Everyone knows someone like Rebeca Huntt. A born-and-bred New Yorker, she came of age in a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, her family’s pride and joy. Now well into her twenties, she’s figuring out her priorities as an artist and her place in the world. She loves her parents even if they sometimes push her buttons, she couldn’t be closer with her big sister, and she’d die without her crew of friends. She explores romance and sex, and as an Afro-Latina of Dominican and Venezuelan parentage, she navigates a personal heritage that places her in a conflicted position within today’s volatile America. She found a mentor and an intellectual community in her alma mater of Bard, going the classic film student path, which has led to her first feature.
READ MORE: Toronto Film Fest 2021 Preview: 16 Must-See Movies To Watch
The universality of her experiences — and particularity of her perspective — put her in prime standing for an autobiographical künstlerroman like “Beba,” the debut titled after her nickname as an infant. Such a project requires an unsparing awareness of one’s own ordinariness as a starting point to work from, which can clash with the gravity of the grander theses on race and diaspora that Huntt’s mounting. She interweaves her own life story with a weighty past, extending ultra-serious regard to both that can function awkwardly when applied to the self. Never lacking in earnestness or vigor, she nonetheless teeters over the lines separating introspection from navel-gazing and the raw from the simply underdone.
Any summary of her goals — she “investigates the historical, societal, and generational trauma she’s inherited and ponders how those ancient wounds have shaped her,” per the press materials, and Huntt herself calls it “a series of intimate, intangible shifts” — must necessarily omit the means by which she strives to achieve them. That’s because a less interpretive assessment would expose the clash between her lofty ambitions and pedestrian methods, which amount to a haphazard jumble of diaristic voiceover, collegiate-level poetry, and shot-on-the-fly home movies. The confidence of her speech does not extend to her camerawork, flitting around scenes in a restless manner evincing aimlessness instead of spontaneity. All that said, fans of grainy 16mm snippets capturing the beautiful quotidian details that make the Big Apple special will find much to savor.
READ MORE: ‘Unclenching the Fists:’ A Bleak, Unflinching Russian Coming-of-Age Tale [TIFF Review]
Across 79 minutes sliced up by needless chapter headings with subtitles like “Zombie Apocalypse” and “The Call Is Coming From Inside The House,” Huntt lays out her evolving vantage through the events that shaped it. (Her relationship to pop culture is one of the weirder aspects of the thing, starting with a title card taken from Chance the Rapper’s verse on Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam.” Later, she mistakenly refers to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” as “How Does It Feel?” while recounting a night she listened to it sixty times on repeat.) Walking by a community garden, she and her sister recall being told by white people that they couldn’t hang out, bringing crack vials found there to school for show-and-tell, using it as a hideout for smoking weed. It’s a skillfully assembled passage, wending together geography and history on both micro- and macro-sized scales, the kind of cohesive insight that’s ultimately too scarce.
READ MORE: The Best Films Of 2021, So Far
Her worldview is marked in no small part by grievance; in one bit of narration, she offhandedly mentions the summer she lost her virginity “to an asshole” and then moves right past it, and a fraught conversation about race with her clueless white friend group quickly devolves into high-decibel confrontation. A combative interview with her mother comes to an abrupt close when a line of inquiry about being a Latina woman raising Black children compels Huntt to call out her “micro-aggressive attitude.” One wonders what’s been elided from this exchange through editing, just as in the selective framing of her passionate, loving relationship with a young man who pursued her in vain for a year and took his own life shortly following their breakup. It’s an opportunity to exorcise guilt, to show an unflattering side of herself, to be confessional. Instead, we get a mournful karaoke performance and overwrought prose: “Michael, expelled from private school, a Bronx kid with origins in India and Puerto Rico, with bipolar disorder and X-ray vision.”
Despite her somewhat blinkered vision, Huntt possesses a voice worth cultivating further. Her creative appetite is voracious, often to the point of exceeding her abilities, but there are worse issues for a budding filmmaker to have. It’s always preferable to refine an excess of ambition than to build on its lack, and for her, it’s mostly a matter of finding that tonal throttle. In a film small enough to fit in a locket and large enough to span continents, there needs to be a stronger distinction between the two. [C-]
Follow along with our full coverage from the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival here.
