by Hillary Johnson

Oxnard native Trae Briers has his first film in the can, and if an early screening of In Your Eyes is any indication, it is a lot more than a “calling card” to get his foot in the door down in Hollywood. The 31-year-old director is actually in no hurry to get on the 101 and drive the 60 miles south to Babylon; he rather likes the idea of staying put, nurturing his art in his hometown. After making a splash at the Santa Barbara Film Festival (a second screening was added to satisfy audience demand), Briers has been offered possible distribution deals, but he’s preferred to keep control of his film, hoping to build its following slowly in the community that grew it, and about which it has so much to say.

In Your Eyes is a passionate work about the simmering tensions between Blacks and Mexicans in Oxnard, told in the form of a classic Romeo and Juliet story. If the thought of yet another Romeo and Juliet rehash makes you groan, hold that thought, and remember that Shakespeare borrowed it too, and for much the same reasons that Trae Briers did. Briers, like Shakespeare, uses the story of star-crossed lovers to get at the heart of what stops us, as humans, from being fully human. Romeo and Juliet, we often forget, wasn’t about romantic love; it was about war. And so is Briers’ film. You’ve seen lots of nasty adaptations and remakes of the tired love story, all of which generally serve to shore up prejudices and stereotypes while allowing the audience to marvel at and pity the horror of it all, but Briers actually takes you in, to where the stereotypes that kill his lovers started, and blows them up from the inside. In Your Eyes is about the conflict between minorities who, as one character in the film casually remarks, could be a greater political force in their town if they could stop fighting.

Yusef is a young Oxnardian headed for college on a scholarship, and in love with CeCe, his best friend Juan’s sister. They’ve known each other since they were nine. Yusef grew up feeling like part of CeCe’s family—his single mother worked and his dad was off doing drugs somewhere. Yusef is black and CeCe is Mexican.

As Briers said before a recent screening at the Paseo Camarillo Cinemas, he finally got tired of waiting to make his movie, so he borrowed $100,000 from within the community and just made it. Thank God he didn’t get studio funding, or win some kind of Sundance Film Festival fiasco-director contest, because the film he made is superbly unfettered. Like Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi and Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche, this is the kind of raw, self-funded first film that will get its director a career, and while it’s tempting to get excited by the idea of trumpeting our region’s biggest export since Perry Mason, it’s more important to talk about the film itself, because this isn’t just a foot-in-the-door calling card, it’s a real work of art.

Right away, Briers puts us on alert by raising all the red flags that would indicate a preachy sociology tract, and then neatly dismissing them. The movie’s sensibility is subtly subversive in many ways. For one, Briers portrays the gap in understanding between genders in a way that’s almost the opposite of conventional wisdom: His men are fully emotional beings and his women are creatures of reason—but the men aren’t silent (not by a mile), and he never interprets feminine pragmatism as being cold or calculating. Briers has an instinct for stereotype-busting. When Yusef storms out for the big confrontation with his failed, drug-addled father, we expect to see carnage and fireworks; what happens instead is a relatively quiet conversation that is so much less and so much more—and so unmovielike. That a first-time, no-budget director could put together an anticlimactic “big scene” that disappoints then sucks the breath right out of you with its meaning is quite an accomplishment. Briers has a Scorscese-like ability to get his people to act.

While there are rough moments here and there, in part due to the fact that Briers has cast real locals in some of the minor roles, he coaxes some stunning performances out of his key players. As Yusef, Caleeb Pinkett (Jada’s little brother and Will Smith’s little brother-in-law), is a natural actor who not only carries his big scenes, but can make standing around in a tract-house driveway seem poignant. But this is an ensemble piece, and Pinkett is supported beautifully by Michael DeLorenzo as CeCe and Juan’s maintenance worker father (he may be familiar to viewers from New York Undercover), veteran character actor James Black as Yusef’s dissipated dad and newcomer Breon Ansley as Yusef’s jailbird cousin. Even the cameos by figures from the local music scene (Nevamind, Lost Soulz and Q104.7’s DJ-Scratch) blend seamlessly into the fabric of the film, enriching its texture. When the men in this movie are in a group, the dialogue never stops flying, and it’s so raw and authentic that it feels improvised. It wasn’t. Briers scripted the entire movie, and every one of its words is there for a reason.

In Your Eyes is a talky film that puts a lot of cultural politics into the mouths of its characters, but never stoops to becoming a sociology lecture. The characters’ conversations take place between Mexican men at a backyard barbecue, Mexican women in a kitchen, black men playing hearts at a concrete picnic table at the beach. The conversations are mostly about race, and they are exactly the kinds of conversations people have every day as part of the process of fine-tuning their own mythologies as they go along through the course of their days, meeting and parting.

We see these characters tweak their cultural reasoning bit by bit, in groups and pairs, and it is through this fast, rich dialogue that we see the situations between the players swing slowly from harmony to brittleness and suddenly to disaster. The language is raw and vernacular (the terms “Chicano” and “African American” are never heard once, and sound stupidly academic after seeing this movie), but the level of discourse between the characters is sophisticated as hell. It took the Sopranos many shaggy-dog conversations over at least half a season to make you fall in love with its human mobsters, but Briers secures your affections in minutes. He does it by perfectly capturing the poetic complexity of relationships as they are spun out through the flow of words.

For this is a relationship movie—just not the kind you might think. Even though this movie is hung on a love story, Briers’ couple is not at its center. Yusef and CeCe’s love isn’t the least bit grandiose; these are just two people who’d like to go to college, get married, buy a house and have kids. Most of the movie’s real drama concerns the complex web of relationships that surround and hold them both together and apart. By the time Yusef tells CeCe that he can’t be the man she wants him to be because his father, and her father, each failed to teach him how, we know what he’s talking about and feel it with him. And as much as we are rooting for him, we know that he’s speaking the truth on a very deep level. That moment in which the inevitability of doom, and the revelation that it’s been there since birth, sinks in for Yusef, and for us, makes this movie a genuine tragedy, in a way that most screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet have never been, because they always succumbed to sentimentality.

Briers has crafted a perfect tragedy, and he’s done so because the culture he lives in requires it. Oxnard is a tense city. It has a white history, a Latino population, and the county’s most sizeable black community. And in the film, when everyone went out to a club, it was to Nicholby’s on Main Street in neighboring and mostly white Ventura—the only common space anyone shared in Oxnard was a parking lot. A gang injunction covering much of the city’s core was passed recently and, conversely, anyone who knows about the freakish real estate growth in Ventura County knows that CeCe and Yusef, had they lived, would never have been able to buy a nice suburban house in Oxnard like the one her father bought as a maintenance supervisor. Somewhere, somehow, sometime, something’s gotta give.

We can only hope that Briers’ film will be well and widely received, and that it will provide the community with an opportunity for catharsis. That is what tragedy did for the Ancient Greeks. In Trae Briers, Oxnard has found its Sophocles.


		Sophocles in Oxnard Trae Briers has crafted a perfect tragedy in his first film, In Your Eyes by Hillary Johnson Oxnard native Trae Briers has his first film in the can, and if an early screening of In Your Eyes is any indication, it is a lot more than a “calling card” to get his foot in the door down in Hollywood. The 31-year-old director is actually in no hurry to get on the 101 and drive the 60 miles south to Babylon; he rather likes the idea of staying put, nurturing his art in his hometown. After making a splash at the Santa Barbara Film Festival (a second screening was added to satisfy audience demand), Briers has been offered possible distribution deals, but he’s preferred to keep control of his film, hoping to build its following slowly in the community that grew it, and about which it has so much to say. In Your Eyes is a passionate work about the simmering tensions between Blacks and Mexicans in Oxnard, told in the form of a classic Romeo and Juliet story. If the thought of yet another Romeo and Juliet rehash makes you groan, hold that thought, and remember that Shakespeare borrowed it too, and for much the same reasons that Trae Briers did. Briers, like Shakespeare, uses the story of star-crossed lovers to get at the heart of what stops us, as humans, from being fully human. Romeo and Juliet, we often forget, wasn’t about romantic love; it was about war. And so is Briers’ film. You’ve seen lots of nasty adaptations and remakes of the tired love story, all of which generally serve to shore up prejudices and stereotypes while allowing the audience to marvel at and pity the horror of it all, but Briers actually takes you in, to where the stereotypes that kill his lovers started, and blows them up from the inside. In Your Eyes is about the conflict between minorities who, as one character in the film casually remarks, could be a greater political force in their town if they could stop fighting. Yusef is a young Oxnardian headed for college on a scholarship, and in love with CeCe, his best friend Juan’s sister. They’ve known each other since they were nine. Yusef grew up feeling like part of CeCe’s family—his single mother worked and his dad was off doing drugs somewhere. Yusef is black and CeCe is Mexican. As Briers said before a recent screening at the Paseo Camarillo Cinemas, he finally got tired of waiting to make his movie, so he borrowed $100,000 from within the community and just made it. Thank God he didn’t get studio funding, or win some kind of Sundance Film Festival fiasco-director contest, because the film he made is superbly unfettered. Like Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi and Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche, this is the kind of raw, self-funded first film that will get its director a career, and while it’s tempting to get excited by the idea of trumpeting our region’s biggest export since Perry Mason, it’s more important to talk about the film itself, because this isn’t just a foot-in-the-door calling card, it’s a real work of art. Right away, Briers puts us on alert by raising all the red flags that would indicate a preachy sociology tract, and then neatly dismissing them. The movie’s sensibility is subtly subversive in many ways. For one, Briers portrays the gap in understanding between genders in a way that’s almost the opposite of conventional wisdom: His men are fully emotional beings and his women are creatures of reason—but the men aren’t silent (not by a mile), and he never interprets feminine pragmatism as being cold or calculating. Briers has an instinct for stereotype-busting. When Yusef storms out for the big confrontation with his failed, drug-addled father, we expect to see carnage and fireworks; what happens instead is a relatively quiet conversation that is so much less and so much more—and so unmovielike. That a first-time, no-budget director could put together an anticlimactic “big scene” that disappoints then sucks the breath right out of you with its meaning is quite an accomplishment. Briers has a Scorscese-like ability to get his people to act. While there are rough moments here and there, in part due to the fact that Briers has cast real locals in some of the minor roles, he coaxes some stunning performances out of his key players. As Yusef, Caleeb Pinkett (Jada’s little brother and Will Smith’s little brother-in-law), is a natural actor who not only carries his big scenes, but can make standing around in a tract-house driveway seem poignant. But this is an ensemble piece, and Pinkett is supported beautifully by Michael DeLorenzo as CeCe and Juan’s maintenance worker father (he may be familiar to viewers from New York Undercover), veteran character actor James Black as Yusef’s dissipated dad and newcomer Breon Ansley as Yusef’s jailbird cousin. Even the cameos by figures from the local music scene (Nevamind, Lost Soulz and Q104.7’s DJ-Scratch) blend seamlessly into the fabric of the film, enriching its texture. When the men in this movie are in a group, the dialogue never stops flying, and it’s so raw and authentic that it feels improvised. It wasn’t. Briers scripted the entire movie, and every one of its words is there for a reason. In Your Eyes is a talky film that puts a lot of cultural politics into the mouths of its characters, but never stoops to becoming a sociology lecture. The characters’ conversations take place between Mexican men at a backyard barbecue, Mexican women in a kitchen, black men playing hearts at a concrete picnic table at the beach. The conversations are mostly about race, and they are exactly the kinds of conversations people have every day as part of the process of fine-tuning their own mythologies as they go along through the course of their days, meeting and parting. We see these characters tweak their cultural reasoning bit by bit, in groups and pairs, and it is through this fast, rich dialogue that we see the situations between the players swing slowly from harmony to brittleness and suddenly to disaster. The language is raw and vernacular (the terms “Chicano” and “African American” are never heard once, and sound stupidly academic after seeing this movie), but the level of discourse between the characters is sophisticated as hell. It took the Sopranos many shaggy-dog conversations over at least half a season to make you fall in love with its human mobsters, but Briers secures your affections in minutes. He does it by perfectly capturing the poetic complexity of relationships as they are spun out through the flow of words. For this is a relationship movie—just not the kind you might think. Even though this movie is hung on a love story, Briers’ couple is not at its center. Yusef and CeCe’s love isn’t the least bit grandiose; these are just two people who’d like to go to college, get married, buy a house and have kids. Most of the movie’s real drama concerns the complex web of relationships that surround and hold them both together and apart. By the time Yusef tells CeCe that he can’t be the man she wants him to be because his father, and her father, each failed to teach him how, we know what he’s talking about and feel it with him. And as much as we are rooting for him, we know that he’s speaking the truth on a very deep level. That moment in which the inevitability of doom, and the revelation that it’s been there since birth, sinks in for Yusef, and for us, makes this movie a genuine tragedy, in a way that most screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet have never been, because they always succumbed to sentimentality. Briers has crafted a perfect tragedy, and he’s done so because the culture he lives in requires it. Oxnard is a tense city. It has a white history, a Latino population, and the county’s most sizeable black community. And in the film, when everyone went out to a club, it was to Nicholby’s on Main Street in neighboring and mostly white Ventura—the only common space anyone shared in Oxnard was a parking lot. A gang injunction covering much of the city’s core was passed recently and, conversely, anyone who knows about the freakish real estate growth in Ventura County knows that CeCe and Yusef, had they lived, would never have been able to buy a nice suburban house in Oxnard like the one her father bought as a maintenance supervisor. Somewhere, somehow, sometime, something’s gotta give. We can only hope that Briers’ film will be well and widely received, and that it will provide the community with an opportunity for catharsis. That is what tragedy did for the Ancient Greeks. In Trae Briers, Oxnard has found its Sophocles.