What draws viewers to the "Coney Island Cousins" indie film is the expectation that it's about life in a working class Brooklyn neighborhood -- a district best known for its historic amusement park. However, the first thing this film's viewers notice is the change in demographics. Coney Island and other parts of Brooklyn have been well-known for their diversity for decades. Nowadays, a recent wave of Russians have been added to that mix.
The two main characters of "Coney Islands Cousins" -- Val (Diana Sillaots) and Yulia (Upa InSpace/I. Ginzburg) -- are among the Russian émigrés dealing with the daily grind of working class New York life.
These two characters, approaching middle age and working for the weekend like most folks, get together for a night of drinking and hanging out with a older male friend from the old country. However, when that friend accidently dies from a drug overdose in his apartment, the potential of these ladies' lives turning upside down (from deportation to being charged with a capital crime) become too real. This is where the film starts to take off.
The filmmaker, Al Padilla, uses such tension to reveal the unique character of modern-day Coney Island (similar to the famed TV series "Mr. Robot" -- which also took place there). That storytelling technique was also present in the 1991 sleeper hit film "Hangin' with the Homeboys". That movie, where veteran Hispanic character actor John Leguizamo appeared in his first art film, tells the story of four young African-American & Hispanic men from the Bronx who, bored with spending their free time in the outer boroughs, decide to venture into Manhattan on a night of bar hopping.
That fateful night caused those four characters to grapple with their own personal issues. One of the Puerto Rican "Homeboys" gets criticized for constantly selling out his racial identity in order to court women and dodge out of trouble with the police (at one point pretending to be Italian), while another (Leguizamo's character) confronts his painful inexperience with women. Meanwhile, one of the Black "Homeboys" pathologically blames racism for everything that goes wrong with his life.
What made "Hanging with the Homeboys" a sleeper hit was the fact that the audience was able to identify with that film's characters -- because these were folks that they likely grew up with.
It was such universal appeal that "Coney Islands Cousins" filmmaker Al Padilla tapped into when his movie's main characters were confronted with a life-threatening dilemma, and how they used their New York-bred street smarts to get out of it -- all while the audience is introduced to a side of Coney Island that only its locals were familiar with.
Al Padilla does a good job in using the tensions inherent in his film's plot to keep the audience engaged until the very end.
Padilla, a lifelong New York resident, has the potential to use other ethnic districts to tell compelling stories about the changes that its locals are facing, such as the gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and the growth of the Dominican community in Washington Heights (upper Manhattan) (captured in the 2021 Lin Manuel Miranda hit movie "In the Heights").
That, along with the 80s New York (and Miami-bred) genre of Freestyle music, and how it preservers 40 years later (especially on YouTube and TikTok). That genre and its music makers have a story that's still begging to be told on the big screen.
