Reviewed by Kimberli Wong at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2020<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.fabriqueducinema.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/easy-living.jpg\")
This is Elvis. \u00a0Elvis is an immigrant attempting to cross the border between Italy and France, to get to Paris to reunite with his pregnant wife. \u00a0Elvis is cool. \u00a0As the filmmaker brothers Orso and Peter Miyawaka say, \u201cNobody is cooler than Elvis.\u201d \u00a0Everyone wants to be friends with Elvis.<\/p>\n
Which is the catalyst that prompts three people united by chance to try and help him illegally cross the Italian-French border. \u00a0These three are: \u00a0a medication-smuggling young woman (Camilla), her younger brother her presumed other brother dumped on her last minute to babysit (Brando), and a loser-lost-funny as hell American expat tennis teacher (Don).<\/p>\n
The desire Peter and Orso Miyawaka had was to portray immigrants in a different light than they had previously seen in film, in their own words, as everyday people \u201cyou or I would be friends with.\u201d \u00a0This mirrors their own personal experience growing up along the French-Italian border. \u00a0Being there in the 90s, there was an ease at the border, with no military or police patrol, no barricade to stop people from just walking across it. \u00a0\u201cImmigrant\u201d wasn\u2019t really a politicized label in that region. \u00a0With the changing political climate in the 2000s, suddenly \u201cbeing an immigrant\u201d became a thing, and along with all the negative stereotypes came stricter borders and more difficult crossings.<\/p>\n
Brando, played by James Miyawaka, looks up to and befriends Elvis, and it is his urging that convinces his sister and the tennis teacher they meet, Don, to help Elvis cross the border. \u00a0In fact, the immigrant story is primarily told through his lens. \u00a0This is particularly effective because Brando is young, he is innocent, and we see Elvis through this innocence\u2014not as an \u201cimmigrant,\u201d not as his race, but as the filmmakers intended, a cool older guy that Brando admires. \u00a0We can all relate to that feeling, we all had that one person when we were young who just seemed to be… cool. \u00a0Elvis is this person for Brando. \u00a0When Brando must stay behind while the three others attempt to smuggle Elvis across the border, we feel his worry, his utter concern, not through the lens of politics but through pure humanity.<\/p>\n
Manoel Hudec gives a hilarious and nuanced performance as the American expat tennis teacher, Don. \u00a0On the surface, Don is epitome of American asinine\u2014try-too-hard charming, bumbling goofiness, well-intentioned cluelessness. \u00a0An aspiring painter, he paints by night and sleeps with his tennis clientele by day. \u00a0As the story progresses, we learn his journey has not been without hardship, though as he puts it, when difficulty came he ran away, but \u201cto his parents\u2019 beach house.\u201d \u00a0His life, as he sees it, has been \u201ceasy living\u201d compared to someone like Elvis, yet his pain is palpable, and for that it not to be discounted, either.<\/p>\n
Easy Living is an entertaining and heartfelt film, telling one speck of the immigrant story in a charming, humorous, and original light. \u00a0There are plenty of laugh out loud moments, the timing of the film is brilliant, and there is a surprising depth to such a simple yet relevant story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reviewed by Kimberli Wong at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2020 This is Elvis. \u00a0Elvis is an immigrant attempting to cross the border between Italy and France, to get to Paris to reunite with his pregnant wife. \u00a0Elvis is cool. \u00a0As the filmmaker brothers Orso and Peter Miyawaka say, \u201cNobody is cooler than Elvis.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":226246,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,404],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","category-santa-barbara-film-festival-2020"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/226246"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46712"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46994,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46712\/revisions\/46994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}