Little Odessa

James Gray's first film, set in the Brighton Beach neighbourhood of Brooklyn. Joshua works as a contract killer. A job forces him back to the neighbourhood he was born in. His family is there: his mother is dying, his father does not want to see him, and his younger brother Reuben admires him. What the film is interested in is not crime but how far the family has come apart. Joshua's occupation stays almost in the background; what comes forward is that inside one house nobody can speak to anybody. The choice of neighbourhood is not incidental: Brighton Beach is where post-Soviet immigration concentrated, and the film shows that community not with an outsider's curiosity but with an insider's exhaustion. Tim Roth plays Joshua, Edward Furlong plays Reuben, Vanessa Redgrave the mother and Maximilian Schell the father. Gray made it in his early twenties, and it won the Silver Lion at the Venice film festival in 1994. A strong debut for anyone who likes slow family tragedy and cold city landscapes. For a viewer wanting action, the pace is heavy and violence appears only a few times, briefly and without decoration.