Mad Bills to Pay is your new favorite NY movie

Pairs perfectly well with dinner. Chicharrones, cosmic brownies, and why Tatiana and the Bronx are telling the same story.

Would you pass the marshmallow test? I’m very much the kind of person who holds off on the final chapters of a book or episodes of a television show to prolong the pleasure of having it still ahead. At least that’s what I tell myself, and so it is with the latest issue of MUBI Notebook, which happens to be centered on food and film—not incidentally one of the founding preoccupations of this newsletter. I’ve had it for months, and I still have one or two essays deliberately unread.

The new issue of print-only magazine explores what nourishes us on and off the screen. I liked reading about the late-20th-century power lunch in Hollywood by Courtney Stephens; she codirected the John Lily doc I mentioned the other week. I’m slightly jealous I wasn’t invited to the hypothetical potluck of movie-dishes featuring greats, like Wesley Morris and Robert Sietsema, who actually picked one of my all-time favorite on-screen meals (!).

It’s probably for the better, since I was commissioned to write an entire essay. It’s still online, I think, but like most things, it’s magically better in print.

We had copies for sale at the BAM screening, where everyone was in universal agreement about how good they looked. See for yourself and purchase at mubi.com/magazine. And, as always, get 30 days free of MUBI at mubi.com/elissa.

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WHAT TO WATCH

MAD BILLS TO PAY

or DESTINY, DILE QUE NO SOY MALO

I’ve been mentioning this movie for the better part of a year—it was on my top 10 list. Now you can finally see it.

Joel Alfonso Vargas, a Bronx native now based in London, shot his debut feature on location across the Central Bronx, Orchard Beach, and City Island (shout out to Johnny’s Reef)—inside the Dominican community with the texture of actual life, moving between domestic uproar and suspended stillness.

The protagonist Rico (Juan Collado) sells nutcrackers, mostly. When his 16-year-old girlfriend Destiny gets pregnant, he invites her to move into his already-crowded apartment—despite being told, clearly, not to. He is the kind of person who keeps derailing his own life in ways that feel both small and irreversible. It is funny and a little bit sad, which is the correct ratio. When I met Vargas over fried pork in Inwood, he described Rico as possibly prone to self-sabotage. You feel it in every scene.

We’re talking food next—so at the risk of losing you and breaking stride, I’m sending you to Screen Screen for more detailed thoughts on the film—and a full conversation with Joel.

Mad Bills to Pay is in theaters now, at Film Forum. It opens in LA next month. Go see it!!

THE FOOD SCENE

I could not actually tell what Rico and his family were eating in the dinner-table scene. Because the film is shot largely in master takes (static camera, middle distance, no zooms pushing you toward emphasis). But that hardly matters. Rico is on everyone’s last nerve. Destiny has just moved in, and she’s radio silent. His mother radiates displeasure, and his sister openly delights in the situation, ripping into Rico with an irrepressible cackle. Only someone truly close can talk shit so directly.

Rico tries to improve matters by flattering his mom’s choice of take-out and praising the salad, a detail I find particularly funny to me because “salad” in these Latin establishments, as in Italian ones and many others besides, is a loose collection of lettuce and tomato better suited to a sandwich and burger than an actual salad but I digress.

Vargas told me he doesn’t have too many memories of eating around the table because his mom was always at work. “There was no structure, so I like this kind of Malcolm in the Middle-type thing where the family comes together and eats,” he confessed. “It’s a great unforced way to share what’s going on in your day-to-day.” In the short version of the film, the dinner scene is more dramatically pivotal: it’s when Rico announces his mom's and sister's pregnancy.

Vargas is a big cinephile and was influenced in part by Maurice Pialat and the way he films family arguments, which I pointed out can often happen in the kitchen or around the table.

*Relatedly, Film at Lincoln Center is about to screen, for the first time ever in the US, Pialat’s seven-part mini series La maison des bois. Highly, highly recommend.

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WHERE TO EAT

For dinner afterward, I could send you to uptown or to the Bronx. Naturally.

Ajo y Oregano is a classic spot nestled in Little Italy. There’s Cachapas y Más and plenty of other reliable stops along Dyckman, and Elsa La Reina del Chicharrón has multiple locations, all anchored by the same specialty: chicharrón, which in the context of Dominican food means thick slabs of fried pork chopped into blunt, two-inch rectangles, their skins armored and crackling, their interiors improbably tender—which is always a minor miracle when it comes to protein, but especially with pork. Vargas ordered for us in Spanish, politely asking the women behind the counter for just a little, a request they appeared to treat as charming but nonbinding. I added mofongo, and rice and beans—which were cooked and separately, not folded together as in moro—and was handed, half of a gourd-sized Dominican avocado for good measure.

But that would be too easy.

look at this interior.

I send you instead, to Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, at Lincoln Center, since a) it is according to some the best NY restaurant and b) the chef’s origin story rhymes with Rico’s. If you didn’t already know, before his professional culinary career took off and after his employment at the McDo’s, a young entrepreneurial Onwuachi also vended nutcrackers in the outer boroughs.

Vargas made a film about working-class life with arthouse precision, finding formal beauty in the Bronx without aestheticizing its poverty. Tatiana does something similar: it takes the flavor logic of Afro-Caribbean home cooking—food that was never asking for anyone's approval—and runs it through formal technique without altering its grammar. Consider the escovitz fish reborn as a crudo or the cosmic brownie as an actual fudgy confection (the other desserts are just as good, actually better imo).

Both the film and the restaurant translate diasporic New York as abundance, the improvisational intelligence of city life refined, without being laundered of its origin.

The truffle chopped cheese. Tatiana is not cheap, but it is worth it (a better value perhaps than the roast chickens everyone’s down on). You’ll be hard-pressed to pick a favorite. Nearly every single thing on the menu is criminally good.