The American director Ramin Bahrani‘s latest film, ‘Goodbye Solo,’ about a Senegalese cab driver in a small North Carolina town, which stars the Cote d’Ivorian actor, Soulemane Sy Savane, opened this weekend at New York’s Angelika Film Center. I am going to try and see it.. I love this guy’s films.
Film critics also seem to get it. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott neatly summarizes what’s going on in Bahrani’s films:
Mr. Bahrani’s … films … focus on the struggles of immigrants to get by and get ahead. But while that description is accurate enough, it is also a little misleading. Mr. Bahrani is not interested in serving up warmed-over multicultural sentiment or in delivering lessons on social problems, nor in staging encounters between uptight, privileged white Americans and earthy, sensitive Others. What he is after is at once more straightforward and intriguingly elusive. His motive seems to be a basic curiosity about what people do and how they live, and his method — placing nonprofessional actors … in real-world settings and embedding them in small, powerful stories — allows for both a richly detailed sense of life and an intimation of unspoken meaning.
The review is accompanied by an audio interview with Bahrani.
