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Ukrainian-born actress Oksana Orlenko's performance as an illegal immigrant from Croatia has brilliant, shifting movements between hope and despair. Her character is stripped of all her values, including that of language and culture, but she perseveres, her demeanor toughened and resolve strengthened by each indignity. You wish this performance came in a less schizophrenic movie, but it does contain an emotional honesty that cuts through the melodramatic hokum that surrounds Orlenko. The movie opens Friday in Los Angeles following a February release in Chicago.
"Lana's Rain" starts off as an engrossing tale about the dark side of the American immigrant experience. A brother and sister escape the war-torn Balkans in the mid-1990s only to find themselves desperate for money in Chicago, thus falling into a drowning pool of exploitation and prostitution. On the fringe are other characters like a Chinese immigrant sculptor, fighting his own battles of self-worth, that hint at the interesting picture writer-director Michael S. Ojeda could have made.
But at roughly the halfway point, the movie turns into a low-budget gangster picture, which sacrifices character and themes to the kind of action mayhem all too commonplace in studio thrillers. Most troubling is Ojeda's inability or unwillingness to introduce greater ambivalence into his brother-sister relationship. The degradation of the innocent Lana (Orlenko) would play better if Darko (Nickolai Stoilov) was not such an unrepentant monster. He suffers no conflict whatsoever turning his own sister into a whore.
The world of immigrants who cannot escape the physical and emotional violence of their homeland even by leaving it is a morally murky one, ripe for examination by an adventurous filmmaker. Turning it into a routine gangster film with requisite double-crosses and retribution slayings throws away that opportunity.
Gennaldi Balitski's camerawork is quite good as he uses Chicago to express Lana's emotions and moods. William Brown's music subtly and sometimes not so subtly underscores the story's emotions. But it is Orlenko's Lana that you take away from the film, a woman bravely struggling to get her footing and regain the moral strength to escape her most evil oppressor -- her own brother.
Ukrainian-born actress Oksana Orlenko's performance as an illegal immigrant from Croatia has brilliant, shifting movements between hope and despair. Her character is stripped of all her values, including that of language and culture, but she perseveres, her demeanor toughened and resolve strengthened by each indignity. You wish this performance came in a less schizophrenic movie, but it does contain an emotional honesty that cuts through the melodramatic hokum that surrounds Orlenko. The movie opens Friday in Los Angeles following a February release in Chicago.
"Lana's Rain" starts off as an engrossing tale about the dark side of the American immigrant experience. A brother and sister escape the war-torn Balkans in the mid-1990s only to find themselves desperate for money in Chicago, thus falling into a drowning pool of exploitation and prostitution. On the fringe are other characters like a Chinese immigrant sculptor, fighting his own battles of self-worth, that hint at the interesting picture writer-director Michael S. Ojeda could have made.
But at roughly the halfway point, the movie turns into a low-budget gangster picture, which sacrifices character and themes to the kind of action mayhem all too commonplace in studio thrillers. Most troubling is Ojeda's inability or unwillingness to introduce greater ambivalence into his brother-sister relationship. The degradation of the innocent Lana (Orlenko) would play better if Darko (Nickolai Stoilov) was not such an unrepentant monster. He suffers no conflict whatsoever turning his own sister into a whore.
The world of immigrants who cannot escape the physical and emotional violence of their homeland even by leaving it is a morally murky one, ripe for examination by an adventurous filmmaker. Turning it into a routine gangster film with requisite double-crosses and retribution slayings throws away that opportunity.
Gennaldi Balitski's camerawork is quite good as he uses Chicago to express Lana's emotions and moods. William Brown's music subtly and sometimes not so subtly underscores the story's emotions. But it is Orlenko's Lana that you take away from the film, a woman bravely struggling to get her footing and regain the moral strength to escape her most evil oppressor -- her own brother.
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