Chop Shop
Ramin Bahrani | USA | 2007
84 min
Ramin Bahrani is interested in not only people but how people live. This young Iranian-American director has professed a great love for the Italian Neorealist movement, particularly the films of Vittorio De Sica. The influence is pervasive in Chop Shop, Bahrani’s new film about a brother and sister who live and work in an impoverished part of Queens, New York. The boy’s real name is Alejandro Polanco and his sister in the film is played Isamar Gonzales — both of them get to keep their first names for their characters. Ale and Isamar are non-professional actors, and by allowing them to keep their real names it seems Bahrani helped them overcome the artifice of the kind of screen-acting so endemic to the ‘serious indie film.’
Chop Shop is an intimate story about a brother and sister duo barely surviving on the margins of a neighborhood that is far removed from middleclass America. The film begins with Ale doing random jobs, but he eventually secures a job at the eponymous chop shop — his surly yet sympathetic owner allows him to live upstairs, in a room that just about fits a bed, a fridge and a microwave. Ale is so resourceful that he even gets his sister a job at a food stall. They have a shared dream: running a small business out of van; both are saving for this automobile that has become the crux of their redemption. But then Isamar begins to come home late. One night Ale discovers his sister in a truck, with a john who paid for her time. Ale does not confront his sister; instead he takes up stealing to improve his earnings, perhaps in the hope that his sister will no longer need to “keep working.” To say money is a recurring motif would be stating the obvious: there is a scene in the film involving Ale throwing a shopping cart over a bridge and another where he feeds grain to pigeons, that beautifully brings home the film’s secret undertone of the American culture of consumerism and self-imposed narcissistic imprisonment. (How relevant given the current economic depression in the US!)
Shot in the cinema verite style, Ramin Bahrani is also smart to eschew the shaky-cam syndrome that plagues pretentious Hollywood mainstream films: visual compositions consist of intimate medium and close-up shots, and the camera is always handheld. The production design, diegetic music and naturalistic lighting lend themselves to the meticulously planned realism. Chop Shop is a confident sophomore film from a young, perceptive director.
* Note: Chop Shop was included at #7 in WearetheMovies.com’s Best Films of 2008
