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| ‘Fresh’ By Hal Hinson Washington Post Staff Writer August 31, 1994 | ||
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These haunted, punishing eyes are the soul of “ Fresh, “ Boaz Yakin’s phenomenal directorial debut about innocence under attack, and they leave a wound as deep and painful as any bullet. They belong to a child for whom childhood is a lost luxury.
While his classmates bicker about trading cards and comic books, Fresh—who’s played with fierce intelligence by newcomer Sean Nelson—stares intently into space, his mind somewhere else. Already, Nichole (N’Bushe Wright), the sister he worships, has become a junkie playmate for Esteban (Giancarlo Esposito), who directs the neighborhood heroin traffic. And, after he is witness to two shootings in less than a week, his saintly Aunt Frances (Cheryl Freeman) has threatened to send him to a group home.
Boxed into a corner, Fresh can either act or succumb, but his course of action isn’t clear until the day he receives a lesson in strategy from his father (Samuel L. Jackson), a would-be chess master who plays games in the park for money. Actually, chess functions as a brilliant metaphor for Fresh’s elaborate war of wits. Using the money he’s stashed away, Fresh sparks a turf battle between Esteban and Corky (Ron Brice), who controls the crack trade. At first, as Fresh goes about setting his trap, framing his best friend, Chuckie (Luis Lantigua), as the fall guy, it’s impossible to figure out what he has up his sleeve. But as the ultimate outcome becomes apparent, that initial confusion is replaced by a sort of awe at the farsightedness of his design, and by fear at the coldblooded calculation needed to carry it off.
Viewers who want the boy to triumph over the forces that have corrupted him may sense a hint of vigilantism in Fresh’s actions. Yakin is rigorous about showing both sides of his character, depicting him in one scene as a devastated innocent who has lost a friend, and in another as a hardened street veteran, tough enough to snack casually on a candy bar during a gunfight. And in doing so, he—along with Nelson—has created one of the most compelling, enigmatic movie characters of the decade.
Yakin may be a novice, but from the movie’s first poetic images, this gifted young filmmaker tells his story with a sure, distinctly personal voice. The urban landscape explored here has been pawed over by so many other movies that by now its violent streets, playgrounds and abandoned buildings seem to be almost interchangeable from one film to the next. “ Fresh” is also set in this universe of drug dealers and prostitutes, but Yakin rescues his ghetto setting from cliche.
Everything in the film seems to have been newly imagined from the ground up. Instead of the standard-issue rap track, the film has been given a percussive, modern score that lifts it out of the realm of gritty realism and into a more contemplative dimension. And though the images are bold and supersaturated with color, the camera style is cool and detached, as if Yakin were attempting to mirror Fresh’s own dispassionate nature.
Yakin started his film career as a writer, and “ Fresh” is very much a writer’s movie—character-based and character-driven. But Yakin also shows the instincts of a born filmmaker. “ Fresh” is an electrifying, sobering movie, and with it, Yakin announces himself as perhaps the most gifted newcomer of the decade.
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