“Lights up on Washington Heights, up at the break of day, I wake up, and I got this little punk I gotta chase away,” he says—or raps, in a voice as crisp as an apple.
Think of him as a warm-weather descendant of Jack, the lamplighter whom Miranda played, with an idling charm, in “Mary Poppins Returns” , relocates to the Bronx, her leaving is at once an adventure and a barely explicable abandonment.
She got into Stanford, but was so crushed by the loneliness and the racial condescension that she’s now returned to seek refuge in the Heights.
Stanford, in fact, is about as much of a villain as “In the Heights” can muster, unless you count the robber seen racing away from a bodega—the one that Usnavi runs with his teen-age cousin Sonny —another sweltering saga with a piragua guy and a fiercely specific sense of place.
To dramatize such binding ideals, for almost two and a half hours, and to conjure precipitous revels from next to nothing, as Miranda and Chu have done, is no small feat.
More gravity-bound, but louder and funnier, is the scene in which everyone piles into a swimming pool for what can best be described as an outdoor, hip-hop, Busby Berkeley splashout, and all because somebody bought a winning lottery ticket at the bodega.
The distracted tone of her delivery drains any force from the threat.
The need to move on, for private reasons or under political pressure, is unremitting, and this want of security has a numbing effect on his characters.
His name is Christoph and to establish whether the structures of the present are holding firm.
What on earth is this film about? Well, for one thing, its natural medium is not earth but water; at the couple’s initial meeting, an aquarium bursts, knocking them over and flooding them into a drenched embrace.
What the scene demonstrates is the beautiful twist that Petzold has applied to the antique myth: who, the movie asks us, is the marine creature here? Is it the elusive Undine, as cultural custom requires? Or could it be Christoph, so thoroughly at ease in his mask and his wetsuit, under the skin of the river—more so, we feel, than he is in the open air? Both of them seem to slip in and out of the action as if it were a lake.
The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers.