All talented directors are allowed an off moment in their careers – and this is the stage arrived at by Kantemir Balagov, whose earlier film Beanpole was such a triumph. This follow-up – his third feature in fact – is his first English language movie, set among the expat Circassian community in New Jersey; it features star names and one colossally self-conscious icon cameo unsubtly signalling cinephile importance. Butterfly Jam is contrived, tonally uncertain, implausible and frankly plain silly in its underpowered kind of magic-unrealism, with some clunky secondhand Mean Streets mob-fraternal dialogue and pedantic ethnic-foodie cred, and elliptically positioning key scenes off camera for no obviously satisfying reason.
Barry Keoghan plays Azik, a widower who with his longsuffering pregnant sister Zalda (Riley Keough) runs a Circassian food diner in Newark; as chef he cooks a sublime delens a delicious cheese and potato dish to his own (secret) recipe, accessorised with delicious jams, one of which, he whimsically announces, is made of butterflies. (He is presumably kidding but he has an amazing touch with the natural world, as we will see.) His teen son Temir (Talga Akdogan) is a talented wrestler who dreams of Olympic glory and he has a sweet crush on fellow wrestler Alika (Jaliyah Richards).
Azik is happy enough in the little diner, but wonders if he could make more money working in one of the flashy restaurants owned by big-shot Kantik (Zaramok Bachok), a successful guy from the neighbourhood. He is also exasperated at having to tolerate, and look out for, an irritating and boorish loser in his circle, his beta-male buddy called Marat (Harry Melling) whose insecure rough-housing always looks like escalating into violence. Under the banter there is a macho undercurrent: who is the winner and who is the loser, who is strong and who is weak?
Driven by an extravagant and romantic caprice, Azik captures a wild pelican that had been featured on the local TV news and keeps it in a lockup, intended as a wacky birth gift for his future niece. Grabbing that pelican is one of the off camera moments we are asked to take on trust – although that particular omission works reasonably well. But more baffling is the moment when, at Marat’s unwholesome suggestion, Azik hires a local sex worker for Temir’s 16th-birthday coming of age. That ends with a chaotic and humiliating brawl with another client at her apartment but we aren’t shown how exactly it comes out, a blank space which is not interesting or dramatically satisfying.
The same to some extent goes for a scene where Azik goes to Kantik’s restaurant with Temir, apparently to sound out the possibility of a job. We cut to Azik telling Temir he turned him down. This might be a face-saver to cover up the fact that he wasn’t offered a job? But isn’t Kantik supposed to be an obsessive fan of his cooking? Was the money not enough? (Kantik supposed to a rich big shot after all?) Or could he just not bear to let Zalda down? Either way, it’s a muddle, not a mystery.
The drama is to lead to a hateful crime: the film’s crowning, climactic implausibility as it turns out, especially as the cops are apparently not involved. And having produced this peculiar flourish, the film sags into sentimentality. Keoghan and Keough have moments of vehemence and eloquence, but this is a misfire.