« Early Bollywood/Early Hollywood | Main | Teaching Resource Blog News »
January 10, 2004
House of Sand and Fog
House of Sand and Fog (IMDB), based on a novel by Andre Dubus III, is a formally exquisite and morally compelling film. The film opens with a shot of Behrani (Ben Kingsley, jumping into the ethnic chameleon machine one more time), an Iranian military officer looking from his balcony as several giant pine trees are chopped down to provide him with a view of the Caspian Sea. The shot suggests a certain amount of hubris, and his actions displease his wife.
The film then crosscuts between Behrani, now living and forced to work two jobs (on a cosntruction crew and in a convenience store) in the United States, and Kathy (Jennifer Connelly), living alone in a modest split-level house with a meager ocean view. Kathy's life seems to be careening out of control. An early sequence shows Kathy on the phone with her mother, who lives across the country, lying about her broken marriage and financial stability, and her only form of stability is the cabin left to her by her father. Kathy's life is then disrupted when the county siezes her house claiming that she has failed to pay business taxes on the house. One of the officers, Lester (Ron Eldard), seems sympathetic and directs Kathy to a lawyer to fight back for her house. However, Lester, who is married with children, is also clearly attracted to her. Behrani, seeing an oppurtunity to get rich quickly, buys the house at a bargain rate with plans to sell it for a large profit so that he can support his family and send his son to college. Kathy, unable to find anywhere else to go, begins sleeping in front of her old house in her Pontiac (one of her few remaining possessions).
The film, directed by first-timer Vadim Perelman, thus establishes a complicated set of moral questions. Both Kathy and Berhani are essentially entitled to the house; they have also both made mistakes. Kathy should have opened her mail and paid her bills sooner; Berhani, perhaps, should have been more understanding of Kathy's dilemma, but it's easy to understand why he would want to preserve his family's comfort level, especially after the luxurious life they were forced to leave in Iran (it's implied that he was in the Shah's army). In this sense, the film evokes a complicated take on the Amerian Dream. Berhani, the immigrant, is working hard to make a better life for his family in the United States while Kathy sees the home that her father worked thirty years to buy dissapearing from her grasp.
Perhaps the only character with whom I had no sympathy was Lester, the police officer who leaves his wife and family for Kathy, and not simply because he leaves his wife, but more likely because the film doesn't show us much about his family life. We only get one or two scenes of Carol (Kim Dickens) confronting Lester, and his desire to leave her seems more motivated by a night of steamy sex with Kathy than anything else. When I was discussing this film afterwards, I read this decision as a directorial mistake, one that simplified the story a little, but on reflection, I'm trying to recuperate it because the decision to not show us that part of Lester's life now seems rather deliberate (and may also be influenced by the tone of the novel). My reading now is that Lester is simply drawn to Kathy's self-destructive tendencies (she's a recovering alcoholic and smoker), and in fact, he begins to encourage her self-destructive behavior, buying cigarettes and alcohol for her.
I don't want to give away any other details about the plot, other than to say that once the conflict is set, it has a certain inevitability. The characters all make choices that we understand, but given our knowledge of their world, we also know the devastating consequences of their choices. House of Sand and Fog is beautifully filmed by Roger Deakins (Man Who Wasn't There, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Shawshank Redemption, among others) in a style that is generally naturalistic without being showy. One powerful shot, however, clearly evokes film noir, with Lester walking away from Kathy in a point-of-view shot. Lester is back-lit by a street lamp and is transformed into silhouette in the dark night. It's a beautiful shot for evoking the film's complicated moral questions, setting in motion a series of devastating choices.
House does have one sequence that I found improbable, and I won't mention it in too much detail, but I think that Behrani's son's action near the end of the film seemed fairly implausible and perhaps a little manipulative. Overall, though, the film sustains its complicated moral dilmemas, produced in part by the very effective use of crosscutting between Berhani and Kathy.
Posted by chuck at January 10, 2004 9:28 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.wordherders.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.fpl/1260