After viewing countless flawed films, tolerating several superficial screenplays, and living with too many loose ends that have not been tied up, I was very happy to see Easy Money at the Toronto International Film Festival. A crime caper film with a twist, director Daniel Espinosa spends as much time exploring the personal lives of those who control the drug market in Sweden as he does the cocaine deal about to unfold. Consequently, the characters are fully developed and their motivations are known and understood.
J.W. is a business school student who drives a cab and runs errands for a small Arab drug cartel. He has constructed a life of lies for himself, partially as a mechanism to cope with the disappearance of his sister several years previously and partially because he wants to socialize with his wealthy classmates. When he meets a beautiful woman named Sophie, he realizes that he requires more money to woo her and becomes more involved with the crime syndicate. J.W. is not inherently evil but he certainly is selfish and shallow.
The problem is that J.W. is naive about how the drug racket actually works. Acts of violence and vengeance shock him. Increasingly, he becomes more and more worried that he will be betrayed so he starts looking out for his our interests. What seems to be easy money turns out to be an entirely different proposition.
The film, known as Snabba Cash in Sweden, also chronicles the stories of other parties in the drug smuggling operations, such as the Serbian Mrado who is trying to raise his eight-year-old daughter and the recently escaped Jorge who wants to support his pregnant sister. Spending additional time on these backgrounds (the movie devotes about forty minutes to fleshing out the main players before introducing the plot) lengthens the film but it creates characters who are more three dimensional than those in Avatar.
Espinosa makes extensive use of blast cuts. The blast cuts between scenes show the disjointed nature of the criminal underworld and how everything doesn’t quite fit together. The blast cuts which interrupt a scene show how a character is distraught by the decision they are contemplating. This a fine work of film noir. ****