaches, scrambling over one another to survive as they land in the water at her feet.
With no Social Security number, she's limited to low-paying Craigslist jobs like babysitting bratty kids or handing out flyers for a chicken joint, dressed as sexy poultry. "I'm so tired of all the possibilities," Luciana moans, in an overwritten exchange with Olga (Natasha Romanova), a Russian migrant with whom she's friendly. "The possibilities are why we're here," replies Olga, before asking Luciana to fill in for her at a lucrative gig that night. All that's required, she assures her, is to turn up and look pretty at a cocktail party, wearing an LBD and heels.
Working in fruitful collaboration with cinematographer Greenberg, Asensio succeeds in creating an intimate, unstable world around Luciana, without any risk of the film becoming a vanity piece. However, it becomes harder to reconcile her desperation with her naivety as she ventures deeper into danger. Luciana, girl, have you never seen a movie?
She's directed first to Chinatown, where a barking middleman tells her to ditch her bag and gives her a padlocked clutch purse before sending her to an industrial warehouse basement on the West Side Highway. There she finds herself caught in a nefarious playground where wealthy guests — both male and female — choose their human pawns to be led behind a closed door into the "game room." Revealing any more would kill the suspense.
These climactic scenes are certainly tense and chilling, peeling back the city's shiny surface to uncover its cold, hard heart. But they're also a tad arch and inadvertently campy, with actress Caprice Benedetti (in a performance that could double as a Ryan Murphy audition) strutting around as an icy mistress of ceremonies, spouting ominous lines like, "If anything unfortunate happens, well, we make our own luck."
Asensio's grasp of the darker genre twists is less assured than her observation of the deadening daily grind, and her skill with the actors could use work. Some of the smaller roles give the impression of friends-and-family casting, and this has got to be the most innocuous-looking group ever assembled for a high-stakes, sexy dance of death. They look more like the HR team at an accounting firm.
While early on, the writer-director allows us to piece together seemingly casual details of Luciana's existence — which could be that of any of these women — into a vivid, empathetic picture, the film ultimately veers into overstated obviousness. A beautiful final shot says plenty, without the need for a faded sign on a warehouse wall, ironically promising "Big Big Dreams
[The film is] an intimate exploration of solitude, identity and discovery,” says Asensio, who also wrote and directed the film, which won the Grand Jury prize at the year’s SXSW Festival. “The story was drawn from my own experiences as a young Spanish immigrant in New York City. We shot the film on super 16mm which was both a dream and an enormous challenge to accomplish due to our tight schedule and limited budget. I chose to shoot the film in an intimate, voyeuristic way, mixing professional actors with non-actors in improvised and fluid scenarios. Being an actor myself, it was crucial for me to make sure the performers received the necessary information about the roles they were playing while giving them freedom to improvise. This freedom helped tremendously in achieving the spontaneity and realism I wanted for the film.”
The story is described as inspired by true events so there may be some exaggeration in the actual climax, but it is still quite powerful and leaves the audience awestruck. Ana Asensio directed, wrote and stars in this fascinating and absorbing film. It is beautiful written, filmed and acted. The tension builds towards the disturbing climax. The American Dream is not always what it seems to be and needs to be re-imagined for our current economic and political realities. I hope the film gets distributed so more people can learn to empathize with the immigrant experience which has sadly become a political punching bag in recent years.
References[edit]
- ^ a b Peter Debruge (2017-03-19). "'Most Beautiful Island' Review: SXSW Competition Winner". Variety. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
- ^ "'Most Beautiful Island' Review | SXSW 2017". Hollywood Reporter. 2017-03-15. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
- ^ Hipes, Patrick (2017-06-20). "SXSW Winner 'Most Beautiful Island' Acquired By Orion & Samuel Goldwyn". Deadline. Retrieved 2017-07-03.
- ^ Clark Collis (2017-09-25). "Watch the trailer for psychological thriller 'Most Beautiful Island'". Ew.com. Retrieved 2017-11-05.
- ^ "Most Beautiful Island (2017)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2017-11-05.
- ^ "Most Beautiful Island Reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved 2017-11-05.
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