‘Mountains’ Review: Monica Sorelle’s Warm, Intimate Look at a Disappearing Community

Monica Sorelle’s Mountains is a film about work that nonetheless champions leisure. As Esperance (Sheila Anozier) suggests to her husband Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), “If work was a good thing, the rich would have taken it for themselves.” Mountains interprets leisure not so much as the opposite of work or struggle, but a stance that can and should suffuse each moment of life, not discounting those we sell to make a living.

Xavier and Esperance are Haitian immigrants living with their adult son, Junior (Chris Renoir), in Miami’s rapidly gentrifying Little Haiti neighborhood. Whether recompensed or not, each has their work: Xavier is a demolition worker, Esperance a crossing guard and dressmaker, and Junior, to the consternation of his parents, aspires to be stand-up comedian. An incident of on-the-job racism, complicated in that it involves a Cuban immigrant (Yaniel Castillo) tussling with Xavier’s Black American coworker (Roscoè B. Thické III), escalates toward the film’s moving climax. Tellingly, it’s during a period of unplanned rest from constant work that Xavier has time to contemplate his past and reframe his relationship to his son, his job, and his neighborhood.

The film’s opening scenes center around Xavier’s job, with montages that find a rhythm in the noisy industriousness (and primal pleasure) of reducing to rubble what others have built. The compositions capture the ghostly emptiness and stillness of half-demolished or abandoned homes strewn with bankers boxes, and it becomes clear before long that Xavier’s livelihood comes at the expense of pulling his own neighborhood down around him. These images, marked by a disquietingly ambivalent lyricism, recall Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life, in which entire villages are dismantled to make way for the Three Gorges Dam and the “progress” it represents. But where Jia’s film is cold and alienated, Sorelle’s is warm, intimate, almost delicate.

That intimacy stems in part from how the film’s scenes oscillate between work and home life, lingering on intervals of downtime (a lunch break at a food truck, an evening smoke on the porch) in each. Mountains unfolds in its own good time, expanding outward from Xavier’s perspective to encompass that of Esperance, then Junior, all the while offering elegiac glimpses of Little Haiti’s way of life. Though there’s tension at home, there’s also respite, and nostalgic mementos of the Haiti that Xavier and Esperance left behind. Long stretches of the film unfold without dialogue, such as when we watch Esperance methodically cooking or at work in her sewing room, surrounded by colorful dresses that she herself designed.

The soundtrack by Dyani Douze, at times eerie with woodwinds, at others blistering with Afro-Caribbean drumming, contributes much to the mood of the film. So, too, does the tension between the repetition of routine and the forward momentum of plot. Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson comes to mind in relation to a recurring tableau: At several points we see Xavier, returning from work in the afternoons, carefully maneuver his pickup truck into the family’s narrow parking lot. At the same time, a local fixture of the neighborhood strolls down the sidewalk, gossiping on his cellphone in Haitian Creole. Near the end of the film, the pattern deviates as this talkative fellow is replaced by an advance-guard gentrifier in the form a white girl in yoga gear, walking her guard dog and talking on her cell about stopping by Whole Foods to pick up a rosé.

A life that can’t make time for contemplation, Sorelle suggests—with a touch as light as it is self-assured—or for taking pleasure even in the midst of work, is reduced to the condition of mere survival. Without leisure, there’s only the desperate, blinkered, runaway obliteration of the past, of which gentrification is a symptom. It may not be a film very open to interpretation, but in the measured intricacy of its pacing and structure, Mountains urges us to ponder the meaning of spare time, offering a balm for the hyperactivity of modern life.