Critics reviews

His working method is immersive and total. In order to shoot, Minervini had to abolish any distance, any barrier between himself and his characters.

Seen today, post-election, the film just feels like a full-on document of today's America, bald-faced, shameless, and tragic. And what's miraculous is that despite all the hate-mongering and simmering violence on display, The Other Side is ultimately full of compassion and love for its wayward souls.

Minervini's project, not unlike Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, seeks to show the beauty and complexity already extant in his subjects, and never projects anything that isn't there.

This is direct cinema at its most unnerving, providing an all-too-close look at the lower depths of modern American society.

Minervini films all this in dramatic chiaroscuro, and the contrast between the verdant natural setting and the unadorned ugliness of his subjects' sentiments couldn't be more stark. At times, though, he goes overboard: the shot of a meth addict wandering naked down a country path would have more poetic value if it weren't so obviously staged. Minervini has captured a segment of American society too often ignored and mocked, but sometimes he's overtaken by the urge to romanticize decrepitude.

Minervini spends entire scenes in the company of impoverished, beer-guzzling idlers who confirm some of the worst stereotypes we might have about them. Yet this shocking portrait of Louisiana drug addicts and a pro-gun militia is also remarkably sweet. Minervini has the ability to turn grimy situations into art while affording any perceived "degeneracy" on screen a style of attention that takes his subjects as seriously as they take themselves.

A film that pushes back against the critical impulse toward definition and classification, and Minervini, with this slippery, unreconciled object that seems as much fact-threaded fiction and fiction-laced fact, has produced a destabilizing, resistant work.

The least racist, most printable critique of Barack Obama in the film comes from a teenage girl who simply pronounces him "self-centered." Here, Minervini doesn't do much gawking, though, patiently building out a social context for beliefs and behavior that most viewers will consider beyond the pale.

We never feel that the camera is intruding or spying, not even in the scenes of Mark and Lisa having sex or taking drugs. Rather, this camera (whose physical presence is skillfully downplayed) seems to be an ally that gives these people the possibility of affirming themselves.

If it were possible to splice the DNA of William Faulkner and John Cassavetes, the resulting progeny might produce a film like Roberto Minervini's "The Other Side," an immersive, almost harrowingly naturalistic plunge into the lives of marginal Louisianans obsessed with guns, drugs and belligerent resentments.

Although it's being marketed as something like a documentary, this film, directed by Roberto Minervini, is, in fact, something oddly different. To call it a cross between reality television and art film would perhaps be more accurate. Whatever genre it belongs to, "The Other Side" is powerful and disturbing.

Nearly every moment in this Bayou-set docu-fiction hybrid engenders a tricky twofold reaction: The words and actions of the people on screen often trigger revulsion, anger, or pity, even as Minervini's camera tenderly cozies up to its subjects, examining them in intimate proximity until the root causes and emotional justifications for their destructive behaviors become impossible to ignore.