_Fresh_

                    reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs


     Twelve-year-old Fresh (Sean Nelson) lives in Brooklyn with his aunt
and eleven cousins. He runs heroin for dealer Esteban (Giancarlo Esposito)
and sneaks illicit visits with his estranged dad (Samuel L. Jackson) in
Washington Square Park, where they play speed chess. Fresh is a bright,
ambitious, basically decent kid, with what looks to be a predetermined
future ahead of him: he'll stay local, frustrated, and angry. 

     Boaz Yakin's first film is less a generic hood movie than it is a
"movie movie.'' It indulges in some cinematic contrivances and diversions
while depicting an urban milieu that's familiar by now, old-style "mean
streets'' and "no way out'' revised according to a contemporary,
specifically black male experience. The opening credits sequence makes
clear the obvious material limits of this existence: buildings are
run-down and grafitti-ed, garbage- strewn, noisy street corners are where
the action is, where deals are made and where destinies are decided. 

     Fresh is a likeable character, meaning to do the right thing but
caught up in a world that leaves him few options. He grows on you. At
first he's naive, aspiring to the given codes of success. Running drugs
for the smooth-talking, extremely confident Esteban, he wants the kind of
power he sees displayed all around him, men with hard, well-worked-out
bodies, conspicuous capital (nice jewelry and rides), nasty reputations
that precede them, and immediate access to women (a.k.a. "bitches'' or
"harems''). No one messes with these guys. Observant and a quick learner,
Fresh makes sure - quietly and firmly - that clients don't cheat him or
his bosses. 

     The other man he works for, Corky (Ron Brice), is strung tighter than
the more paternal, silky Esteban. Corky is beginning to move crack and
hoping to make it big. He's assisted by Jake (Jean LaMarre), a
mighty-chested, bandanna-ed punk full of rage and nerve, aggressively
marking and defending his turf. Fresh is awakened to the moral problemsa
that frame what he's been doing when he witnesses, first-hand, the effects
of drugs and Jake's gangsta violence. This transformation is classically
motivated: his sister (N'Bushe Wright) is a junkie, dependent on
self-important scuzzball Esteban, and a girl Fresh knows from school is
hit by extra bullets during a basketball court disagreement. These events,
on top of the extreme macho posturing by his friend, Chuckie (Luis
Lantigua) - "I got the dope moves!'' he says again and again - move Fresh
to plot an intricate revenge, in order to save his sister and himself from
fates that seem inevitable. 

     It's a deft film, carefully orchestrated, psychologically compelling,
and less explicitly violent than you might expect (much of the violence
takes place offscreen, indicated by sound effects and sharp-edged, vibrant
colors). When Chuckie decides to make some fast cash by using their shared
pet, a pitbull, for fights, Fresh is upset; his focus on the dog - as an
unself- conscious victim forced into bloody aggression - makes sense, as a
not-so-subtle displacement for the other anxieties he's feeling. The boys
talk comix, _X-Men_ and _The Punisher_, characters with alienation
and anger to burn, caught up in volatile, vivid worlds; Fresh and Chuckie
seem especially young and trapped here (as the comic book images come up
on screen), all of which underlines their age-beyond-their-years in other
scenes. 

     Fresh's relationship with his alcoholic, genius father Sam (and
Jackson is as remarkable as ever) is more underplayed, such that the
tensions between them are left unspoken, but electric. Sam spends his time
playing chess and remembering games he played in the park with well-known
white chess-masters (Bobby Fischer's name comes up); he advises Fresh to
play chess (read: life) with intensity and fervor. This is a cute device,
but the exchanges between Jackson and the young Nelson are finely tuned. 

     There's been some discussion in press surrounding the movie, about
Yakin as the writer-director of a "black'' movie. You know, questions
arise concerning his place as a white, Jewish filmmaker, depicting an
experience he hasn't lived, the legacy of appropriation of black stories
by white filmmakers, etc. This is an interesting problem, especially given
recent attention to identity politics and the overdetermination of
cultural meanings. Remember the stir when _The New Yorker_ decided
that it would only publish fiction by writers who "were'' what they wrote
about? 

     While Yakin has defended his work in predictable terms (it's reality,
it's "out there''), this rationale seems less useful in a long run than a
rethinking of how such "appropriateness'' is decided and maintained as a
system (and representation is a system of production, distribution, and
consumption: they all inform each other). There are important political
and cultural stakes for this, lodged in the history of representation:
white filmmakers have been running everyone's show for too long. But does
this then mean that you have to *be* what you represent? For the
larger question is this: how do you or anyone else decide what you
*are*? 



Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University.

Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.

This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.