In the brief snippets that form the opening montage of A Thousand and One, it’s clear writer-director AV Rockwell has an assured aesthetic sense: street corners buzzing with chatter and pulsing with 90s hip-hop, greetings and handshakes, the cacophony of 1994 Brooklyn as it bends around an assured Teyana Taylor’s take-no-prisoners walk. We first meet Taylor’s Inez a year earlier, in a single sumptuous shot at Riker’s Island; now she’s back, beeper on her hip, looking for Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), the six-year-old child she left behind.
Rockwell’s beautiful yet underwhelming debut set over a decade in rapidly gentrifying New York, proceeds unemphatically, like a collection of artfully staged vignettes loosely unspooled from a single impulsive act. That act – Inez, a 22-year-old hairdresser desperate to restart, steals Terry from under the nose of his foster family – first appears to us, as it likely would to the characters, as far less consequential and dramatic than it is. For all Inez’s fire and the stakes of their predicament (no work, no place to live, few bridges left unburned, a crime against the state), Inez and Terry’s escape to Harlem plays out, through cinematographer Eric Yue’s ravishing cinematography and Gary Gunn’s warm score, as almost languid and easy.
