Director Cristiano Bortone’s coffee-themed tellurian garb play is a initial central co-production between China and Italy.
A cross-cultural multi-plot play related by a lax thesis of coffee, Cristiano Bortone’s sixth underline is notable for being a initial fruit of an Italy-China co-production covenant sealed in 2014. The Italian-born director, a USC and NYU graduate, collaborated with Chinese screenwriters and censors on Coffee, that is screening during Beijing International Film Festival this week. Bortone is also a owner of Bridging a Dragon, an beginning designed to encourage closer links between a European and Chinese film industries.
Citing Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 2006 Oscar-winner Babel as inspiration, Bortone recognised Coffee as a breathtaking image of a globalized star in a hold of informative and financial turbulence. His ambitions are superbly grand, even if a finish outcome feels a small preachy and glib. Backed by a multi-national brew of prolongation houses in Belgium, Italy and China, this concept summary film has apparent festival interest and a medium shot during niche runs in mixed markets. The story might be uncomplicated and sentimental, though a same could be pronounced of Babel, that scored frequency both critically and commercially.
Coffee blends together 3 stories set in 3 opposite countries. In a Italian subplot, a photogenic span of immature lovers leave Rome to find improved fortunes in a coastal city of Trieste. Desperate for income after training his partner Gaia (Miriam Dalmazo) is pregnant, ninja-level coffee consultant Renzo (Dario Aita) takes a minimum-wage room job, where a multi-coloured squad of co-workers daub his inside believe to mountain a heist. Their aim is a profitable transport of ultra-rare Kopi Luwak, a part-digested coffee beans with a gold-plated cost tag. But, inevitably, their get-rich-quick devise runs into disorderly complications.
Meanwhile, in a Belgian city of Antwerp, amicable Arab storekeeper Hamad (A Prophet co-star Hichem Yacoubi) takes a law into his possess hands after his emporium is looted in a travel riot. The burglary of his dear antique coffee pot leads him to a uneasy immature male Vincent (Arne De Tremerie) and his virulently extremist father (Koen De Bouw). But their assembly ends badly, degenerating into a moving life-or-death onslaught that mirrors Europe’s stream immigration anxieties in microcosm.
Woven by these Euro-plots is a together story of Ren Fe (Lu Fang Sheng), a large hotshot executive for a Chinese coffee company, who is dispatched from Beijing to repair technical problems during a provincial factory. But returning to a farming backwater of his girl stirs opposing emotions in Ren Fe, generally after his unrelenting trainer (and destiny father-in-law) orders him to spin a blind eye to bootleg prolongation methods that discredit both workers and environment. Then a fatal assembly with individualist internal artist A Fang (Zhuo Tan), who has a confidant intrigue to enhance her late father’s eco-friendly coffee farm, army Ren Fe to rethink his soulless corporate values.
The 3 braided stories in Coffee never rigourously intersect, though they counterpart any other in mood, design and message. Each is shot in a same style, with complicated use of a hand-held unsure cameras that once signified dirty docu-drama realism, though that feel unnatural and antiquated nowadays. Teho Teardo’s ever-present score, twinkly and mournful, also leaves small room for shade or ambiguity.
Bookended by folksy father-son scenes in that a ambience of coffee serves as a clumsy embellishment for a bittersweet flavors of life itself, Bortone’s film is a small too lustful of fortune-cookie truth of a Forrest Gump variety: “always remember there’s a skinny thread joining everything”. The characters frequency feel like some-more than mono-dimensional chess pieces in a black-and-white star where a soft dignified sequence can be easy with only a small some-more consolation between people. Each of these mislaid souls is on a training journey, stranded in a wrong trail until a startle epiphany reactivates their asleep humanity. There is no spirit that their problems branch from underlying domestic or amicable causes, that might be a Faustian cost paid for removing China’s state censors on board.
In a favor, Coffee is a technically discriminating and attractive production. It facilities plain performances opposite a house and some well-staged, pacy thriller elements in a final act. Bortone maintains a commendably awake tinge and stroke too, given that he is wrangling 3 globe-spanning plots, 5 opposite screenwriters and half a dozen languages. An considerable sophistry act, even if a take-home summary is roughly comically banal: arise adult and smell a coffee.
Production companies: Orisa Produzioni, Savage Film, Road Productions, China Blue Films
Cast: Miriam Dalmazio, Dario Aita, Tong Sheng Han, Yuqi Zhang, Qi Xi, Xiaodong Guo, Koen De Bouw, Arne De Tremerie, Hichem Yacoubi, Charlotte de Bruyne
Director: Cristiano Bortone
Screenwriters: Cristiano Bortone, Annalaura Ciervo Matthew Thomson, Shi Minghua, Shi Minghui
Producers: Cristiano Bortone, Bart Van Langendonck, Gongming Cai, Natacha Devillers
Cinematographer: Vladan Radovic
Editor: Claudio di Mauro
Music: Teho Teardo
Sales company: Orisa Produzioni, Rome, info@orisa.it
Not rated, 100 minutes