Bad Things In Brooklyn
Francine Prose writes: ‘Roughly halfway through the young Chilean director Sebastián Silva’s excellent film, “Nasty Baby,” there’s a revealing, complicated, delicately handled scene in which a black local beat cop (Catrina Ganey) intervenes in a neighborhood dispute in an upscale part of Brooklyn. Entirely convincing and plausible, it is the polar opposite of the stomach-churning videos we have been watching on the news: police pumping bullets into young black men, cops felled by a sniper. Without preaching or making obvious points, this scene (like the rest of the film) reminds us: how many of our daily interactions are shaped by race and class, how well we understand or intuit this fact, and how much about these issues remains unspoken. The brief interaction—of a conflict humanely and reasonably resolved—offers something like hope, which the last part of the film will proceed to cast in shadow.’
