preview: hiff at Southampton Cinema...by jan silver

The Hamptons International Film Festival gave a heads-up to cinephiles on August 26 with a sneak preview of Dito Montiel’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints at the Regal/UA Southampton Cinema. There will be 150 new features and documentaries shown at this fall’s festival in East Hampton, Montauk, Sag Harbor and now Southampton from October 18-22.
Dito Montiel is very much what the Hamptons International Film Festival is all about – first-time independent filmmakers. He wrote the screenplay and directed the film based on his memoir of the same title. Guide is the story of growing up in Astoria, Queens, in the 1980s, a time when the neighborhood was gritty, graffitied and tough. Its teenage inhabitants, whose every other word seems to be f—-, have few options for adulthood except drugs, prison or death.
Orlando Montiel Jr. is the son of a Nicaraguan father and an Irish mother. His nickname is Orlandito, which gets shortened to Dito. He attends Catholic school and hangs out with his friends Antonio, Nerf and Guiseppi (Antonio’s younger brother) and the neighborhood girls, Laurie, Jenny and Diane. He never leaves the gritty, rough neighborhood even though, from the elevated subway right near his home, he can see Manhattan.
In the hot summer of 1986, he makes a new friend from Scotland, Mike, who begins to open up Dito’s world to things beyond Astoria. Dito is torn between the raw, no-exit lives his friends are headed for, his loving but restrictive father who tells him he can never leave, and the dreams of a band and living in California he shares with Mike. Suddenly and senselessly, things happen to Guiseppi, Antonio and Mike which so radically shake up Dito that he takes his summer-job earnings and heads to California by bus.
The film starts in 2005, when his mother calls him in California to say she needs help with his ill father whom he hasn’t seen in 15 years. The scenes cut back and forth between 2005 and 1986, and the editing is not always smooth, but the story unfolds. The young Dito is sensitively played by Shia LaBeouf and the older Dito, with his suppressed demons, is portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. Chazz Palmenteri is an overwhelmingly powerful presence as Montiel Sr. and Dianne Wiest is soft, loving and repressed in the underwritten role of Dito’s mother, Flori.
The other “saints” in Dito’s life he pays tribute to for shaping his character include his troubled friend Antonio, given a strong portrayal by Channing Tatum, and his first girlfriend Laurie, played with a maturity beyond her young years by Melonie Diaz and, as the older Laurie, Rosario Dawson. Dito even learns from the gay, druggie dog-walker Frank, movingly played by Anthony DeSando.
Postscript: Dito is successful in California, forming a band, Gutterbug, and writing. He has made good contacts in the entertainment industry because Trudy Styler is one of the lead producers of this film and her husband, Sting, is an executive producer. A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints won two awards at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It opens in Los Angeles and New York on September 29. The Hamptons International Film Festival’s schedule is to be released on its website today – www.hamptonsfilmfest.org.