Romeo Eleven
Story of teenage awkwardness leans too heavily on dull stereotyping
SCREENINGS:
Wednesday, September 14, 7:45 p.m.
Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles Street)
Friday, September 16, 2:45 p.m.
AMC 3 (10 Dundas Street East)
Romeo Eleven is a classic tale of maladjusted, lovelorn youth that’s bound to ring true for anyone who ever met a woman on the Internet, lied to them about being a high-powered accountant (as if there’s such a thing), arranged to meet them at a hotel, spent $530 on a room, got dressed in a new suit, and then bailed at the last minute. In this scene, Rami (Ali Ammar), who uses the online chat handle romeo11, stews around in the lies he’s worked himself into. You can see the doubt flick across Rami’s face as he pores over how out of his depth he is and when (not if) he’s just going to cut his losses and ditch. It’s a pretty masterful study in a very pathetic type of emotional tension.
Elsewhere, though, Romeo Eleven mostly flails around. Grbovic develops Rami as a shy, near-mute creep; the kind of kid who gets an inordinate amount of romantic and erotic satisfaction out of lingering too long on the hand of the girl working the takeout window at McDonald’s. His relationship with his hard-headed, domineering father archetype (Joseph Bou Nassar) is strained, but why wouldn’t it be? This smacks strongly in places of someone’s (likely Grbovic’s) personal experience, but its gestures beyond the presumably personally meaningful and the dully stereotypical are few and far between.