“The heart-pounding pace and striking energy from the very first minutes are maintained all the way through, in part thanks to the intense performances of the main quartet of actors.”

Rico, the main (and virtually only) male character in Mad Bills to Pay, is a 19-year-old small-time hustler from the Bronx, and not even a very good one – his skills regarding how to make his business of selling homemade alcoholic cocktails on the beach flourish fall as short as his expectations are high. He pictures himself remaining his own boss, getting his own car and place to live, even (sure, why not?) retiring by the age of 40. For the time being, he goes home (that is, his mother’s apartment) passed out drunk every other night, he has a habit of taking the subway without paying while carrying weed in his backpack, and he got his 16-year-old girlfriend Destiny pregnant. We learn this at the same time his mother Andrea and sister Sally do, during the swift introduction of the story – and just a few scenes later Destiny, kicked out by her own family, precipitately moves in to live with Rico.

In contrast, writer and director Joel Alfonso Vargas brilliantly manages the leap from short films to a feature-length one. Mad Bills to Pay is his first, expanded from his most recent short that was shown only six months ago at the Locarno Film Festival – reprising the same cast, crew and characters, but never feeling stretched out to last an hour and a half without the necessary substance. The heart-pounding pace and striking energy from the very first minutes are maintained all the way through, in part thanks to the intense performances of the main quartet of actors. Juan Collado (Rico), Destiny Checo (Destiny), Nathaly Navarro (Sally) and Yohanna Florentino (Andrea) are as complementary as their characters are diverse, and often conflicting. Whether they are two, three or four in the room, their arguments – for the most part ignited by Rico’s lack of maturity and excess of self-confidence – about the present or future situation always seem remarkably real, never overacted or shallow. Far from clashes just for the sake of it, each of these scenes contributes to build up each individual a little more by giving us insight into their personality. We get to know them better and better, and thus we care for them more and more.

Another aspect that lifts up and energizes Mad Bills to Pay is its visual composition. Even though the shots are mostly still and wide, they are elaborate and cut together in a way that fills the film with vitality and spontaneity. With great fluidity Vargas intertwines the almost blinding brightness of a sunny summer day at the beach with the cramped interior settings of his characters’ living spaces, which feel even more confining and dark as a result of the very clever use of the image’s 4:3 ratio. At the beach or in the city’s streets, Rico and the others suddenly blend in with the crowd, a sentiment strengthened by the casting of local people in small roles playing themselves – the story is a fictional one, yet set against a real-life backdrop, which adds authenticity to the overall mix. A mix in which the final and secret ingredient is the editing, as Vargas and his co-editor Irfan van Tuijl achieve a rare feat: to manage to surprise us from time to time cutting in and out of the scenes. Hence, the film is continuously captivating and thriving, even though the subjects it tackles tend towards the opposite – family conflicts, teenage pregnancy, the lack of real prospects for the future, and in the case of Rico growing up without a father but with a head filled with misconceptions bred by toxic masculinity. Between the short and the feature film, the tone set by the Spanish title changed quite a lot: from Que te vaya bonito, Rico to Destiny, dile que no soy malo, a sense of melancholy, in addition to the change of focus from the male to the female character, transpires, as it does in the closing moments of Mad Bills to Pay. Without going as far as to condemn Rico, the film distances itself from him, even more than it did before. With his final and subtle gesture, with no need for dialogue and through the way the scene is shot, Vargas ends his tale on a bittersweet note – adulthood is catching up to Rico, who is possibly done dreaming the high life but far from done struggling to live the real life.