NEAR
AND FAR
by
Howard Schumann
Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco), called Ale for short, works
at an auto-body repair shop in what has come to be known as the Iron
Triangle, a deteriorating twenty block stretch of auto junk yards and
sleazy car repair dealers close to Shea Stadium in Queens, New York.
Here customers do not question whether or not parts come from stolen
cars or why they are able to receive such large discounts; they simply
put down their cash and hope that everything is on the up and up. Sleazy
outskirts like these are not highlighted in the travel guides, but Iranian-American
director Ramin Bahrani puts them on vivid display in Chop
Shop, a powerful indie film that received much affection
last year at Cannes, Berlin, and Toronto. In this follow-up to his acclaimed
Man Push Cart, Bahrani spent one and a half years in the location
that F. Scott Fitzgerald described in The Great Gatsby as “the
valley of the ashes.”
For all its depiction of bleakness, Chop Shop is not a work
of social criticism but, like Hector Babenco’s Pixote,
a poignant character study in which a young boy’s survival is
bought at the price of his innocence. The picture was shot on location
at Willets Point in Queens, and Bahrani makes you feel as if you are
there, sweating in a hot and humid New York summer with all of its noise
and chaos. The film’s focus is on the charming, street-smart 12-year-old
Ale who lives on the edge without any adult support or supervision other
than his boss (Rob Sowulski), the real-life proprietor of the Iron Triangle
garage. Polanco’s performance is raw and slightly ragged, yet
he fully earned the standing ovation he received at the film’s
premiere at Cannes along with a hug from the great Iranian director
Abbas Kiarostami.
Cramped into
a tiny room above the garage together with his 16-year-old sister Isamar
(Isamar Gonzales), who works dispensing food from a lunch wagon, Ale
is like one of the interchangeable spare parts he deals with. While
he has dreams of owning his own food-service van, in the city that never
sleeps he knows that the only thing that may make the “top of
the heap” is another dented fender. In this environment, Ale and
Isi use any means necessary to keep their heads above water while their
love for each other remains constant and they still laugh and act out
the childhood that was never theirs. As Barack Obama says in Dreams
From My Father, the change may come later when their eyes stop
laughing and they have shut off something inside. In the meantime, Ale
supplements his earnings by selling candy bars in the crowded New York
subways with his friend Carlos (Carlos Zapata) and pushing bootleg DVDs
on the street corners, while Isi does tricks for the truck drivers so
as to save enough money to buy the rusted $4500 van in which they hope
to start their own business.
Though Ale
is a “good boy,” he is not above stealing purses and hubcaps
in the Shea Stadium parking lot, actions that Bahrani’s camera
observes without judgment. In Chop Shop, Bahrani has provided
a compelling antidote to the underdog success stories churned out by
the Hollywood dream factory, and has given us a film of stunning naturalism
and respect for its characters, similar in many ways to the great Italian
neo-realist films and the recent Iranian works of Kiarostami, Panahi,
and others. While the outcome of the characters is far from certain,
Bahrani makes sure that we notice a giant billboard at Shea Stadium
that reads, “Make dreams happen,” leaving us with the hint
that, in Rumi’s phrase, “the drum of the realization of
that promise is beating.”
The
latest Werner Herzog documentary, dedicated to Roger Ebert, Encounters
at the End of the World, is a study of man and his interaction
with nature in the ice-laden rivers, mountains, and shores of Antarctica.
If you are looking for answers as to why a red worm lives in the anus
of static sea life, or the consistency of the milk of a baby seal, you
have come to the right place. Still searching for the bizarre and the
eccentric, Herzog takes us as far south as it is possible to go, where
he meets and interviews scientists, researchers, travelers, and a variety
of oddball characters looking for meaning and purpose. The film is loosely
constructed and overly long, feely mixing the sublime and the banal.
Like some of his other works, it is filled with gorgeous cinematography,
exquisite music, and Herzog’s unique commentary spoken in a somber,
musical voice that has a distinct poetic quality that strives for profundity.
Herzog was
paid by the Discovery Channel and the National Science Foundation to
travel to McMurdo Station in Antarctica to gain some insight into the
mysteries of the land at the bottom of the world, promising only that
he would not come up with another film about penguins. He criticizes
McMurdo as an ugly mining town, and rails against the noise and the
tractors and yoga and aerobics, which he calls an “abomination.”
His study, of cours,e is less about the sex life of the penguins than
about the oddball humans and why they have gone to great lengths to
travel to Antarctica. We meet a linguist who had studied the disappearance
of native languages but is now growing hydroponic tomatoes in a tin
hut, a traveler who went from Ecuador to Peru in a sewer pipe, a plumber
who is convinced the shape of his hands points to a royal Aztec heritage,
and a woman who contorts her body to fit into a gym bag. We see scientists
huddled together watching the science fiction thriller Them
from 1954, and probably films of other genres that even Herzog was not
able to include.
We are also
privy to a humorous training exercise, as Herzog follows a survival
class at McMurdo in which trainees put a white bucket over their heads
to match the blindness they would encounter in a windstorm. Connected
to each other, they search blindly for the trainer who is actually only
fifty feet away, perhaps an inadvertent metaphor for humans trying to
connect with God. Like all of Herzog’s films, there is an upside,
and perhaps the main reasons to see the movie are the entrancing underwater
ballet sequences of the divers who risk their lives every time they
plunge in to the freezing waters, shots of the beautiful caves carved
in the South Pole, and satellite images of sea ice compressed into an
animated montage. Throughout the film, Herzog finds the most beautiful
music imaginable–Mongolian chants included with original compositions
by experimental composer and guitarist Henry Kaiser, who co-produced
the film and provided the music with David Lindley.
All of this
beauty strives for a spiritual context but comes up short. Sadly, little
attention is paid to subjects such as global warming and how it may
affect the future of the region and of mankind. The scientists he interviews
are some of the top men in their field, but most are convinced that
the human race is doomed to extinction, a proposition not challenged
by Herzog, who is too busy excoriating yoga, penguin movies, aerobics,
environmentalists (tree huggers and whale huggers), and asking such
questions as whether or not penguins are gay or insane. Perhaps the
most telling sequence is the one, most probably staged by Herzog, in
which an individual penguin refuses to follow the group heading to open
water, but instead opts for a lonely and sad journey to the mountains,
likely to result in certain death. It tells more perhaps about Herzog
than about penguins or the human condition.
©2008 Howard Schumann
CineScene
