Change Your Image
mhd939
Reviews
Transatlantic Coffee (2012)
Alex, a forty-something working clown in New York City, finds romance with a young English girl.
This lyrical, poetic film is a visual delight and a thespian triumph -- an understated but screaming manifestation of the writer/director's inner dream/nightmare. Most of the burden of his vision is carried superbly on the shoulders of Kevin Pinassi, who plays Alex, a forty- something working clown who in the wake of 911 stumbles into an unlikely online romance with a young English woman (excellently played by Rachel Marie Lewis) which becomes real (or does it?). Pinassi is able to inhabit this character much the way Ingmar Bergman's actors channeled their director's vision of deep down raw emotion with the slightest facial movements, a twitch of the brow, a tightening of the mouth or the tilt of a glance, giving the audience a living text from which to read the mind of an introspective confused soul. Carlsen and Pinassi's Alex is a pilgrim from some other universe stranded on earth not knowing which way is home and which way is disaster. This a a unique and personal work of art which grabs you and holds your attention. We feel we're inside a mind which is continually at odds with itself trying to decide, is this world real or not? And isn't that the conundrum which takes place in every human being?