Venice and Toronto. Goodbye Solo.

"An odd-couple relationship fuels a slow-burning but ultimately moving emotional and spiritual journey in Ramin Bahrani's third feature," writes Lee Marshall in Screen Daily.

"As in the well-received festival faves Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, the US director of Iranian origins unspools a story set among America's immigrant underclass - represented in this instance by Solo, a Senegalese taxi driver in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. But this time round Bahrani's steadfast refusal to exaggerate the chances of underdog success in an indifferent world is tempered by a greater sense of lyricism than he has previously allowed himself."

"In this benign version of Collateral, the only person a cabbie's passenger wants to kill is himself," writes Ronnie Scheib in Variety. "Utterly engrossing dual-character study, unfolding with a serene disregard for indie quirkiness, Goodbye Solo radiates authenticity, as much in the town's unmistakable tobacco towers as in the characters' mindsets."

Next stop: Toronto.

Update, 9/8: "Bahrani's concern with the American immigrant experience remains, as does his generous humor and resistance to sentimentality," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Though the plot has shades of Abbas Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry, Bahrani goes the conventional route by detailing the give and take between these two men and the painful understanding they have to reach with one another."

Updates, 9/14: "Unlike other movies I've seen at the festival, where I wondered why certain scenes hadn't been left on the cutting floor, every moment of Goodbye Solo is integral to the story, every scene propels the narrative forward," writes J Robert Parks at Daily Plastic. "Grounding it all is a star-making (and Oscar-winning, if there were any justice) performance from Souleymane Sy Savane, who is absolutely charismatic as a man persistently trying to save another man. But Bahrani has such a way with actors that the non-professionals, especially the young Diana Franco Galindo as Solo's stepdaughter, keep up as well."

"In his films, Bahrani imports the Iranian New Wave minimalism exemplified by Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi and applies it to stories about the daily struggles of American minorities," writes Eric Kohn at the Jaman Blog. "In a sense, Solo recalls Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor, another recent movie about a kindly immigrant raising the spirits of an wizened caucasian, but Bahrani surpasses McCarthy's character study by allowing us to see William from Solo's perspective, rather than the other way around."

Posted by dwhudson at September 3, 2008 1:57 PM