Goodbye Solo

May 3, 2009

The third film from the highly talented Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani is a beautifully sculpted examination of human interaction and compassion, filmed, like “Man Push Cart” and “Chop Shop”, with Neo-Realist attention to performance, location, and human nature. In a depressing strip of Winston-Salem, cab driver Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane) picks up William (Red West), a 70-ish old man with a life's worth of pain; he makes a deal with Solo to drive him two hours out of town to a windy cliff, no questions asked, but when Solo pegs the guy for suicide, he takes it upon himself to befriend the old man and change his mind. From this simple set-up Bahrani and his co-writer Bahareh Azami (the Zavattini to Bahrani's de Sica) fashion a friendship of struggle and need based both on economic situation and past failures, with the optimistic Solo finding William's angry exterior tough to crack, and that we are only slowly given any information about the characters, especially William, grows the fascination and mystery. There are some who think Bahrani might be the best independent filmmaker working in America today; with films as good as “Chop Shop” and “Goodbye Solo”, that's spot on.

By Adam Suraf

asuraf@DunkirkMA.net