Toronto Dispatch: Bahrani Nails It
Some movies play at a film festival and vanish into oblivion; others arrive with major distributors in tow. For filmmakers, this polarized state of the business often makes it seem like a choice between the lesser of two evils — you either sell out or disappear. Ramin Bahrani is one of the few contemporary filmmakers to evade this problem. The Iranian-American filmmaker emerged as an original voice in the independent community with his debut feature, Man Push Cart, and has managed to gain recognition for his utterly distinctive approach to human drama without developing a voracious appetite for bloated finances or media stardom.
In his films, Bahrani imports the Iranian New Wave minimalism exemplified by Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi and applies it to stories about the daily struggles of American minorities. Man Push Cart follows a lonely coffee peddler who was once a rocker star in his native Pakistan; last year’s Chop Shop documented a bawdy twelve-year-old working in the grungy autoshops of Queens overlooking Yankee stadium. Now, Bahrani’s back to exploring the difficulties of an immigrant living in the United States with Goodbye Solo, his third feature, which premiered this week at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Although in many ways not as daring as his earlier films, Solo consolidates Bahrani’s social-realist tendencies by placing them in a conventional story structure. The movie follows a kindhearted taxi driver from Senegal named Solo, whose rather despondent life in North Carolina remains fortified only through a relentlessly upbeat personality that he manages to play off those around him. The main thrust of the narrative involves an unlikely relationship Solo cultivates with a cranky customer named William (Red West), the kind of crusty old white man whose national background suggests he’s the last person Solo would associate with. Indeed, William initially resists Solo’s friendship when the patron continually has him drive to a faraway movie theater and the local motel for mysterious reasons — but Solo optimistically reaches across the communication barrier and very nearly gets William to open up about his past. While not entirely successful at that goal, Solo does forge a connection with the older man, especially after the driver realizes that he needs time apart from his wife and abruptly crashes at his customer’s hotel room.
If Goodbye Solo had movie stars and a budget many millions of dollars strong, this premise would likely lead to a comedy of manners, one of those needlessly racy, annoyingly brash stories filled with endless one liners about ethnic quirks and their discontents. It’s America’s fixation on this type of entertainment that has lead us down the road from House Guest to Rush Hour , and while there’s a certain art to perfecting that type of comedy, Bahrani has far more intellectual plans. Goodbye Solo essentially functions as a quiet, moving portrait of two men from vastly different lives learning to understand one another. There’s a central enigma involving William’s underlying motives, but Bahrani avoids any sort of big reveal. Nobody stops the show to deliver one of those patented Hollywood monologues filled with shiny lesson plans and progressive rhetoric. Instead, with meaningful glances, Solo and William acknowledge the trouble they share and realize the universality of personal defeat. In a sense, Solo recalls Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor, another recent movie about a kindly immigrant raising the spirits of an wizened caucasian, but Bahrani surpasses McCarthy’s character study by allowing us to see William from Solo’s perspective, rather than the other way around. By the solemn finish, however, their outlooks are virtually interchangeable. The movie’s key impact lies with the trick of the title, an imaginary line of dialogue symbolizing camaraderie that’s never spoken in the film — although it comes so close to reality that the invisibility has a devastating effect.
