The line between homage and flat repetition can be thin. The Violent Heart, writer and director Kerem Sanga's third feature (premiering in competition at France's Deauville Film Festival), falls on the dull side of the dividing line.
That result is a shame, because there is plenty to admire technically in his drama about Daniel, a young Black man in Tennessee trying to pull his life together, and Cassie, a white high-school senior.
But its substance is a mashup of ill-fitting parts, indebted to both Romeo and Juliet and Douglas Sirk. Daniel's character is far more intriguing than his unlikely romance with Cassie.
As the film begins, we briefly see him as a boy who trails his older sister one night when she sneaks out of the house with a.
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