‘Bella’ is no heavyweight but at least it has heart

New York movie clichés abound in the film.

By ROGER MOORE

ORLANDO SENTINEL

It’s just “a typical New York moment,” or collection of moments, this movie “Bella.”

Girl meets boy at work. Girl is pregnant. She’s fired. He walks off the job and spends a day trying to talk her out of an abortion, maybe by sharing his “deep dark secret.”

“Bella” is a strained dollop of Latin “magical realism” injected into a realistic American indie movie.

We meet a soccer player who has just signed the big American contract and is riding off to his New York press conference in his 1950s-vintage Cadillac convertible.

We drop in on Nina (Tammy Blanchard of “The Good Shepherd” and a recent TV Judy Garland biography), late for work again, this time scrambling to find a home pregnancy test.

Manny (Manny Perez) preps his swank New York restaurant where his brother, Jose, is head chef. Bearded, disheveled Jose (Eduardo Verastegui) may have sensitive, soulful eyes that cry out behind that beard. But he looks like a street person.

The high-strung Manny fires Nina, Jose runs after her. And “Bella” is about their day, dining out, visiting his family, hanging out on the beach, ruining Manny’s lunch hour rush.

Jose flashes back and forth to the “big day” (and big tragedy) of his past. Sometimes, he flashes forward and seems able to take Nina into this vision of the future. He needs to. Because she doesn’t want a baby.

“I can barely take care of myself.”

There’s more technique (jumpy, nervous hand-held shots) and heart than credibility or mystery here. We know where this is going even if the movie leaves chunks of what actually happens out of the plot.

Mexican co-writer/director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde finds warmth when he connects with how feuding brothers make up (Jose cooks for Manny) and catches odd little bits of New York life — the blind origami artist-street person who offers to give away his art if “the lady can tell me” what she sees all around her on “this beautiful day.”

Her answer? New York is “like a huge clock. Nothing ever stops.”

We learn what happened to Jose years before, but the too-chatty script talks away the emotional impact of that revelation.

Still, this New York story, those “New York moments” make “Bella” an engaging failure, an inversion of some New York movie clichés, a sweet if incomplete movie about love with the proper stranger in the city that never sleeps.