3 1/2 stars (out of four)Eternally, cinema returns us to the streets, where children grow up more quickly than they’re designed to. Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani’s fine, sharp new film “Chop Shop” takes place in the so-called Iron Triangle, a tangle of auto body shops and junkyards in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, N.Y., also known as Willets Point. For a parentless street kid, this place is both heaven and hell, a land of opportunity with an invisible fence around it.
Bahrani, who made a name for himself with his first feature, “Man Push Cart,” shot “Chop Shop” two years ago on location. It’s a sharp mixture of neorealist grit and lyricism, and while other writer-directors would treat the sibling relationship at the film’s center very differently—more melodramatically, for starters—Bahrani lets us into two improvised lives naturally.
Alejandro Polanco plays not himself but a dramatic variation on himself, also called Alejandro. He is 12, living in a room behind one of the repair shops with his 16-year-old sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales). The boy scrambles to prove himself each day, hustling bootleg DVDs, directing customer traffic, eventually saving money for a used (very used) lunch van. Isamar, Alejandro learns, turns tricks to earn money.
These are film characters drawn with a fine hand, though they’re not conventionally built for pathos and high drama. We experience what they experience as if they were documentary subjects, and we were the documentarians. Bahrani charts the boy’s progression from one petty crime to another, and then on to stealing hubcaps, and then worse. Yet all along he’s trying, in his way, to be a good brother and to navigate a world that does not look out for him, even if certain people living in it do.
The neighborhood is near Shea Stadium, which looms like an unattainable symbol of the American Dream. Yet as Bahrani himself has acknowledged, “Chop Shop” belongs to a long international cinema tradition of lost ones, transcending the particulars of greater New York. “If ‘Los Olvidados’ were to be made today and in America,” Bahrani has said of the Bunuel film, “it would be made here.” Small but sure, the film is like Alejandro himself: quick on its feet, attuned to a harsh life’s hardships and possibilities. The universe so deftly explored here is built on the principle of stripping hunks of metal down to component parts. “Chop Shop” shows us how difficult we make it in this country, just like most any other, for the underclass to hang on to what makes them human.
mjphillips@tribune.com
(4 ratings)
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