Orlando Bloom was in town Thursday to promote his new film Haven, a mystifying fusion of Romeo and Juliet, money intrigue and unapologetically trashy B-movie that opens Sept. 15. Written and directed on the cheap by then-24-year-old Frank E. Flowers (yes, really) in his native Cayman Islands, Haven interweaves the stories of Shy (Bloom), a poor white kid who falls in love with a rich island girl Andrea (Zoe Saldana), whose brother (Anthony Mackie) juggles his disapproval with an earnest Quest for Gangsterdom, which overlaps with the indiscretions of petty criminal Fritz (Victor Rasuk), who is casing a rich American (Bill Paxton) who fled the feds in Miami with his impressionable teenage daughter (Agnes Bruckner). Everything comes together like a bulky, poorly wrapped Christmas present worth studying for its incompetence and worth opening for the guilty pleasure insde; the ratio of sultry cast members to sensical narrative here ranks at a deciedly underachieving five-to-zero.

Sea fairer: Actor/producer Orlando Bloom with Zoe Saldana in Haven (Photo: Yari Film Group)
But you cannot say Flowers did not try; his camera swerves like a speed freak and cuts hot and fast, not an entirely unsuccessful (or original) stylistic exercise that helps viewers defer the question “What the fuck am I watching?” if only because there is just never enough time; Flowers is jump-cutting months ahead, or across town, or across oceans, or into oceans with lovers Bloom and Saldana. After 40 minutes or so, it is not impossible to appreciate or even enjoy Haven for what it is: a soap opera with teeth. Or maybe just really, really foxy dentures.
I asked Bloom and Flowers (I’m telling you, this stuff writes itself) from whence and how exactly they developed the film’s stormy “style.” “The one advantage you do have with bening young and having your first film is saying ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘What do you think?’ and not have ego get in the way of it or vice versa,” Flowers told me. “As we went through, it was really all about that–all about collaborating. As far as the style of the actual film, it’s like in movies like Amores Perros, movies like City of God, there’s a certain disregard in the film. They just say, ‘Let’s do it.’ Things drop out of foucs. It’s just so aggressive and so real and so raw and a lot of times, when you don’t have the money or the time to do three or four angles, all your actors kind of rise to the occasion. It was really an amazing experience, and I was a little spoiled by it. These guys would get it all in one or two takes, and they’d be like, ‘Aren’t you going to do some coverage?’ I’m like, ‘No that’s great.’ It was an amazing moment. ‘I could shoot it again if you wanna spend an hour lighting it, but it was brilliant and I have it, and we’ll jump cut if the continuity isn’t 100 percent there because the moment is true and the moment is pure.’ ”
“And that was so exciting as an actor,” Bloom interjected, “because of the script, and they way he adapted it on the turn of a dime, the way that he was that flexible as a director working with him. You know? He was 24 years old! But he had a real confidence and a real air of, ‘This is what I want–I got it.’ And what can I say? I believed him. It took a few turns to really believe it, but it was exciting. It was an exciting process. It was a dialogue; it wasn’t a one-way street. Neither of us have got egos that mean we can’t talk about it. We want to make a movie and get it done together.”
Bloom, who co-produced the film, passed the buck when asked why Haven languished for two years on its distributor’s shelf. “That’s kind of a Bob Yari question,” Bloom said, referring to the mogul-ish, Oscar-deprived Crash bankroller whose eponymous distributing arm has pushed a half-dozen titles of varying quality (Winter Passing, Find Me Guilty, The Illusionist among others) into the market in 2006. In full producer mode, however, he modestly added that now is Haven‘s time, then thanked the press and left the room. Harvey would be proud.

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