Luli Bitri and Kasem Hoxha in “Holy Boom.” credit: cineuropa.org
Maria Lafi is an experienced filmmaker who’s done a number of short films and TV projects. Her feature film debut drama, Holy Boom (Greece, 2018), is a mixed bag; it’s capably shot, and paced and edited with a good sense of urgency and varied dynamics. But she’s far too anxious to tell us How Bad Things Are, How Complicated The World Is Now, and How Powerless We All Are Up Against It, rather than taking the time to establish who these people are and why we should invest our time and sympathy.
Athens, of course, is one of the hubs for the movement of immigrants and refugees from wildly disparate homes to what they hope will be different, better lives. One night, a bored Filipino teenager, Ige (Spiros Ballesteros), and his buddies drop an explosive into a mailbox, completely unaware of how many nearby lives they’ve turned upside-down. Musician Lena’s (Anastasia Rafaella Konidi) boyfriend Manou (Samuel Akinola) has bought an envelope of acid tabs to deal. Poof. Not having them to sell leaves them on the hook to some very bad guys. Adia (Luli Bitri), her husband and their baby son have come in illegally from Albania, and when he has a horrific accident, her life becomes hell. She can’t see him in hospital without ID, the trafficking brokers won’t give up her passport, and the birth certificate her family sent her is up in explosive smoke. Busybody Thalia (Nena Menti) keeps an eye on all of them, and life gets interesting for her as a result, to say the least. And the mailbox is only the first can of worms Ige opens up – he’s in a pretty dark spiral in school and with his family at their busy restaurant.
The outlines of the plot are pretty compelling, and the disparate stories that merge together are woven well. But the characters are drawn in too broad and too simple strokes, and the deck being constantly stacked against them gets monotonous without that underlying depth. When the narrative gets motoring, the actors can’t bring it home credibly. When the performances convince, the short-sightedness of the narrative disappoints. Adia invokes the most empathy, but she’s the one with the baby, a string that’s pulled a bit too often despite Luli Bitri’s good work here. I hope Lafi gets more feature work after this – she clearly knows what she’s doing; she should put this one behind her and move on.
Periscope In The Bathtub 