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The morally healthy Bella (2007), by Alejandro Gomez Monteverde, is a charitable failure.  It’s unaccepting of abortion–unlike its pregnant main character Nina, well acted by Tammy Blanchard.

Nina doesn’t want the baby inside her, but receives manly compassion and then some from a chef and ex-soccer star called Jose (Eduardo Verastegui).  The screenplay, I regret to point out–why did it take three men to write it?–is careless, basically ramshackle.  One wonders whether Jose’s accidental killing of a child, wrenching as it is, would actually induce the man to give up a lucrative pro soccer career and become a chef.  One wonders, really, how Nina could have been so feckless as to get pregnant by a fellow she cares nothing about.  I’m not sure I know what’s going on in Monteverde’s film.

Ostensibly Christian, presumably spiritual, Bella is in truth pseudo-religious.  Jose may or may not be a genuine Christ follower; it isn’t clear.  The movie is not exactly a Francois Mauriac novel, or even Au Hazard Balthazar.  If it were, it would possess a brilliance consistently missing from evangelical fiction films.