“I’m done. I’m done with you.” These are the first words we hear harried single mom Regina say to her surly 14-year-old son Andrew, in Antonio Méndez Esparza‘s exceptional “Life and Nothing More.” But as so often in this rich, quiet film, that despite being shot in docu-realist style is invested with a Bressonian respect for silence, stillness and the movement of bodies in unobtrusively eloquent choreography within the frame, words are a lie. As her very next scene demonstrates, while she pleads with passionate sincerity for the judge to allow the boy’s sentence to be served at home with her, Regina will never be “done” with Andrew. No matter how much he lets her down, no matter how far short she herself may fall from the ideals of motherhood that circumstances put so far beyond her reach, she will never be done. If part of the great power of cinema is in being a visual medium that can somehow give form to the intangible, Esparza’s sophomore film is exemplary: it makes manifest such enormous, politicized intangibles as race, class and gender relations through the authentic portrayal of real lives, real people, vividly played. This is nothing more than life; what more could there be?
Spanning with unnerving newness a time frame around the 2016 election, the film’s focus oscillates between mother and son. Andrew, played by newcomer Andrew Beechington, lives at home in Florida with his chirpily adorable three-year-old sister and his mother. He is at that pivotal moment between childhood and adulthood, not just in terms of his own identity, but also in the eyes of the legal system. Pretty soon the strikes that have been accruing against him may lead to him being charged as an adult, and likely joining the father with whom he has little contact, behind bars. Regina (Regina Williams, also a first-timer and an utter revelation in one of most compelling performances of the year) is trying hard not to let that happen, but her exhausting work schedule as a minimum-wage diner waitress means she returns late at night tired and bullish and more likely to berate Andrew for dishes not washed than to sit him down and have a parenting heart-to-heart.
With so many demands on her time and so much disappointment written in her wary, unsmiling countenance, Regina is mistrustful of Robert (a subtle, mischievous turn from Robert Williams, another non-professional), a diner patron who courts her. But his persistence starts to defrost her defenses. A dimple sometimes shows up on her cheek. “You just might be a genuine man,” she tells him. As is the cyclical way of things, for a time it seems like Regina might have found the partner and helpmate she deserves, but his relationship with Andrew, who has taken to carrying a butterfly knife in the pocket of his hoodie, is another matter.
If it all sounds melodramatic, Esparza’s rigorously unsentimental approach always pulls back from that brink. The film’s style is, like its guarded characters, watchful. It’s an approach that doesn’t come across as remove, but respect. Perhaps it’s due to this Spanish-born writer-director’s outsider perspective, and his trust in his non-professional cast to bring an authenticity that a lesser director might try to force. It is complemented by the photography from Romanian DP Barbu Balasoiu (who also shot Cristi Puiu‘s terrific “Sieranevada“): the careful close-ups that show us every minute change that flashes through Regina’s eyes, the wides that often don’t so much frame the characters as find them, lost in thought at the centre of some hubbub, or the behind-the-head shots that give us a sense of the world they are a part of but also separate from.
On one level, not a whole lot happens, but this deceptive, unshowy formal dexterity reaches a crux in the film’s tensest scene. Andrew is sitting on a park bench, brooding after a fraught encounter at home. He is approached and questioned by a white man whose young family is nearby and who claims this is a private park. “Come on,” the man wheedles in that exact faux-reasonable tone of voice that nice white Obama-voting middle-class people use to mask discomfort while talking to black people, “my children play here.” Like everything else in the film the interaction is understated — indeed most of it plays out in an extreme wide shot so we can’t even read the characters’ expressions — but the man’s complete obliviousness to how ridiculous and offensive it is for him to expect Andrew to understand that he sees him as a threat is wincingly accurate and inevitably self-fulfilling. Later an exchange between Regina and the man’s wife sketches America’s unbridgeable racial divide in a few short lines of dialogue as precisely and enragingly as anything we’ve seen.
But though the film does not compromise on its depiction of the mundane battle that is day-to-day life on the margins of Trump’s America, it is not despairing. Like that dimple that creases Regina’s cheek momentarily when she smiles, there are moments, in the reading of a letter or a quick word of support, when hope flares — not just for her, but for Andrew, and for all the exhausted but persevering people trying to build better lives for their families, to make better choices than the ones that got them here, despite society doing its best to push them back down.
Esparza’s first film, “Here and There”/”Aqui et Alla” won the Critics’ Week Grand Prix in Cannes in 2012, and this follow-up, which gained a quietly positive reception after its TIFF premiere, and then landed a competition slot in San Sebastian, deserves to bring him, and the amazing Regina Williams, to wider attention. A steady, unjudgmental look at ordinary lives and nothing more, what’s perhaps most remarkable is how it paints such a full, complete portrait, neither magnifying nor miniaturizing in the name of drama. Instead, in under two hours, it’s like we’re given a 1:1 scale map of the complexity, injustice and careworn grace that is the daily experience of so many people living, and struggling, in an America that is neither dream nor nightmare, because nobody here has time to sleep. [A-]
