In a neat 80 minutes, auteur/actor John-Luke Montias (Nicky's Game) puts together a three-story portrait of one neighborhood's mean streets peopled by pimps, prostitutes, murderers, gangsters, slave traders, carjackers, and other cutthroats. It's not a pretty picture, but Montias, with more know-how than production capital, milks it for humor, tragedy and the feel of real.

The first story is Olivia's (Jessica Pimentel, Pride and Glory) as she arrives in the United States under the assumption that she's been sponsored for a waitress job in a restaurant. She harbors the hope that when she proves her culinary skills she'll be moved up to her ultimate goal as a Mexican cook. But when Ivan (Daniel Oreskes), an oversize bull of a man, drives her to a house off Jackson Avenue and orders her to take a shower and join the other women idling on couches, she feels her dreams crashing down into a hell-hole of darkness and brutality.

Tomo (Jun Suenaga) is another alien arrival -- a Japanese national and professional hitman. Mechanically efficient, his first order of business is a meeting with his Chinese-mob client to get his assignment. While locating and following his target, he is in constant phone contact with his brother in Japan, deeply concerned over the severity of their mother's illness. In his legit life, he's a teacher and a model son who can barely survive on his meager salary. His emotions start to get the better of him, affecting his ability to carry out his well-remunerated sideline. But a professional commitment is not something he intends to compromise.

Lastly, there's Joey (writer-director John-Luke Montias), a high-strung opportunist who jacks automobiles with his swift ability to hotwire a car. Turning each vehicle over to his fence for $1,500 here or $2,500 there, his goal is to accrue $100,000 to satisfy his dream: to buy, own, and operate a tire store from a local merchant. Joey's ambition includes improving his cynical uncle Jack's (Gene Ruffini) life and attitude by putting the old guy to work for him.

Olivia is mortified by the naive trust in people that put her in virtual bondage to Milot (Stivi Paskoski of the Brotherhood TV series), a small-time pimp and drug trader from Albania who owns the prostitution operation. She learns the ropes from her fellow workers and submits to a brute local cop who wants to be her regular John. There is a moment, however, when she's alone, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, when she silently decides what she must do to get her passport back and flee her enslavement.

In large part, the movie works as well as it does because of the way Montias avoids cliché and plays very purposefully against type, which is the commonality of the separate stories. The hitman's deep concern over his mother's health is a sign of humanity that belies his second day-job as a cold-blooded killer. Joey, is trying to convert his faceless crimes to the square life. Olivia, the hapless victim of the piece, discovers what it takes to step over the line of her own morality.

Montias is playing the chords of contradiction throughout this little triptych and it adds up to a lively patchwork of multi-national felony in a concise package with a fresh viewpoint. The layers of each story are allowed to unfold with enough fascination to keep us in a state of anticipation of outcomes and ironies in a seamy corner of New York where justice is achieved through its own means and devices.

It's an approach with much promise. Count me in for this filmmaker's next offering. I detect a burgeoning talent here.



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