There’s a moment near the end of the first act of The Black Sea when Khalid (Derek B. Hardin), a Brooklynite stranded in the port town of Sozopol, Bulgaria, greets his new employers the morning after a wild party and sexually-charged miscommunication. The chilly atmosphere greets Khalid (Hardin is also co-director) unexpectedly when his boss orders him around to do menial tasks, including picking up a nearby pile of crap with his bare hands, seemingly as punishment for a faux pas he made the night before. Khalid refuses the humiliation, and storms off the job site in anger.
The tensions inherent to the presence of a Black American man in this small coastal town in Eastern Europe haven’t quite reared their heads at this point in the film; the preceding 30 minutes have unfolded mostly like a charming, fish-out-of-water comedy. This moment of stark mistreatment underscores the potential avenues for drama available to a film directed by Hardin and Crystal Moselle, the latter a filmmaker whose work over the last decade (including the 2018 coming-of-age dramedy Skate Kitchen) has deftly straddled the worlds of documentary and fiction.
The Black Sea’s loose, improvised storyline allows Hardin, a game and charming screen presence, to live through each moment as they come, be they mundane or bizarre. And in theory, this approach to creating the film’s story should relieve it from the burdens of the American-lost-abroad genre cliches. In practice, this isn’t quite the case. The film’s breathless opening sequence barely introduces the grounds for his abandoning his life in Brooklyn, though periodic FaceTime conversations throughout the film clumsily allude to financial debts back in America. He flies to Bulgaria, where he believes a wealthy older woman awaits his arrival, and discovers this isn’t the case. The easy ticket to a better, easier life away from the troubles that plague him at home now gone, he has to scrape together enough money to go home with his tail between his legs, or try to make something of himself. Along the way, he meets people who treat him with both scorn and love, who want something from him and give something in return.
These beats are, of course, pretty familiar. What keeps the film afloat amid its occasionally stuttering pace is Hardin’s charm and the chemistry he seems to conjure out of thin air with even the most unlikely characters. Sometimes that chemistry, deliberately, produces stark contrast — Khalid’s sometimes bumbling gregariousness chafes amusingly against his more reserved screen partners, be they random passers-by or his already established co-stars. In particular, this chemistry sparks with Ina (Ina Chichikova), a local travel agent whom Khalid befriends, disappoints, and, through that disappointment, ultimately reconciles, to the point that perhaps Khalid could build something more lasting in Bulgaria. The Black Sea is refreshingly open to the messiness of chance, of whatever wild choices either Hardin or his Bulgarian screen partners might make within the parameters of the story’s expected beats. In a film that’s deliberately short on narrative propulsion and invention, the spontaneity of Khalid’s presence is enough to help the film maintain considerable interest.
DIRECTOR: Crystal Moselle & Derrick B. Harden; CAST: Irmena Chichikova, Derrick B. Harden, Samuel Finzi, Stoyo Mirkov; DISTRIBUTOR: Metrograph Pictures; IN THEATERS: November 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
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