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Under discussion:

45365  (2009)

Severe Clear  (2009)

It’s heartening that 45365 won Best Documentary at SXSW; Severe Clear is ultimately stronger, but 45365 is the only doc I saw that took any formal risks. The first five minutes made me think I was looking at the doc of the year, let alone the fest.

First the opening shot, repeated several times, a stream of text and colors passing by illegibly fast. (I finally figured out it was an extreme close-up of a train passing by on the third go-round.) Then we’re in an empty theater with a man playing trumpet for no one, which is downright Lynchian. What comes next is showy but dazzling: using the local radio station as an audio link, we go from the station’s extremely efficient DJ to a cop driving along listening, cuting out of the car to zoom into the valley below where the high school football team is practicing as they’re being discussed on the radio, cuts back to the station, cuts to the fair that’s now being discussed, etc. ad infinitum.

Safe to say there’s a lot of formal control here; for their feature doc debut, Bill and Turner Ross appear to have never put themselves in a situation where they couldn’t figure out the most elegant shot in about five seconds flat (although they’re mostly skeptical of and avoid the outright lyrical). And yet, throughout this aesthetically admirable movie, I couldn’t figure out the thematic point; I kept waiting for something revelatory, something that would get me inside either the people on display or the town’s vibe. Instead, all I can tell you is that Sidney, OH (45365) is a nice, small Midwestern town, where everything that stereotypically implies — and nothing more — is firmly set in place.

In a lot of ways I really admire what the Rosses have done here, which is always err on the side of understatement; no button-pushing interviews where they wait for people to weep, no powerhouse confrontations, no uplifting redemption sagas. They actively seek out fragmented snippets of banality, and they’re not going to push anyone into situations or questions that would yield more dramatic footage. If a gregarious ex-alcoholic wants to freely share tales of his criminal past, that’s cool; if a reticent high school girl can’t offer up anything more than generic teen breakup conversations on her cell phone, they’ll take that too. However much people offer on their own is fine; the only thing they’re interested in imposing themselves on is the structure, which is deliberately counter-narrative. People get arrested and never appear again; story threads are dropped with abandon. (One that isn’t dropped is the re-election of local judge Don Luce, one of the few people who gets a full name assigned to him. Luce treats the election with grim professionalism; hanging out with this taciturn, reserved man really doesn’t prove anything.) While I admired the film’s elegance — pretty much every frame would make a terrific still — I was still waiting for the Rosses to use their understatement to sneak up some kind of point, whether elegiac or dystopian.

They never did. There are some stand-out sequences: Halloween night, with tracking shots down the sidewalks of Sidney, sent an E.T.-esque chill down my spine. I was never bored. But in refusing to force a narrative, the Rosses don’t convey the emotional tenor of what’s happening. Generally, when you make a documentary about small-town America, filmmakers strive mightily to prove to the (inevitably urbanite) festival crowd that life in Middle America is richer, stranger and more complicated than you’d initially assume (see SXSW companion Best Worst Movie’s portrait of Alexander City, Alabama). 45365 seems to want to prove the opposite — that life in one small midwestern town is generically interchangeable with anywhere else in the area, that the people remain static over the years in preordained trajectories — which is perverse, and surely unintentional. But what else can I think about this cast of characters? A blonde high school girl, inoffensively somber and reserved, but still vacantly fixated on the usual high school drama of over-negotiated first relationships whenever she does talk; the men for whom everything inevitably turns to the local high school football team; the bickering couple who steal each other’s pills on a drive around town, bringing tales of small-town addiction to life. None of them are cartoons (OK, except maybe the pill-stealer); they have contours. But they’re such perfectly representative types of a generic small town that it’s hard to know what to learn from this, except maybe that sometimes people and towns really are as boring as they look.

Bizarrely, the movie 45365 reminds me most of is The Straight Story, which I sometimes think is David Lynch’s best, most emotionally expressive movie in lyricizing really simple pleasures. 45365 has the same kind of setting and cast of characters, but it’s all been deliberately flattened; where Lynch drove a helicopter repeatedly into gorgeous flares over crops, the most the Rosses allow themselves are melancholy shots through a car’s windshield driving through town while crappy radio plays. It’s like The Brown Bunny all over again, except instead of Gordon Litefoot and rainy highway drives we get even worse corporate rock and the unidentifiable suburbs. Once more: how in the world should I feel about that?

Under discussion:

Goodbye Solo  (2009)

Looking up at her co-star Souleymane Sy Savane and noting the pain written on his face, child actress Diana Franco Galindo pulled aside Goodbye Solo director Ramin Bahrani to ask why it was that his character at this moment seemed so sad.

“I don’t know; why do you think he is so sad?” Bahrani asked.

Not having read any of the script beyond her own scenes, Galindo thought for a second on the question.

Here, of course, is all the story background that she, in considering the question, knew nothing of: With this latest work, Bahrani studies the world of naturally jovial, curious taxi driver Solo who, in meeting cantankerous, suicidal fare William (Red West), is forced to reconsider the definitions of friendship. Opening with an already quarrelsome scene between the two men, Goodbye, Solo, while quite a comfortable film to engage with, its journey full of levity as Solo studies for an exam to land a job as a flight attendant, leaves no easy way out either for its characters nor its audience. William has full intentions of leaving everything in life behind him, and Solo, despite his growing affection for the man, must learn not only to let him go but also to help him on his way.

Knowing this perhaps makes Galindo’s answer to Bahrani in that moment all this much more poignant.

“I think because he failed his exam,” she says.

“That’s a really good answer. Why don’t you really encourage him to pass it then!” Bahrani told her.

”And she said she would, and thus she really fills Solo with courage and hope in the final scene to pass, and manages to cheer him up and put a smile on his face about the future, right when another man’s future has been cut and Solo is thinking about the past, mortality, fragility and the briefness of life,” Bahrani explains.

Although his three feature films Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and Goodbye, Solo all explore issues related to both culture and class, Bahrani would hate to be accused of making multicultural, socially aware films for any manipulative, sentimental purpose. “Those films, I have to confess, bore me. I never wanted my films to be that,” he says. Rather he, working under his Noruz Films outfit, simply aims to share what he found in that moment with Galindo, to uncover truthful emotions and reactions in order to present these in tenderly told stories about everyday experience.

To understand these very real emotions and reactions, Bahrani, much as he did on his previous shorts and features, spent six months tagging along with a Senegalese taxi driver in his hometown of Winston-Salem, NC. “[This man] was very charming, warm and friendly. He had a curiosity about the world and about himself. He was constantly trying to improve himself on his own terms. He loved reading. He didn’t always want to be driving taxis; he had other ambitions. He was struggling to attain them, and there were forces that were stopping him. All of those elements seemed to play into this fictional version Goodbye, Solo,” Bahrani says.

This six-month research journey also served as a learning experience for the director in another potent manner. It allowed him for the first time to discover the oft unseen people and places of his hometown. “Unlike in New York, where taxis are expensive, in a suburb of Winsten-Salem, it’s actually not the wealthy people who take taxis; it’s usually economically poor people who can’t afford cars, can’t afford the insurance. So most of our clients were working night jobs, managing bars or working cleaning jobs. Those were the people I was encountering, and thus I was encountering where they lived, which interestingly in Winsten-Salem is oftentimes literally on the other side of the train tracks,” he says.

“I find myself really fortunate to have a job where I can [learn like] that. That excites me and energizes me to want to work.”

Pulling from his observations, Bahrani then met up with co-writer Bahareh Azimi to craft a script carefully balanced between reality and narrative, a process which brought to life characters who Bahrani speaks of as easily as he would friends. “William is incredibly determined to do what he wants regardless of what other people tell him, and that’s something Solo has been struggling with. His wife tells him to stay here as a taxi driver in Winsten-Salem. She tells him, “I love you. Now you should not do those things; you should do these things.” He’s told by friends, “If we’re friends, you should do these things with me even if you don’t want to do them.” He’s told by the dispatcher which way to turn, right or left,” Bahrani explains. “William doesn’t; he doesn’t try to love Solo and control him. I do think that Solo senses that in the relationship and starts learning from it.”

Shot by longtime Bahrani collaborator, cinematographer Michael Simmonds, Goodbye, Solo, even more so than the intimate naturalistic portraits of Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, feels framed upon the landscape of the face, character disappointments made immediate by the slightest change in expression. Yet, despite facing great difficulties that are often beyond their ability to control or alleviate, the characters of Bahrani’s films still hold strong to unwavering optimism.

“The films are not to romanticize poverty, which some films can do, even with the best of intentions, to the disservice of the location, the situation of the characters and where they stand in the world,” Bahrani points out. “Nevertheless the characters continue to battle anyhow. That is something I’ve noted deeply, and it’s something I’ve wanted to attain more in my own life.”