Staff PickA lot of film enthusiasts here in Boulder recently became acquainted with director Ramin Bahrani this year at the Conference of World Affairs, where he co-hosted Roger Ebert’s “Cinema Interruptus” and discussed his second film, Chop Shop, which I had the pleasure of reviewing last year when it arrived on our shelves. Ebert is convinced that Bahrani is a major new talent on the same order as Martin Scorcese was in the 70’s, and a leading exemplar of a new American “neo-neo-realism” movement. That kind of praise usually strikes me as hyperbolic, since film is so subjective in nature. But after watching Goodbye Solo, the director’s third feature, I can certainly attest that he is a confident and philosophical master of cinéma vérité, creating films with so much realism one could be forgiven for thinking them documentaries.

But documentaries they are not! Bahrani shoots entirely on digital video, and unlike other pioneers in digital filmmaking, he doesn’t try to make it look like film. But his shots are deliberate, crisp and well-composed. He is especially deft at establishing the geography his characters inhabit and the details that surround them. He doesn’t often use professional actors, but rather people that he has met somehow who already resemble his characters. In Goodbye Solo, the title character is played by Souleymane Sy Savane, a former flight attendant who worked in Africa before coming to the states. His character is in fact studying to become a flight attendant, while he drives a cab around Winston-Salem, NC (Bahrani’s birthplace and hometown) to pay the bills and support his Mexican wife and stepdaughter. The film opens with him driving an older Southern gentleman, William (played by Red West, who was the longtime friend and bodyguard for Elvis Presley). William wants to hire Solo to drive him to Blowing Rock, an Appalachian mountaintop on the 20th of October, and not drive him back. Solo recognizes that he seems intent on ending his life, and contrives to be his only cabbie until then, driving him to the movies and to a motel after he sells his house. He invites William into his life, determined to cheer him up.

As I read the premise I just wrote, it sounds almost formulaic somehow, but Bahrani approaches these two men in such a clear-eyed and authentic fashion that he immediately engenders your trust that he won’t do the obvious, and you become transfixed by the reality he observes. Solo, a Senegalese immigrant, is such an endearing and engaging optimist that I defy anyone not to like him. For my part, I don’t think I’ve ever met a West African I didn’t like, and while he’s strictly speaking a fictional character, Solo certainly reinforces that impression. William, meanwhile, is an enigma for him to solve–he is at turns cranky and laconic, but not closed-minded or inconsiderate. He is sorrowful and perhaps defeated by life, and when Solo is confronted by this sadness, we see his empathy transform his face. It’s interesting to note that none of Bahrani’s characters ever seem motivated by racism–born to Iranian immigrant parents, he insists his family never felt unwelcome when they moved to the States. At the same time, he calls himself an outsider in both the U.S. and Iran, and his films thus far have always focused on impoverished immigrant characters struggling to survive in America. But his vision of this country is broad and optimistic, even while he peers closely at those on the bottom rungs. – [DVD]

Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 8/25/09

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