After the Storm

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly stormy entertainment
Review: Okay, people, excitingly enough I'm the first reviewer on this film. And this is a surprisingly good movie! We've owned it for a while and actually watched it three or four times, despite its slightly heavy undertone.

Winner of Best Picture and Best Screenplay at the New York International Independent Film Festival and described as "enthralling, intelligent, sleek, sophisticated." It's all that--and more.

The story is based on an Ernest Hemingway story, and those can be a bit heavy with too much outdoorsy great-white-hunter types of which Hemingway was so fond, but this story is really, really good. The only "hunting" involved is for sunken treasure!

It's set in the Depression-era 1930s on a small tropical island, full of laid-back locals and crooked types who are just cruising around waiting out the Depression on their 1930s gold buillion-laden yacht. Benjamin Bratt plays Arno, a young man with a very painful past family memory who is living a very simple life as a scavenger cum errand boy, trying to heal his past and figure out his life. His island love interest, the young and beautiful native Coquina, gets involved with his sunken treasure hunting scheme, and with him. Through a couple of bad twists and turns, Arno ends up having to team up with Jean-Pierre (Armand Assante), playing his usual crooked, oversexed womanizer self, and Jean-Pierre's wife/girlfriend, Janine. The four of them race against time and antiquated diving equipment, trying to get at the sunken treasure of jewels and gold on the mafiosa yacht gone down in the prior night's storm before the insurance company's agents get to it. Janine and Coquina are just beautiful and have a very touching and anchoring scene on the scavenger boat where Janine shows Coquina the latest 1930s fashions of fur and jewels and gowns and hairstyles in beautiful places like "New York and Paris." Arno and Jean-Pierre have a working mutual distrust of each other, and between the two of them, they've created more love triangles than there are people!

The acting is superb, the setting is wonderful, the story really exciting, and the ending is just as surprising and perfect as the rest of the movie.

At least see this movie once. You'll be glad you did. It's independent film at its best.

See also: (1) "El Mariachi" (a wonderful and artful independent film, entirely in Spanish w/ English subtitles, set in Mexico, a tragic love story involving a case of mistaken identity); and (2) "The Deep" (with Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset, 1977, two Bermuda honeymooners discover some wonderful but deadly treasure while scuba diving).