Harmony Rules in “In the Heights”

Morning in America, not yet six o’clock, and a couple of working stiffs, in the bright early glare of New York, are finding it hard to make a start. One of them is a crane operator, down at the docks, beside a U.S. Navy vessel. “I feel like I’m not out of bed yet,” he says—or sings, in a baritone as slow as a bear. Way uptown, close to the 181st Street subway stop, someone else has the same problem. “Lights up on Washington Heights, up at the break of day, I wake up, and I got this little punk I gotta chase away,” he says—or raps, in a voice as crisp as an apple. The first man, who is unnamed, initiates “On the Town” (1949), and the second is Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), the likable hero of “In the Heights.” Two guys, two movies, seventy-two years apart, both springing from stage musicals. Oh, and Usnavi is so called because his father, arriving from the Dominican Republic, saw a ship marked “U.S. Navy.” How much is truly new, under the sun?

On Broadway, the part of Usnavi was taken by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who, for good measure, wrote the music and the lyrics, too. Here, onscreen, he has a more modest role, as the fellow who wheels his cart up and down Usnavi’s block, selling piragua and half joining in the action. Think of him as a warm-weather descendant of Jack, the lamplighter whom Miranda played, with an idling charm, in “Mary Poppins Returns” (2018). The new film is directed by Jon M. Chu, and most of it—aside from a few flashbacks, plus an unnecessary framing device, in which Usnavi tells his story to a bunch of oppressively cute kids—is set in one patch of Washington Heights, with bits of plot shared out, like beers, among the inhabitants. When the owner of the local hair salon, Daniela (Daphne Rubin-Vega), relocates to the Bronx, her leaving is at once an adventure and a barely explicable abandonment.

This psychogeographical unease—do I stay or do I go?—is, again, not without precedent in movie musicals. Much as the Smith family, in “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944), was torn by the prospect of shifting from Missouri to New York, so Usnavi is sorely tempted to start afresh, rebuilding a derelict beach bar, back in the Dominican Republic. As an immigrant, of course, he faces a choice far starker than the Smiths’, since he is essentially asking: What country, friends, is this? Where is my home? His brainy pal Nina (Leslie Grace), the pride of the neighborhood, has her own quandary. She got into Stanford, but was so crushed by the loneliness and the racial condescension that she’s now returned to seek refuge in the Heights. “Just breathe,” she sings, inhaling the sweet and unthreatening air.

Stanford, in fact, is about as much of a villain as “In the Heights” can muster, unless you count the robber seen racing away from a bodega—the one that Usnavi runs with his teen-age cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV)—or, on a larger scale, the government. “They’re talking about kicking out all the Dreamers,” Sonny says. Despite the daca reference, the movie is far too invested in harmony, melodic and civic, and in the crotchety refrains of everyday life, to countenance bad blood; why bother to fight, when there’s a blackout looming and a fridge on the fritz? We seem to be oceans, rather than boroughs, away from the world of Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (1989)—another sweltering saga with a piragua guy and a fiercely specific sense of place. No characters sing in Lee’s film, but it quivers with musical beats, and everything sparks and flares when, with his usual audacity, he rubs together different communities like dry sticks. “In the Heights,” by contrast, verges on the frictionless, and the wealth of its diversity is unfailingly benign; as one of Daniela’s stylists exclaims, “My mom is Dominican-Cuban, my dad is from Chile and P.R., which means: I’m Chile-Dominica-Rican!”

To dramatize such binding ideals, for almost two and a half hours, and to conjure precipitous revels from next to nothing, as Miranda and Chu have done, is no small feat. There’s an old-fashioned, semi-comical innocence breezing through the film, not least in the romancing; Usnavi has a thing for Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), an aspiring fashion designer, but is too shy to ask her out without Sonny’s help, and, near the beginning, Nina is wooed by Benny (Corey Hawkins) through a taxi dispatcher’s mike. Though the movie is set in a heat wave, and though Miranda is cheeky enough to rhyme “Cole Porter” with “cold water,” the desiring is never allowed to be too darn hot.

How you respond to this oddly demure bacchanal will depend on your thirst for celebration; many viewers, no doubt, will take as much as they can get, after months away from the cinema. They will be treated to lyrical fantasy, with Benny and Nina suddenly tilting through ninety degrees and dancing up the side of a building—a scene to make Gene Kelly crack his widest smile. More gravity-bound, but louder and funnier, is the scene in which everyone piles into a swimming pool for what can best be described as an outdoor, hip-hop, Busby Berkeley splashout, and all because somebody bought a winning lottery ticket at the bodega. Who won? Who cares?

The new film from Christian Petzold, “Undine,” begins with an ending. At a café table in central Berlin, it’s breakup time. A guy named Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) tells his girlfriend, Undine (Paula Beer), that it’s over between them. Undine’s response is clear. “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you,” she says. The distracted tone of her delivery drains any force from the threat. But what if she actually means it?

This is classic Petzold territory, where you can dwell in a place, or a relationship, without ever quite belonging there. (His previous film, in 2018, was entitled “Transit.”) The need to move on, for private reasons or under political pressure, is unremitting, and this want of security has a numbing effect on his characters. However tenacious their emotion, they seldom react as strongly as circumstances, minor or major, appear to demand. When one of Undine’s treasured possessions—a small figurine—falls and breaks, she neither remonstrates nor swears but simply takes the object home and mends it. Even murder, late in the movie, is committed with a fluid facility that verges on the serene.

In line with the laws of mutability, Undine soon hooks up with someone else. His name is Christoph (Franz Rogowski), and he’s an industrial diver, now in the process of checking the local bridges. Undine, for her part, is a historian, who lectures to students and visitors at the Senate for Urban Development and Housing, guiding them through the strata of different Berlins: not just the old and the recent but also the utopian one that was envisaged by the Soviets, to “express their grand ideas for social change.” In short, both of our lovers are delvers, reaching down through the murk and the muck of the past, to see what wonders linger there (a startled Christoph confronts a catfish as big as himself) and to establish whether the structures of the present are holding firm. “Progress is impossible,” Undine declares, in reference to an architectural project. She might as well be talking about love.

What on earth is this film about? Well, for one thing, its natural medium is not earth but water; at the couple’s initial meeting, an aquarium bursts, knocking them over and flooding them into a drenched embrace. The title, too, is a clue, though only if you happen to be steeped in European folklore. In traditional legends, an undine is a female water spirit, whose encounters with mortal beings tend to be fraught affairs, not least because she lacks a soul. You can track her from the sixteenth-century philosopher and alchemist Paracelsus to a stirring poem by Seamus Heaney and a ballet choreographed by Frederick Ashton. (Margot Fonteyn danced the role in 1958.) The most sustained treatment is by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, in a German fairy tale of 1811, which is heavy with heraldic trappings, including a mounted knight and an enchanted forest. In Fouqué’s creepy finale, the aqueous heroine stops the breath of her paramour and boasts, “I have wept him to death!”

All of which is a long way from Petzold’s Undine, who may or may not have a soul, but who certainly has a cell phone. At one point, she almost drowns, and Christoph has to give her CPR, chanting the words of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” while he pumps her chest. “Can you revive me again?” she asks, as if the kiss of life were an act of moistened seduction. What the scene demonstrates is the beautiful twist that Petzold has applied to the antique myth: who, the movie asks us, is the marine creature here? Is it the elusive Undine, as cultural custom requires? Or could it be Christoph, so thoroughly at ease in his mask and his wetsuit, under the skin of the river—more so, we feel, than he is in the open air? Both of them seem to slip in and out of the action as if it were a lake. Near the end, when they come face to face, beneath the water, and her bare hand strokes his gloved one, there is, once again, no great sense of shock. This is just how things are, in the luminous darkness, as we leave behind our human habitations, forever ruined and reconstructed, and dare to dive. ♦