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Stop The Pounding Heart

STOP THE POUNDING HEART (Roberto Minervini). 98 minutes. Opens Friday (March 13). Rating: NNNN

Watch online: iTunes


Stop The Pounding Heart is a modest production, but that’s okay. You don’t need a huge budget when you’re working with simple truths.

Roberto Minervini‘s drama is a close-up study of young Sara (Sara Carlson), who lives and works with her large family on their rural Texas goat farm. Just edging into her teenage years, the sheltered girl is starting to comprehend the larger world beyond her home-schooled Christian household. When she meets a young bull-rider (Colby Trichell) who doesn’t have time for faith, she starts to challenge the limitations of her upbringing.

It sounds like the stuff of a hot-blooded teen drama, but writer/director Minervini is working on a much subtler wavelength, observing small moments in a naturalistic manner instead of orchestrating big emotional confrontations. He casts non-actors and shoots them in their own world. Much of Stop The Pounding Heart plays as ethnographic documentary rather than fictional narrative. (The Carlsons are who they are, and so is Colby.)

More importantly, Minervini – who’s made two previous features about life in this part of Texas, The Passage and Low Tide – respects these people and their world view, refusing to caricature their devotion to goats, guns and God in any way. He doesn’t editorialize he just shows us human beings living their lives, letting urgent questions emerge from the juxtaposition of desires.

It’s mesmerizing.

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