Local Color
Filmmakers Bill Bilowit and Grela Orihuela improvise on Miami — and Tokyo — in ‘Round Trip’

“Anybody can make a movie from a script. … I wanted to let the tale evolve.”

A troubled Tokyo woman, played by Japanese pop singer Mami Asada, explores a South Florida ranch.

BY CELESTE FRASER DELGADO

A Tokyo yuppie bored with her job and betrayed by her lover finds her way to Miami, where she disappears somewhere between a Cuban pig roast on the outskirts of Hialeah and a fetish party in Wynwood. Determined to find her, her straitlaced brother checks into the Abbey Hotel on South Beach and hires a private eye in a guayabera who takes him on a tour of the Magic City’s seamy side.

In Round Trip, an independent feature from Miami-based Tareco Pictures, familiar characters from the local arts scene — many of them non-actors — share their homes, traditions and dirty secrets with refugees from Japan’s demanding work ethic, played convincingly by professional actors from Tokyo theater troupes. While the Tokyo scenes might seem, well, foreign to Miami viewers, anyone who has been living the lush life in recent years at local galleries and alternative performance spaces will recognize many faces and locations, from the Spam Allstars to poet-singer Lourdes Simon and troubadour Roberto Poveda; visual artist David Rohn; composer and SunPost art critic Alfredo Triff; stage actors Rosa Inguanzo and Ricky Martinez; drag queen Adora, aka Danilo de la Torre, in a butched up cameo; dance theater performers Octavio Campos and Natasha Laura Tsakos; and Miami New Times art critic Carlos Suarez de Jesus in a star turn (and his acting debut) as a tough-talking private eye. There’s Jazid; there’s Hoy Como Ayer; there’s Artemis arts presenter Susan Caraballo’s apartment door.

The soundtrack is full of familiar strains as well, with tunes by Spam, Triff and Poveda as well as atmospherics from electronic minimalist David Font and the stirring German composer Friedemann Dahn –— as recorded during Miami’s own Subtropics Experimental Music and Sound Arts Festival. Art connoisseurs will see Miami all over the walls as well, with canvases by local luminaries Jose Bedía, Edouard Duval-Carrié, and Hernan Bas spiffing up many a set. “We used everyone we knew,” explains producer Grela Orihuela. “We were writing scenes based on what locations we could get.”

That bare-bones indie credo does not quite convey the resources Orihuela and her partner, director Bill Bilowit, have at their disposal after having produced corporate events, live shows and videos for the media giant Sony from the late ’80s until they founded Tareco in 2002. Round Trip may be the Key Biscayne couple’s first theatrical feature (or more precisely, one of the couple’s first two theatrical features), but they are hardly new to making movies. They have had access to cutting-edge technology over the years, even making the very first DVD ever produced as a demonstration for dealers of what a DVD could do, and they have worked with a large number of professional actors. And given the number of miles the couple has logged on their own roundtrips to and from Tokyo, the film’s far flung locations and unusual cast makes sense. “I wanted to make a Japanese film as an American,” says Bilowit. “For me, Tokyo is the ultimate expression of an urban civilization.”

Originally the director had planned to include another of his frequent-flier stops, Los Angeles, as a third location in what he envisioned as a kind of technological experiment, with each location shot in a different format. Ultimately Bilowit and Oriheula settled instead on making two feature films, both shot in high-definition video and both completed in the past year, with Round Trip using amateur actors in Miami and stage actors in Tokyo and Naked Under Heaven starring Hollywood regular Tim Dekay (best known for his portrayal of “Bizarro Jerry” on Seinfeld) and other members of the Screen Actors Guild. “We kept a wish list of actors we’d worked with [on corporate projects in Los Angeles] over the years,” says Bilowit, “and everyone said ‘yes.’”

“We would have brought the whole movie to Miami,” adds Orihuela, “but it would have cost too much to bring the SAG actors out from California.”

So the duo recruited friends in South Florida. And Bilowit relied on a friend in Tokyo to solicit audition tapes, sent to the director by e-mail, from actors in the city’s English-speaking theater troupes. With a limited understanding of Japanese, Bilowit reviewed the improvised auditions by listening for rhythm and pitch. Some of the actors, such as Rie Saito who plays the lost Michiko’s sister, were so engaging that he created new characters for them because they did not fit any existing character. When he took the film to Tokyo for three private screenings last spring, he says the audience was surprised by the natural quality of the acting and identified with the main character’s ennui with her upscale existence.

The plot in both settings developed from the actors’ improvisations, with the director and producer ready to follow wherever the characters decided the story should go. The hectic pace of corporate production and documentary work gave Bilowit a taste for improvisation himself. “Anybody can make a movie from a script,” he says. “I wanted to let the tale evolve.”

That’s how art critic Suarez suddenly found himself in a starring role; he had an instant rapport with Japanese lead Takuya Matsumoto that propelled the story forward. That’s also how the story took a darker turn, as the intense energy of dancer and professional circus performer Tsakos in the role of Michiko’s roommate led the lost Japanese character into the labyrinth of Wynwood after dark.

Matsumoto’s character, Yusuke, follows in his sister’s footsteps, reading her diary for clues to her whereabouts. When not following the leads, he has time to sample Cuban food and dance salsa. Although he speaks English well, he, like so many visitors to Miami, is puzzled by the prevalence of Spanish in the United States. Watching an exchange between Suarez’s detective and a real-life Wynwood fetish-party host, Yusuke asks: “Do people always answer in Spanish when you ask a question in English?” Suarez, without missing a beat, gives the only answer that makes sense: “Hey, buddy, this is Miami; get used to it.”

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