HOMEWORK is first-time director Kevin Asher Green's small miracle of a film, made in barely eleven days at a cost of only $10,000, which hearkens to some of the classics of Asian cinema. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 "un-Sundance", the Slamdance Film Festival, HOMEWORK puts Green on the map as an up-and-coming director to watch.

The pouty Paz de la Huerta (The Cider House Rules) is Sara, a young ballet student whom, it is revealed, suffers from depression and bulimia as a result of her relentless pursuit of perfection. She lives with her mother and brother in a luxurious New York Apartment with "three bathrooms for four people", as plumber Jean (Isaach De Bankolé) notes in wonder. Sara would seem to have a charmed life; she looks great in her Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy classic sportswear, she's fashion-plate skinny, she has a devoted, if dweeby chess-addicted pseudo-philosopher of a boyfriend. But the skinniness is from her eating disorder, which her mother seems not to notice, or worse, to encourage. The boyfriend gropes her with zero finesse, wheedling and begging and pleading for sex while quoting Kierkegaard, but has no idea what to touch and where. The strictures of classical ballet bore her to tears.

Enter Jean, the soft-spoken plumber with the lilting West African accent and the Marlon Wayans dreadlocks, who tells her that he too is a dancer, and before you know it, Sara is dumping multiple bottles of Drano into the pipes to necessitate a return visit. Jean, it turns out, is an instructor in a dance studio in the same building as Sara's ballet class; and she is intrigued by the freedom of the movements Jean creates to the Afropop beats he favors. Inevitably, they begin a sexual relationship that feels taboo less because it is interracial than because of the obvious class differential and the fact that Sara may very well be underage. Paz de la Huerta suggests a subtler Juliette Lewis, yet she correctly portrays Sara not as nymphet, but as a confused kid hungry for experience. It's an opaque, yet curiously expressive performance.

Jean, as rendered in a wonderfully subtle performance by Isaach De Bankolé, is such a gentle soul that the relationship seems more balletic than exploitive. De Bankole perfectly partners his co-star in the pas de deux of this budding relationship.

It would have been easy to turn this into just another variation on the "take of your glasses and take down your hair" seduction model, especially since Sara really does loosen up --and begins eating again -- after Jean not only finds the right place but shows her how to find it too. There are small elements from a million dance films in which the elegant ballerina gets down and funky. And yet HOMEWORK puts on the brakes just shy of such a descent into cliches.

The influence of Wong Kar-wai permeates this quiet film, yet it feels wholly original. Shot on location by cinematographer Richard Rutkowski (Chelsea Walls) in digital video, the film transcends this often harsh medium to verge on the poetic. With its dreamlike, intercut pacing (400 shots packed into an economical 57-page screenplay), the film relies on location, mood, color, and music rather than dialogue to tell its story, and draws the audience into its parallel yet different worlds. At times this seems to be two different movies; one influenced by the French and Asian filmmakers Green cites as his influences, and a far more conventional dance film. Green has an admitted fondness for the repetitive shot, and while this repeated use of the same shot helps underscore the ennui in Sara's life, in a film of this budget it sometimes seems like simply a money-saving device.

As of the film's screeings at the Tribeca Film Festival, no distributor had picked up this film. I hope that HOMEWORK finds a distributor, because Green is a genuine talent who has constructed an extraordinarily lyrical, beautiful, minimalist film that transcends its astonishingly low budget.

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