Whereas many cinematic portraits of Los Angeles can double as tourist-targeted travelogues, the well-observed if rough-around-the-edges indie drama Where the Road Meets the Sun (2011, Yong Mun Chee) is admirably interested in exposing the real L.A. to audiences. Writer-director Yong has enough clear affection for the city that she does justice to its striking architecture and colorful neighborhoods--Little Tokyo and Silver Lake are both featured to fine effect--but she also offers viewers a glimpse of restaurant kitchens staffed with illegal Mexican immigrants and sweat shops where counterfeit green-card photos are taken. This is a version of the city--decaying, multicultural, inhabited by an invisible-to-most lower class--bound to be refreshingly familiar to residents and eye-opening to outsiders.
In one of the city's decrepit hotels, manager Blake (Eric Mabius), bearing wounds from a marriage that went south, rents rooms to immigrants looking for a temporary residence. Along with Blake, three of the hotel's denizens take center stage in the film: Julio (Fernando Noriega), a Mexican dish washer hoping to save enough money to bring his wife and child over the border to join him; Takashi (Will Yun Lee), a brooding Japanese man with a mysterious past; and Guy (Luke Brandon Field), a shamelessly womanizing Brit.
Yong has created an engaging (and respectably multi-ethnic) quartet of characters, and she and editor Azhar Ismon effortlessly balance each of the four characters' intersecting narrative threads. (Yong and Ismon also deserve credit for the economical storytelling of the movie's first 15 or so minutes, which track four years in the characters' lives in a minimum of screen time.) Julio and Guy emerge as the strongest figures, partly because the two characters form a touching and believable friendship, and partly because Noriega and Field are immensely charismatic. Noriega has a killer smile, and does an impressive job of conveying Julio's decency and optimism without ever turning the character into a cardboard saint. Field, who, with his dark eyes and broad nose, resembles a taller, less nerdy UK version of Shia LaBeouf, invests Guy with such sincerity that it's clear Guy is a big-hearted person underneath his raging libido.
I had such a good time getting to know these characters and their struggles that I was disappointed when the narrative machinations of the third act kicked in, overwhelming the movie's gentle humanity. Without giving anything away, the events that reunite Julio with a group of pawn-shop hooligans he antagonized earlier in the film depend upon an implausible number of narrative coincidences.
Also, Yong's dialogue often settles for being functional instead of inspired. While it's natural that characters in such desperate financial straits would talk most often about the hardships they face, some more loose conversational exchanges would've been welcome to keep monotony at bay.
However, Yong's vision of LA's fringe dwellers is so potent that I hope we're graced with more of her humane urban portraiture in the future. Grade: B-
[FULL DISCLOSURE: Yong is actually a friend and former colleague of mine, so I'm not even gonna pretend to be unbiased here (although, honestly, I did try to write as "objective" a review as possible under the circumstances). It was actually hard not to just call her Mun Chee throughout the review, but I stuck to my professional guns. To support her, I'll mention that Where the Road Meets the Sun is now playing for a week-long engagement in LA and New York as part of Maya Indie's Film Series and will spread to other cities in the weeks to come. Go see it!]
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