The Mexican rapists, murderers, and vermin of Donald Trump’s malarial imagination are the delivery guys and cotton candy salesmen in On the Seventh Day. If they work seven days a week without a breather, a manager may reward them with a promotion to busboy. To Jose’s coworkers, the devotion to his futbol team mystifies them – it’s leisure activity, hence suspect. Vibrant, thick with the smell of the warm Brooklyn streets on which it was filmed, Jim McKay’s feature examines the ways in which communities of color navigate between work and leisure. Who knows — in this summer of World Cup hysteria, it might be a modest hit.
Fernando Cardona plays Jose, the delivery man for La Frontera, a modestly upscale, if such a term exists, Mexican restaurant in Carroll Gardens. To save money he rooms with a half dozen bros who double as the teammates in his futbol league. His girlfriend Elizabeth, with whom he communicates tersely by phone to save roaming minutes, is back home six months pregnant. He hopes the promotion will make it possible to bring her over before their child is born; he, quite naturally, wants the baby to be an American citizen. Steve (Christopher Gabriel Núñez), the non-Spanish speaking restaurant manager, has ordered all hands on deck for a big party the following Sunday. The trouble: it falls on the same day as the big futbol game. Without revealing much, Jose asks and is refused the day off.
What makes Steve infuriating is that he probably regards himself as a paragon of liberalism yet can’t see how he exploits his workers, and he doesn’t have to raise his voice or issue threats (Núñez is terrific). “This isn’t mob rule,” he actually says when employees ask of favors. He’s no worse than the anonymous corporate stooges to whom Jose delivers lunch (“They’re all separate companies,” an employee informs him on delivering food to the right location but wrong office). Worse psychologically for Jose: he neglects telling his mates until the last minute.
Structured in chapters of unequal length using the days of the week as title cards, On the Seventh Day builds such good will that I want sequels. McKay doesn’t build characters – he populates a world. Besides Jose there’s Artemis (Genoel Ramirez), benched because of a knee injury and as a result apt to give orders from the couch like a pasha. A white guy with, if you’ll pardon the expression, skin in the game (Donal Trophy) comes up with the idea of calling in short order deliveries to La Frontera so that Jose can bike over to the park and play a quick round or two during game time. This supplies some tension — will Jose get caught, and, if so, what will happen? A co-worker gets knocked off his bike by a perfectly timed open car door; he begs the apologetic driver not to take him to the hospital, and the audience understands why. A false step can lead to penury or expulsion.
Not only is On the Seventh Day a refutation of Theodor Adorno’s oft-quoted sour bit about sports as “ritual in which the subjected celebrate their subjection,” it’s damn fun to watch too. The camera loves Cadona; his face looks sculpted out of obsidian. Zipping through the steaming Brooklyn streets on his bicycle, he’s as confident as he is on the futbol field. On the phone with Elizabeth his face brightens like only a non-actor can (another nice moment: shopping for a nice but cheap dress at Happy Days). A rebuke to our increasingly atomized lives, On the Seventh Day is an affirmation of communitarian values.
GRADE: B+
Humanizing The Vacuum 