A chorus of shouting animates the Bronx apartment at the center of Joel Alfonso Vargas’s Mad Bills to Pay. There’s plenty to yell about in 19-year-old Rico’s (Juan Collado) home, which he shares with his single mother, Andrea (Yohanna Florentino), who’s nearly always donning scrubs as she heads to or from work, and his 15-year-old sister, Sally (Nathaly Navarro), who’s quickly slipping toward trouble. The biggest stressor is the “bills to pay,” with money perpetually tight and Rico’s hustles doing little to support the household in the long run.
Rico makes his money selling nutcrackers—that hyper-alcoholic beach staple of New York summers—in between spending too much time drinking and smoking. Even though the family faces hardship, they make time for moments of caring, such as the children surprising their mother with a cake for her 40th birthday, where she wishes for “love and tranquility.” But these moments are fleeting, quickly flickering out as the family careens from one blowup to the next.
Across the film, Vargas delivers an intimately observed portrait of Rico and the Bronx’s Dominican community, folding warmth into the very real pressures that define daily life. Everything ruptures around a very familiar teenage accident. Rico is going to be a father. He drops the news to Andrea and Sally with a brittle, practiced confidence, as if he expects he might steady the room. The news is met (unsurprisingly) with disbelief, then fury. His family lobs questions about how he will support a baby, and with what money. Justified concerns become even more pertinent when it comes to light that the soon-to-be-mother is the shy 16-year-old Destiny (Destiny Checo), who will need to move into their already overstrained apartment.
Rico is infuriating. His misplaced machismo blinds him to the realities of his life. His bravado shuts out his family and keeps him locked in a kind of arrested adolescence, making their doubts about his fitness as a father feel inevitable. And yet he resists easy dislike. Vargas frames Rico with care, tracing the forces that shaped him. Chief among them is the absence of a stable masculine role model, pushing Rico to perform a version of manhood he barely understands.
Vargas approaches his characters, flaws and all, with incredible empathy. What makes Mad Bills to Pay so poignant is just how real it feels. Some instances, given their intensely visceral, energetic close-up view of Rico’s life in the Bronx, could easily be mistaken for ones out of a documentary. Vargas and director of photography Rufai Ajala shot the film in 4:3 with rounded edges, a visual storytelling technique that fills the proceedings with a sense of nostalgia. The camera lingers on the fleeting moments of everyday life, from Rico on the toilet before his sister pounds the door to Destiny perched on the edge of her new shared bed.
Nothing is ever that neat in Mad Bills to Pay. Even as Rico and Destiny begin to accept their shared destiny and learn from one another, neither seems remotely ready for it. Rico, particularly, is actively trying not to become his father, pushing himself forward despite any misgivings about his capabilities. Vargas ends the film at the gender-reveal party for Rico’s child, where the celebration clashes with the sobering reality ahead of the soon-to-be parents. Vargas, though, avoids catastrophizing this situation, instead showing that, whatever comes next, a harsh reality remains: that there will always be mad bills to pay.
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