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A Minimalist Long In Voice And Vision
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| Director Ramin Bahrani, center, appears on the set of “Chop Shop” (2007) with Alejandro Polanco, left. (Courtesy of Noruz Films) |
The Humility, Obsessions Of Ramin Bahrani
By JONATHAN L. FISCHER, The Bulletin
When it comes to filmmakers of the American art house, we are used to audacity as the instrument of provocation. Humility, not so much.
“I think it’s very important for the director not to be the star of the film,” Ramin Bahrani said on an afternoon earlier this spring, sitting in the bar of Sofitel in Center City. He was in town for the day to promote his new film “Goodbye Solo,” which screened that night as part of Philadelphia Cinefest.
This third film by the 34-year-old director opens theatrically in Philadelphia this weekend, and it is as much a study in cinematic restraint as it is a deeply felt exploration of friendship, sacrifice, a corner of the American zeitgeist — and maybe, just maybe, the human condition. And though this drama, set in Mr. Bahrani’s hometown of Winston-Salem, N.C., ends in high symbolism, its ascent — narratively and literally, up the smoky mountain where its climax unfolds — couldn’t be more perfectly minimal. Deliberate yet self-effacing, Mr. Bahrani is not a director who shows off. And yet his three films — which also include “Man Push Cart” (2005) and “Chop Shop” (2007) — are unmistakably the works of a modern-day auteur, long in voice and vision.
Not to be the star of the film — when was the last time a critically lauded director said something so … undirectorly?
“That doesn’t mean that the scenes aren’t precise and planned,” cautioned Mr. Bahrani. “But that doesn’t mean that you leave the film thinking what a great shot or what a great musical soundtrack. That’s not what people should be thinking about.”
Later in the conversation, he elaborated: “I want you to think about what the film is about” without being distracted, he said. “My hope is that audiences will bring themselves there, too.” What that means, he said, is universal stories that are entirely specific to a time and place.
The critics, at least, have rewarded that ambition. The Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Roger Ebert called Mr. Bahrani “the new great American director,” and an essay in The New York Times Magazine included him among a list of filmmakers practicing “neo-neorealism” — referring to the Italian postwar film movement that launched the careers of Vittorio De Sica (“The Bicycle Thief”), Roberto Rossellini (“Rome, Open City”), Luchino Visconti (“The Earth Trembles”) and Federico Fellini (“La Strada”).
Like those greats, Mr. Bahrani and his peers make naturalistic films about the fringes of American society — the working poor — featuring nonprofessional actors and location shooting. The themes are serious and sad, yet Mr. Bahrani’s films each end with subtle uplift.
The films of Mr. Bahrani, who is Iranian-American, are clearly interested in the experiences of recent immigrants. “Man Push Cart” follows a Pakistani former rock star who now operates a breakfast cart in Manhattan. “Chop Shop” stars an orphaned Latino boy who lives above an auto repair shop in the “Iron Triangle” of Queens. And Solo — the title character of his new film — is a Senegalese cabdriver who aspires to become a flight attendant. In each of these movies, much time is devoted to the processes of daily life — how the characters go about their work.
Some of that comes from Mr. Bahrani’s interest in detail; he cited Chekhov as one of his favorite writers. More importantly, he said, he wants to create stories that audiences recognize as real.
“I think it’s important to acknowledge that people work for a living,” Mr. Bahrani said. “And that the stories involve what they do for a living. And that people have jobs other than doctor, attorney, detective.” — he laughed — “There are other jobs in this world.”
He acknowledged a common trap for filmmakers — oversentimentalizing, or even romanticizing, the poor for a mostly affluent audience — and said he works hard to avoid it.
“There is no Steinbeck or Faulkner tale which romanticizes or idealizes the poor,” he said. “They usually have those who abuse the poor, and I also despise people who abuse the poor, but they don’t romanticize them.” He said the characters in his movies “are being cheated by other immigrants and by working-class people, they’re not really being cheated by some powerful white guy … which is true to what I see.”
In conversation, Mr. Bahrani comes off as cerebral and enthusiastic, but there’s also something very puritanical to his view of the movies. For one thing, he said he has little interest in escapism.
“You look at ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and you see the outfits. It’s been turned into a Hollywood song and dance — or a Bollywood song and dance,” he said, referring to this year’s winner of the Best Motion Picture Oscar about two orphans living in India’s capitol, Mumbai. “I mean, a kid jumps into a pile of human feces and the audience thinks it’s fun. That’s not fun. It’s horrific.”
He continued: “ ‘Goodbye Solo’ — it may feel real and may be about serious subjects, but that doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining. I think it’s a really entertaining film. You want to know what happens next, and it’s funny.”
Mr. Bahrani was born in 1975 and grew up in Winston-Salem; his parents had emigrated from Iran. He attended Columbia University, and lived in Tehran for several years after graduating. There, he made his thesis film, “Strangers,” and these days, he teaches in Columbia’s graduate film program. (Last month, Mr. Bahrani was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.)
He said that he was inspired to make “Goodbye Solo” during a visit to Winston-Salem some time ago. For the first time, he saw a large number of African men playing soccer in a park. The field was lined with cabs.
Mr. Bahrani eventually spent months in the passenger seat of one driver’s cab — though he won’t say the man’s name. But somewhere in his mind, Solo was born.
He said rehearsals lasted for many months, largely without a script. Souléymane Sy Savané, the actor who plays Solo, spent two months driving a cab and living with Mr. Bahrani and his brother. At Mr. Savané’s first rehearsal with Diana Franco Galindo, the young actress who plays his step-daughter, they ate hot dogs. Red West, who plays a suicidal old man whom Solo tries to save, was only able to rehearse for 10 days, because of Screen Actors Guild rules. On his first day, Mr. West asked Mr. Bahrani if there would be a table reading, and the director said he didn’t know what that meant. That’s because he’s more concerned with his actors inhabiting their roles than quickly memorizing their lines.
Meanwhile, the screenplay — which Mr. Bahrani wrote with Bahareh Azimi — was slowly taking shape. “Always, the script is written and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten while location scouting, casting, meeting nonpros, meeting the real people,” Mr. Bahrani said. “It’s happening all at once.”
Although his style is observational, Mr. Bharani’s method is exacting. He is well-known for demanding 20 or 30 takes of a single shot, and he said that everything captured by his hi-def cameras — down to props, colors and negative space — is planned. Helpfully, he said, his cinematographer, Michael Simmonds, is as obsessive as he is.
But he stressed that his attraction to realism reflects a narrative philosophy rather the grittiness of his subject matter.
“If we are to feel something for these characters, I want it to resemble the world we’re living in,” Mr. Bahrani said. “And the world we’re living in doesn’t seem to be reflected often in our cinema. Even Jean Renoir” — hardly a realist director, Mr. Bahrani admitted — “talked at great length about why in day-to-day life people keep erecting walls from reality. In conversation, people erect walls away from reality.”
He said his next film will be a Western, set in the 1850s, but that he couldn’t reveal more. Then he added: “It’s crazy. No really, it’s crazy.”
It will be Mr. Bahrani’s first period piece, but it’s hard to imagine the director not taking pains to ensure its historical accuracy.
Not that the young realist is immune to grand cinematic ambitions. “The entire emotional buildup of [Solo] is this: hand, stick, wind, clouds, sky,” he said, referring to the dramatic climax of “Goodbye Solo” atop Blowing Rock in the northwest of North Carolina. “And I’m watching people in the audience looking at a guy holding a stick.”
“That’s the power of cinema … You can’t do that in any other medium.”
Jonathan L. Fischer can be reached at jfischer@thebulletin.us
“I think it’s very important for the director not to be the star of the film,” Ramin Bahrani said on an afternoon earlier this spring, sitting in the bar of Sofitel in Center City. He was in town for the day to promote his new film “Goodbye Solo,” which screened that night as part of Philadelphia Cinefest.
This third film by the 34-year-old director opens theatrically in Philadelphia this weekend, and it is as much a study in cinematic restraint as it is a deeply felt exploration of friendship, sacrifice, a corner of the American zeitgeist — and maybe, just maybe, the human condition. And though this drama, set in Mr. Bahrani’s hometown of Winston-Salem, N.C., ends in high symbolism, its ascent — narratively and literally, up the smoky mountain where its climax unfolds — couldn’t be more perfectly minimal. Deliberate yet self-effacing, Mr. Bahrani is not a director who shows off. And yet his three films — which also include “Man Push Cart” (2005) and “Chop Shop” (2007) — are unmistakably the works of a modern-day auteur, long in voice and vision.
Not to be the star of the film — when was the last time a critically lauded director said something so … undirectorly?
“That doesn’t mean that the scenes aren’t precise and planned,” cautioned Mr. Bahrani. “But that doesn’t mean that you leave the film thinking what a great shot or what a great musical soundtrack. That’s not what people should be thinking about.”
Later in the conversation, he elaborated: “I want you to think about what the film is about” without being distracted, he said. “My hope is that audiences will bring themselves there, too.” What that means, he said, is universal stories that are entirely specific to a time and place.
The critics, at least, have rewarded that ambition. The Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Roger Ebert called Mr. Bahrani “the new great American director,” and an essay in The New York Times Magazine included him among a list of filmmakers practicing “neo-neorealism” — referring to the Italian postwar film movement that launched the careers of Vittorio De Sica (“The Bicycle Thief”), Roberto Rossellini (“Rome, Open City”), Luchino Visconti (“The Earth Trembles”) and Federico Fellini (“La Strada”).
Like those greats, Mr. Bahrani and his peers make naturalistic films about the fringes of American society — the working poor — featuring nonprofessional actors and location shooting. The themes are serious and sad, yet Mr. Bahrani’s films each end with subtle uplift.
The films of Mr. Bahrani, who is Iranian-American, are clearly interested in the experiences of recent immigrants. “Man Push Cart” follows a Pakistani former rock star who now operates a breakfast cart in Manhattan. “Chop Shop” stars an orphaned Latino boy who lives above an auto repair shop in the “Iron Triangle” of Queens. And Solo — the title character of his new film — is a Senegalese cabdriver who aspires to become a flight attendant. In each of these movies, much time is devoted to the processes of daily life — how the characters go about their work.
Some of that comes from Mr. Bahrani’s interest in detail; he cited Chekhov as one of his favorite writers. More importantly, he said, he wants to create stories that audiences recognize as real.
“I think it’s important to acknowledge that people work for a living,” Mr. Bahrani said. “And that the stories involve what they do for a living. And that people have jobs other than doctor, attorney, detective.” — he laughed — “There are other jobs in this world.”
He acknowledged a common trap for filmmakers — oversentimentalizing, or even romanticizing, the poor for a mostly affluent audience — and said he works hard to avoid it.
“There is no Steinbeck or Faulkner tale which romanticizes or idealizes the poor,” he said. “They usually have those who abuse the poor, and I also despise people who abuse the poor, but they don’t romanticize them.” He said the characters in his movies “are being cheated by other immigrants and by working-class people, they’re not really being cheated by some powerful white guy … which is true to what I see.”
In conversation, Mr. Bahrani comes off as cerebral and enthusiastic, but there’s also something very puritanical to his view of the movies. For one thing, he said he has little interest in escapism.
“You look at ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and you see the outfits. It’s been turned into a Hollywood song and dance — or a Bollywood song and dance,” he said, referring to this year’s winner of the Best Motion Picture Oscar about two orphans living in India’s capitol, Mumbai. “I mean, a kid jumps into a pile of human feces and the audience thinks it’s fun. That’s not fun. It’s horrific.”
He continued: “ ‘Goodbye Solo’ — it may feel real and may be about serious subjects, but that doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining. I think it’s a really entertaining film. You want to know what happens next, and it’s funny.”
Mr. Bahrani was born in 1975 and grew up in Winston-Salem; his parents had emigrated from Iran. He attended Columbia University, and lived in Tehran for several years after graduating. There, he made his thesis film, “Strangers,” and these days, he teaches in Columbia’s graduate film program. (Last month, Mr. Bahrani was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.)
He said that he was inspired to make “Goodbye Solo” during a visit to Winston-Salem some time ago. For the first time, he saw a large number of African men playing soccer in a park. The field was lined with cabs.
Mr. Bahrani eventually spent months in the passenger seat of one driver’s cab — though he won’t say the man’s name. But somewhere in his mind, Solo was born.
He said rehearsals lasted for many months, largely without a script. Souléymane Sy Savané, the actor who plays Solo, spent two months driving a cab and living with Mr. Bahrani and his brother. At Mr. Savané’s first rehearsal with Diana Franco Galindo, the young actress who plays his step-daughter, they ate hot dogs. Red West, who plays a suicidal old man whom Solo tries to save, was only able to rehearse for 10 days, because of Screen Actors Guild rules. On his first day, Mr. West asked Mr. Bahrani if there would be a table reading, and the director said he didn’t know what that meant. That’s because he’s more concerned with his actors inhabiting their roles than quickly memorizing their lines.
Meanwhile, the screenplay — which Mr. Bahrani wrote with Bahareh Azimi — was slowly taking shape. “Always, the script is written and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten while location scouting, casting, meeting nonpros, meeting the real people,” Mr. Bahrani said. “It’s happening all at once.”
Although his style is observational, Mr. Bharani’s method is exacting. He is well-known for demanding 20 or 30 takes of a single shot, and he said that everything captured by his hi-def cameras — down to props, colors and negative space — is planned. Helpfully, he said, his cinematographer, Michael Simmonds, is as obsessive as he is.
But he stressed that his attraction to realism reflects a narrative philosophy rather the grittiness of his subject matter.
“If we are to feel something for these characters, I want it to resemble the world we’re living in,” Mr. Bahrani said. “And the world we’re living in doesn’t seem to be reflected often in our cinema. Even Jean Renoir” — hardly a realist director, Mr. Bahrani admitted — “talked at great length about why in day-to-day life people keep erecting walls from reality. In conversation, people erect walls away from reality.”
He said his next film will be a Western, set in the 1850s, but that he couldn’t reveal more. Then he added: “It’s crazy. No really, it’s crazy.”
It will be Mr. Bahrani’s first period piece, but it’s hard to imagine the director not taking pains to ensure its historical accuracy.
Not that the young realist is immune to grand cinematic ambitions. “The entire emotional buildup of [Solo] is this: hand, stick, wind, clouds, sky,” he said, referring to the dramatic climax of “Goodbye Solo” atop Blowing Rock in the northwest of North Carolina. “And I’m watching people in the audience looking at a guy holding a stick.”
“That’s the power of cinema … You can’t do that in any other medium.”
Jonathan L. Fischer can be reached at jfischer@thebulletin.us
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