Goodbye Solo
Directed by Ramin Bahrani. Written by Bahareh Azimi and Ramin Bahrani. With Red West, Souleymane Sy Savane, Navani Reyes. (NR)
As Goodbye Solo begins, we're dropped into a story already underway. Two men are talking in a cab; the passenger, a sad-faced older man, is offering the driver, a talkative Senegalese immigrant named Solo, 1,000 dollars to drive him to a distant mountain on a certain day a few weeks away. Solo wants to know why, and tries to get the fare he calls "Big Dog" to admit to his plan for suicide. Through it all, he rarely stops smiling, and, for a time, it feels like his easy charm will be enough to save everyone. In a way, it will.
Solo is played by Souleymane Sy Savane with such an appearance of effortlessness that the feeling is that director Ramin Bahrani simply flew to Winston-Salem, where the film takes place, drove around looking for a chatty cab driver until he found Savane, and started shooting. In reality, Savane is an African television star and former flight attendant—a dream job his Solo hopes to land by studying airline manuals in his downtime.
William—his elderly fare—is played by Red West, who has worked with everyone from Elvis to Altman to Francis Ford Coppola yet never, until now, as a leading man. West gives William the shuffling gait of a baggy-pants clown or a longtime alcoholic, and the lumpy, defeated face of the same. His eyes are watery, his skin is blotchy, and by the time he sells his apartment and moves into a cheap motel, it feels like he gave up caring a long time ago.
But if William lives to be left alone, Solo won't give him peace. After breaking up with his girlfriend, Solo barges into William's life to sleep on his couch, ferry him to his appointments and generally interfere with his plan to end his life. We, like Solo, are given clues without ever really finding out the whole truth: William, it turns out, is related to a young man who works the ticket counter at the movie house William frequents, but explodes when he discovers that Solo may have shared that secret with the boy. All we can be sure of is that William has done something—or neglected to do something—in the past, and the lasting pain of the wound has ruined his life.
There are bits of Goodbye Solo that feel forced—the nonchalance of William in accepting Solo into his single-room motel home, for instance, is necessary for the story but hits a false note. But so much else rings true—from the matter of fact portrayal of an immigrant underclass who help each other when nobody else will to the struggle of a broken home—that the film overcomes its weaknesses to tell a lasting story about a new American era.
Wrapping up at Amherst Cinema this week is Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1943 drama Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag), a classic tale of social repression, the power of suspicion, and the dangers of an unyielding intolerance. (The film was shot during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, which makes the subject matter all the more remarkable.) Set in the early 17th century, the film stars Lisbeth Movin as Anne, the very young second wife of aging village pastor Absalon. When a local woman is accused of witchcraft, Anne offers the woman shelter, and learns that her own mother had once been so accused. The revelation that it was only through Absalon's intervention that her mother's life was spared puts an unwelcome spin on Anne's marriage to the pastor.
Adding to the domestic trouble are Absalon's shrewish mother Meret and his son Martin, who arrives home just in time to fall in love with his new stepmother. As Anne's feelings for Martin grow, so do Meret's suspicions about the true aims of her daughter-in-law, leading to an end that leaves nobody spared. A richly photographed reminder of the transporting power of cinema, Dreyer's film has stood the test of time. As Andrew Sarris wrote for the New York Observer: "However bleak, Day of Wrath is a masterpiece. See it."
Also screening as part of Amherst Cinema's Essential Cinema series is Vivre Sa Vie, Jean Luc Godard's stylish look at the deteriorating life of Nana (Anna Karina), a young woman who gives up her home life to follow her dream of becoming an actress, only to drift into a hopeless life as a prostitute when she falls on hard times. The film was described by Susan Sontag as "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of." Cinephiles will also find the film to be something of an exercise in voyeurism: Karina and Godard's marriage is one of cinema's best-known stories, and the pairing inspired some of their best work. But Vivre Sa Vie marked the beginning of the end; the first glimmers of a dissolving marriage—for the full story, see Godard's Pierrot le Fou, made a few years later—appear here, as the once nourishing relationship of director and star begins to sour.
Continuing its run is Sin Nombre, an astonishing debut from Cary Joji Fukunaga. A mix of road movie, immigration story and action movie, it follows Sayra, a young Honduran woman, as she journeys across Latin America to reach the United States and, she hopes, a future of promise. En route, she crosses paths with El Casper, a heavily tattooed youth on the run from his history of violence, one embodied by the gang of former friends who are eager to hunt him down.
Fukunaga's direction took home an award at Sundance, where the film also won for its cinematography, and the research he put into making the film—the California born director went south to hop trains in Mexico, and met with some of the area's violent gangs—shows itself in the naturalism of the portrayals. According to Fukunaga in an interview at Sundance, some 70,000 Central Americans immigrants come north each year, and the surprising thing—at least to an American audience—is that the journey "mainly entails crossing Mexico, which is even more dangerous than crossing the U.S. border." (That portrayal of the danger led to a warning that Sin Nombre contains scenes "unsuitable for young audiences or the faint of heart," so you may want to leave the kids at home.)
Just down the road, Amherst College plays host this week to Full Metal Village, an oddball documentary about a heavy metal festival that descends on a sleepy German village. Once a year, the quiet town of Wacken is invaded by tens of thousands of head-banging fans of bands with names like Cannibal Corpse, Grave Digger, and Death Angel. At a sort of post-apocalyptic Woodstock, the townspeople and the leather-and-spikes crowd find a way to live together. It screens on May 7 at Stirn Auditorium.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
