La Ciudad is a quiet, spare, extremely affecting docudrama
about struggling Latino immigrants in New York City. Riker stays
with each of his four successive vignettes just long enough to
create three-dimensional characters and to make you feel the ache
of their poverty and sense of dislocation and disillusionment
in your own bones. Filmed in Washington Heights with immigrant
non-actors, there is never a second in La Ciudad of queasy
millionaire-plays-bum Acting (see superstar Ironweed tramps
Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep or ever-shaggy Fisher King
Robin Williams) ; reality's bite marks every face. The first story
deals with day-laborers who are lied to about their pay rate and
then left in an abandoned wasteland to retrieve old bricks and
clean them up for re-use. The second piece varies the mood with
a tenuous romance. A sick father tries in the third story to get
his daughter enrolled in school despite having only an old station-wagon
for a home address. And in the last vignette a sweat-shop seamstress
desperate to send some money back home confronts the bosses who
haven't paid her for past weeks of work, spurring a somber pulse
of solidarity among her fellow garment-workers, minus the Norma
Rae fanfare. Studios, movie theaters, and video stores will
not be pushing the must-see film La Ciudad at you--so seek
it out.