Mountains Is a Quietly Magnificent Debut

In his 1976 book-length essay The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin wrote of film stars, “One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be. One does not go to see Humphrey Bogart, as Sam Spade: one goes to see Sam Spade, as Humphrey Bogart.” I’ve never fully agreed with Baldwin’s reading of the movie-star persona as wholly separate from the pleasures of watching acting as a craft, but it’s an instructive thought. Don’t we all want to watch a performance that transcends from acting to being? The kind of performance that feels seamless, as if the actor slipped into the skin of another and brought their soul from the ether to embody them? Acting, at its most divine, is simply being. This idea bubbled to the surface of my mind when I watched Mountains and the whisper-still, evocative lead performance of Atibon Nazaire as Xavier, a middle-aged Haitian immigrant construction worker in his adopted home of Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood.

Mountains begins with a Haitian proverb set against a black background that translates to “Behind mountains are mountains.” Xavier is watching gentrification pick apart his second home like a vulture gorging on a carcass. Little Haiti isn’t dead, but it’s changing. Rapidly. The film, meanwhile, unfurls at the languid, gentle pace established in its opening moments. Homes demolished. Yellow hard hats dotting the eyeline. Xavier eating mango with his hands on a brief work break. The verdant expanse of the yard, with palm trees, octopus trees, live oaks, interrupted by the machinery of demolition. As Xavier heads home — his drives are often set to the sounds of a Haitian radio program (voiced by Henri Claude Douze) that updates him on the flowing political and social change of his first home — the blue real-estate signs that punctuate the lawns start to feel oppressive. Houses up for sale. A neighborhood in the midst of erosion. Xavier returns to the squat one-story pale terra-cotta home he shares with his wife, Esperance (Sheila Anozier), and 20-something son, Junior (Chris Renois).

This is director Monica Sorelle’s feature debut (alongside her co-writer Robert Colom, a Miami-born Cuban film producer and artist) and a vision of Miami rarely seen onscreen. When a film is particularly geographically piquant, a compliment soon follows that the city itself feels like a character. But every film should treat its setting as a character. Geography is identity. This isn’t the Miami of South Beach denizens, transplants dripping in wealth, taut young bodies supine in the brilliant sunlight. This is the Miami of Haitian Creole spoken with loving reverence. This is the Miami of sos pwa served over rice at the family dinner table, of griot brought to the communion party of a young relative. This is Miami at the pitch of a life you can imagine, of a worker you pass on the street. 

The Black South is eroding because of the swirling forces of racism, gentrification, and climate disaster — the same forces that encroach on the doorstep of Xavier and his kin. Sorelle and Colom build out a truthful vision of these characters’ lives, touching on the people and neighbors who populate their existence. But the film is most intrigued by how this family functions and what remains unspoken between them. Xavier sees a nicer one-story home in the neighborhood that he imagines as a great fit for his family, a place with more and softer space to lay your head. When Esperance and Xavier attend an open-house tour, there’s a sense that they’re trying on a new future. Xavier encourages them both to dream about what life could be like in a home like this. But it’s evident they’re not regarded as attractive homeowners, not like the white people inhabiting the background of the scene. Sorelle crafts a Miami that is both naturally gorgeous and politically fraught in a way that is stitched into the fabric of these characters’ lives. An intriguing tension occurs when Xavier’s Black co-worker Daniel (Roscoè B. Thické III) is derided with the N-word by a Latino co-worker who is related to the boss. Xavier understands the precarity of their situation as Black men in such a world and holds Daniel back from rightfully stomping on this man. Things go askew when Xavier overhears the boss tell his relative-underling in Spanish, “Don’t you know we have a contract with the county and the Blacks need to be here? … Don’t let the Black stench get to you.” Sorelle doesn’t mine this moment for melodrama or neat racial lessons. There are no dramatic disagreements, no fatalistic ruptures, no grand pronouncements in this film. Movies are rarely close to the rhythms of life, but this one’s strength is in finding beauty and meaning in the minor key. 

Mountains demonstrates two exceedingly great strengths in Sorelle’s work. The first is undoubtedly how she directs actors. She grants them the space to breathe life and complication into the gestures, expressions, and postures of their characters. Anozier gives Esperance a knowing posture. When I watched her sew clothes — a side job alongside her main one as a school crossing guard — I thought you can find the divine anywhere. And what is more holy on this Earth than the calloused hands of a loving mother? Renois limns quite impactfully the contradictions and yearnings that come with being the son of Haitian immigrants, trying to balance his desires with their expectations of him. Nazaire brings Xavier to life with a sense of history always flowing around him in a performance that is humble yet extraordinary in its physical detail. This is a man who has lived. There’s a scene in which he sits on the bed, his unclothed back to the camera, and I could see in his tense stretching a lifetime of a back burdened by more than it should have to carry. In many ways, Mountains reminds me of director Charles Burnett’s study of the beauty and complication of the Black quotidian in films like My Brother’s Wedding (1983) and my personal favorite, To Sleep With Anger (1990).

Sorelle’s second strength is her keen eye. When her camera enters into the family home, I was immediately bowled over by the production design from Helen Peña, the art direction by Nadia Wolff, and the set decoration by Dezray Smith, all of which Sorelle and cinematographer Javier Labrador Deulofeu frame with structured, angled grace. Walls are painted a carmine red and pale peach. Black art marks them. The sewing corner where Esperance holds court is festooned with pattern after pattern, an array of colors for the eyes to feast upon. Sorelle’s gaze is gentle in how she brings Miami to life, but under that naturalism is a sharp understanding of how to frame a Black body in motion. There are certain shots so powerful in their use of color, blocking, framing, and physical truth — when I rewatched the film a second time for this review, I would pause to drink in the imagery. Sun-kissed lens flares. Xavier nestled in the crook of a tree at a Communion party, framed by brilliant green leaves that complement the amber liquor he swirls in his glass. Esperance at her crossing-guard job. A triangular archway frames her and a friend conversing near the center. Laughter overlaying the score. Aqua-green light streaming into the bedroom, brightening Xavier’s skin as he talks to his son about his relationship to their homeland, a country that has been suffering for hundreds of years for daring to enact a slave rebellion that proved so successful it continues to shake the foundations of the world order. This is why Haiti suffers — for daring to fight back brutally against western powers like the United States and France in favor of Black life and safety. Black futures are explicitly possible and imaginable because of the Haitian people. 

One intelligent ripple in the film I noticed fairly early on is that Junior doesn’t speak Haitian Creole with his parents. When they speak to him, he responds in English, not because he can’t speak their language but, for some reason, he chooses not to. The lack of alignment between father and son ebbs into the background until about 44 minutes into the film, when the son comes into better focus, the story no longer content to leave him in the background as a foil. The sequence that reveals more about Junior occurs at a stand-up comedy event. It’s Junior onstage, aware that his parents regard him as a failure. He has a lanky, easygoing charm up there. “Why you listen to your dreams? You’re sleeping,” he says, mocking his mother’s voice and demeanor. His cousin Farrell (Farley Louis), who recorded the set for Junior, makes an astute point: “You said nothing about us.” That us means Haitians. There’s no specificity in Junior’s set. His parents are broadly defined as Black immigrants, but nothing about the place or the rhythms of who they are and where they’re from comes into focus. This allows the film to be a bit more emotionally revealing, even bruising, building to a crucial scene at the end between father and son. The last 15 or so minutes distill its strengths with elegance — the lived-in performances, the revealing understanding of Miami, the precise yet lush framing and use of color that dances on dark-brown skin, the writing that feels revelatory in how it molds its themes, and the rhythmic editing of Jonathan Cuartas, which reflects Sorelle’s strengths as an artist spearheading this project. When Esperance says, “You don’t own anything in this country,” I was pierced by the truth of that statement.

The film leaves us with no easy answers, no sense of finality about this family and the project of gentrification that is rewriting the culture of Miami. Mountains is a film smart enough to forgo simplistic melodrama or narrative neatness. It’s the kind that dares us to look back and consider what it means to create a home away from the shores where you were born, in a country hostile not just to your betterment but to your very survival.

Mountains arrived in theaters last month and is available to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video now.