Bella

The attractiveness of Bella is found in its preparedness to accept that even the most terrible events can contribute something beautiful to life.

The film opens with a successful soccer star, José, driving with his manager to the signing of a life-changing contract. But he fails to notice a young girl playing in the road and his dream is lost in an instant. Time bends to show him, years later, working as a chef in his brother’s restaurant. There he meets a waitress, Nina, at the point that she is fired for turning up late three times. Her employer has no idea that an unwanted pregnancy is making her sick. Both of their lives, humanly speaking, are ruins. But José’ decision to return a small bear she drops brings about a connection that transforms them both.

José and Nina are just the people each other needs to meet, but not in a romantic sense. His knowledge of what it means for a mother to lose a child leads her to abandon her half-formed plans of abortion. And in her, he finds the opportunity to offer some restitution for the life he took. It’s not a perfect morality tale but their personal tragedies are what allow them to each express the compassion the other needs to receive. The events that threatened to hollow them out, have become a means of filling them with hope, and maturing them as human beings.

Bella opens with José recounting an early memory that is something of a theme for the film:

“My grandma used to say, ‘Do you want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.’”

Without any context, the remark sounds cruel, presenting God as some spoiler of dreams. But in reality it speaks of our Creator’s desire to give us far more than we would settle for, left to ourselves. Like the best parent, He is just as prepared to take things from us as give them if He knows that the absence will ultimately be a blessing. As José and Nina walk along a New York street, they meet a blind man selling decorations. But he is not a creature of pity; rather he seems to have compassion to spare for this uncertain young woman. As they walk away the camera briefly glances across a sign near his stall: ‘God closed my eyes. Now I can see.’

The sovereignty of God in all things – not just His control but His will commanding and controlling even the most desperate situations – is hard to accept, and just as hard to deny from Scripture. Cinematic tales like Bella’s lend us a heavenly perspective on tragedy so that after the lights come up we might consider again the things God achieves through disappointment and sadness. The filmmakers don’t lead the viewer to God (José actually expresses some ambivalence about the after-life) but presence of some guiding hand is clear. A car crash, a child’s death, a lonely, desperate woman – but the writer of Ecclesiastes, looking out on a similarly tragic world, still had the courage to write, “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” (Ecc. 3:11).

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