A Mirror Floating in Water

I just finished watching Goodbye Solo, and I must say, as many critics seem to have said, that Ramin Bahrani is the great new American director.

He has only made three films, and yet each one has shown a mastery of character, emotion, story and technique unlike any other filmmaker in recent years. Even Scorsese had to learn and develop his merits. His film Chop Shop has got to be one of the best films of the decade, and Goodbye Solo, I am willing to say, is probably one of the best films that will come out this year. Too bad the Academy Awards are too eager to overlook small films like these.

Last year Slumdog Millionare won best picture, but in the same year, a film of even greater merit and power was released, but was largely overlooked, except by critics who all agreed that it was an inexplicitley great film. That film was Chop Shop; rooted in Italian neo-realism, it is an urban story about a young but tuff orphan boy who works at a chop shop selling stolen car parts. He dreams of opening his own mobile-food van with his older sister. Simple as that. There are no melodramatic moments, no moral speeches of hope and whatnot, no, this movie is too honest to betray its characters for philosophical chatter. There are heartbreaking moments in this film, derived from the most sublte of places. This is not a conventional film and thus does not play out in a concentional way. There is a silence which invades the film at its most powerful moments, with control and mastery that I have not seen since Ingmar Bergman.

Goodbye Solo is the same way, even though it is a vastly different film in both style and content, though we can tell that it is a Bahrani film at every single moment. Here, an African cab driver in Salem, develops a unique relationship with an old man who has given him $1,000 to drive him up to the top of a mountain, where the snow blows upwards, and leave him there. The cab-driver, Solo, quickly comes to the realization that the old man is planning to jump, and out of the beautiful kindness and compassion of this man's heart, he spends the next week trying to charm and push the old man out of it. Solo tries to show him that life is worth living, and despite the fact that we hear not a single word about this come out of Solo's mouth, he can feel it being deeply implied in every single scene he is in.

Bahrani is a realist and doesn't surrender himself easily to tender moments. Despite the fact that there is plenty of dialouge in this film, everything important being said is silently between the two characters and through Bahrani's subtle and quiet camera-work. Thoughts, motives, ideas, are all made clear to the audience almost without any dialouge at all. Suicide is only mentioned once in the film, and that is at the begining, but throughout to the very end, we know what both men are thinking.

It's honestly too bad the integrity that has been lost in the cinema these days. Too many directors, even good ones, are so easily ready to give in to conventional plot and drama, so ready to have one of their characters burst out crying and having their camera silently say, "look at this tragic person, cry for him!" Bahrani is not like that. This films are not meant to make you weep. And even though his films have scenes of immense emotional intensity and power, that they are so silent and true, that emotional intensity seems to be a wrong word. His films are not dramas, they are about life.