fri 29/03/2024

Film: Goodbye Solo | reviews, news & interviews

Film: Goodbye Solo

Film: Goodbye Solo

A taxi to the dark side

Two people are in the car, one black (the driver, inevitably), one white. But this is not Driving Miss Daisy, nor Collateral; its two occupants aren't played by Oscar-hungry stars, and the ride does not end up at the expected - or, indeed, desired - destination. Instead, Goodbye Solo is a modest, apparently artless film shot through with troubling ambivalence.

The first scene - a long single two-shot of the two main characters, much as they are seen in the above still - plunges us straight into their curious relationship. The passenger, William, is a man in his seventies with a shock of still-red hair and a weatherbeaten face that could have walked straight out of a John Ford Western. He offers Solo, the taxi's Senegalese driver, $1,000 to drive him in a fortnight's time to Blowing Rock, a well-known local lookout point perched high in the hills, where it's so windy that the snow blows upwards. The driver immediately deduces that this will be a one-way fare.

Good-looking, garrulous and extrovert, Solo has charm to burn, though he's also a bit of a chancer and his insistent friendliness is only just this side of annoying. Each time William calls a cab, he is the driver who reports for duty: he has made it his mission to talk his client out of his appointment with destiny.

Solo's own life is messy. He rubs along just fine with his bright young stepdaughter and  little more abrasively with his Mexican wife; with a baby on the way, he supplements his meagre earnings with small-time graft and drug dealing. His plan to adopt the lonely old man and bring him into his family founders almost instantly (it's not before long that the two guys are sharing a motel room). As the film proceeds, his sunny view of life is severely tested.

The director, Ramin Bahrani, is an American of Iranian parentage who shoots his films for next to nothing (though they have a fluency that belies the struggle to make them). His first two movies were set in New York, on the city's economic margins: Man Push Cart, the story of a Pakistani operating a sidewalk bagel kiosk, and Chop Shop, about a crowd of Puerto Rican youngsters working in a car garage.

Goodbye Solo goes to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Bahrani grew up here, and he discovers a shabby poetry in its empty streets, crumbling bars and a little cinema with a nice young red-haired man in the ticket booth. We never learn - though there are clues such as this - what has driven William to his desperate state. But the film is above all a study of two troubled souls caught up in the crucible of Solo's cab.

Bahrani's great coup is to have found two remarkable non-professional actors. Solo is Souléymane Sy Savané, a French fashion model of African descent (rather like his screen character, Savané blagged his way into the role despite having not passed his driving test). William is played by Red West, a stuntman who worked for many years as Elvis Presley's bodyguard and was a member of the "Memphis Mafia". Both have superlative film faces, filled with personality and life experience.

Goodbye Solo is not one of those slickly life-affirming movies where the big-hearted, salt-of-the-earth African will prove William's salvation. But the final drive out of town and up to Blowing Rock, with its bright fall foliage and swirling mists, builds to an intense, almost mystical climax, even an obscurely satisfying one.

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