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Opening at the Film Forum today, “Life and Nothing More” shares the title of Abbas Kiarostami’s 1992 narrative film about the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in Iran that cost the lives of 30,000 citizens. Antonio Méndez Esparaza’s film, while likely not an homage to Kiarostami’s masterpiece, shares its compassion for its victims but on another fault line, that of the racial and class divisions in contemporary Florida.
Using neo-realist conventions heightened by a very gifted non-professional cast, the story is defined by the constraints imposed by capitalist society on a single mother working as a waitress, her troubled 14-year old son and three year old daughter. Fifty years ago, when I was working as a welfare worker in Harlem, I sat by the side of a 28-year old mother of four in her hospital bed trying to convince her stay in bed. Her doctors warned that if she checked herself out, another heart attack could cost her life. Through her sobs, she kept asking what she had to suffer so much. Unlike Job, her suffering and the suffering of the single mom in Esparaza’s powerful film is not a trial of their faith by God but by the vicissitudes of wage slavery magnified by racism.
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