By Adam Nayman

The sinister shadow of Iñárritu hangs over Juan Andrés Arango’s tripartite character study, which doesn’t explicitly interconnect its stories Babel-style but nevertheless seems similarly intended as a commentary on universal issues of displacement and alienation (sans international movie stars, of course; this is a Canadian co-production after all). As such, it’s pretty heavy-handed stuff, introducing a trio of young characters nursing abandonment issues—a Mexican labourer (Bernardo Garnica Cruz), a Colombian fisherman (Jonathan Diaz Angulo), and a Filipino student relocated from Manila to Montreal (Jembie Almazan)—and forcing them into narratives entirely defined by violent contrivance. It’s a fine line between depicting poverty and socioeconomic inequality and exoticizing and/or exploiting it for a North American audience, and Arango’s film ticks off a slew of transnational art-house tropes: strobe-lit forays into nightclubs; pandering scenes of faux-austere violence; bobbing, quasi-Dardenne handheld shots from behind people’s heads; telegraphed moments of redemption at the end of downward-trending character arcs. The actors work their respective ways through the wringer of the script with aplomb—Almazan is excellent as a young woman mysteriously driven to rebel on subcultural terms that are clearly not her own—and Nicolas Canniccioni’s cinematography gleams and glints expressively. But X Quinientos is finally so schematic that its craftsmanship comes to feel like an airless enclosure for notions about loneliness and belonging that could really have used some breathing room.

Adam Nayman