MOUNTAINS - Mark Reviews Movies

Mountains, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 22, 2024

Co-writer/director Monica Sorelle's debut feature Mountains opens with a Haitian proverb: "Behind mountains, there are more mountains." That's life for a family of Haitian immigrants living in Miami, who moved to the United States hoping to fulfill a dream, found one series of obstacles, and now are living amidst even more challenging times.

What the proverb doesn't mention, perhaps, is that, once you've climbed one mountain, you're also among the mountains. From that perspective, the other ones might not seem much of a challenge or worth the effort of climbing them.

That's the position Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), the man who grew up literally wondering what was beyond the mountains of his homeland and decided to discover for himself, finds himself in at the start of this little story. He has a job on a demolition crew, tearing down whatever buildings his boss has been hired to destroy without any questions.

Business is currently booming in the neighborhood of Little Haiti. House after house is scheduled to be torn down, and one of the developers who hired the company Xavier works for takes pride in explaining to the worker what will be built in one house's place. It'll be a mansion, maybe three stories tall, and Xavier stands there, imagining the sight and maybe dreaming again.

After all, Xavier has been working overtime to make and save more money. He and his wife Esperance (Sheila Anozier) have lived in the same home for a decade or more at this point. Their only son, named after his father but whom everyone calls Junior (Chris Renois), is now an adult. Yes, the young man might still be living with his parents, but he's earning money working as a valet, while performing stand-up comedy at a local club in the hopes of getting his shot.

That only highlights in Xavier's mind how small their house actually is, and when Junior does eventually move out on his own, wouldn't it be nice if he and his wife could relax and someday retire in a more spacious home? Xavier thinks he has found such a place, and now, he just has to convince Esperance that buying a new house is worth the cost.

Those are the small but entirely relatable concerns of Sorelle and Robert Colom's screenplay, which simply spends time with this family of three, separately and occasionally together (whenever Junior decides to eat dinner with one or both of his parents). We get to know them in a way that might not have been possible in a busier story with more blatant conflicts and larger ideas in mind.

The best way to understand people, after all, is to see them in their element, and there are scenes here that exist solely to show us that about these characters. Note the way Xavier comes home after work, walks immediately into the kitchen, and gently kisses his wife on the forehead, quietly calling her his "queen."

Esperance is cooking him dinner as that happens, just as she wakes up even before Xavier gets out of bed before sunrise to pack his lunch and have coffee waiting for them both. One might not notice it initially, but Esperance doesn't eat dinner with her husband. Later, we learn that she has her own life, working as a crossing guard at a local school and making dresses for women in the neighborhood.

Because of Xavier's current late hours, she must be eating dinner alone and then making sure her husband has hot food ready when he returns. Esperance isn't doing it because of some marital expectation, since Xavier is too kind and admiring of his wife for such a thing, but because this is clearly a marriage of mutual love and, more importantly, respect.

We can gather all of this from the little moments that make up this film, because Sorelle is patient and observant, having a palpable affection for these characters and trusting us enough to see what she sees in them. We do.

The story, as such, begins as routines—work and meals and conversations over the dinner table or while getting ready for bed. Sorelle and Colom may be focused primarily on Xavier, but they give each of the family members a chance to show us something we might not expect, such as Esperance's daily schedule and Junior's funny stand-up act, in which he jokes about being the child of immigrants whom he perceives as expecting a lot from him.

There's another scene late in the film, when Xavier sits down with his son and explains things the young man didn't know or might not remember about the family's arrival in the United States. The father understands his son's perspective of him but explains that also understands Junior's uncertainty and desire to make something of his life. That is, after all, why he moved the family here in the first place.

Throughout the familial stuff, the film does raise issues outside of the usual. Most of them involve the encroaching gentrification of Little Haiti, in which Xavier is participating through his job and accepts as a way to improve the area. Esperance insists that her husband see what so-called progress is doing to the community. How he does here is alternately subtle, such as the interruption of a kind of daily ritual of a man passing Xavier's home whenever he comes home from work, and heartbreaking, when the man gets conclusive news about his dream home.

All of that means something here, because Mountains takes its time with the little moments, the development of these characters and relationships, and putting their experience within the context of what's happening around them. This may be a little story, but it does possess some notable ideas and a bigger heart.

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