The story is simple. There is a house for sale (I nearly said a cherry orchard!) in order to pay small debts. However, it is bought not by some smart muzhik, who has made it all the way up to nouveau riche, but by an Iranian refugee. One outcast casts out another. The struggle for the house turns into a disaster for all concerned.
At first sight, Perelman’s Oscar-nominated debut film, House of Sand and Fog, is a story about losses. The characters keep saying that they feel newly found or lost. A house that belongs to no one binds people desperately wishing to belong to each other, but destined to lose each other.
Kathy Lazaro (Jennifer Connelly) divorces her husband and then loses her house; her attempts to regain it leads to her meeting and then losing the handsome Sheriff Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard). Lester wants to win back his love, and it costs him his family and freedom. Massoud Amir Behrani (Sir Ben Kingsley) loses his son Esmail (Jonathan Ahdout), and this makes him and his wife Nadi Behrani (Shohreh Aghdashloo) take their lives. The first thing that comes to mind is that the plot is banal, that only a person originating from the Soviet Union (an interview with Vadim Perelman reads, “Forty people shared the Kiev communal apartment where Perelman grew up. A separate family would live in each room, and they would all share one toilet. ‘The joke was the toilet seat was never cold,’ says Perelman.”) could raise the accursed housing problem to the level of tragedy. Although perhaps the main point is not ownership of a house, however near and dear.
Perelman masterfully avoids the temptation to divide his characters into right and wrong ones (Andre Dubois’s novel seems to imply such division, proceeding from the characters’ individual emotional profiles). What helped him was his accurate casting. Connelly’s is an excellent portrayal of a misguided, spoiled woman who, nevertheless, reveals a soul pure in its own way; Behrani says she is a bird with a broken wind, and she is precisely that, instinctively, blindly, and ferociously defending what she has grown accustomed to regarding as her nest. Eldard copes more or less effectively with his very complicated role as Sheriff Lester Burdon prepared to ignore his duty, even spurn the law for the sake of his passion. Shohreh Aghdashloo’s Nadi (nominated for an Oscar as best supporting role) appears one of the most spectacular onscreen dramatic identifications over the past decade at least. Of course, Ben Kingsley’s Massoud Amir Behrani is the most powerful and complex image. Few if any could have achieved such dramatic transformations, ranging from a man in power, managing the construction of a highway with a sure touch of aristocratic dignity, to one preventing Kathy’s suicide, to a loving father that cannot bear the loss of his son. In the House’s finale, Behrani-Kingsley’s every gesture, every line is permeated with human dignity, albeit in an altogether different capacity; it is dignity demonstrated by one about to step on the road to eternity, in an effort to restore universal justice.
However, signal changes are manifest everywhere. Further into the plot, every scene appears to lose its clarity in a veil of quiet evening sepia becoming thicker combined with the editor’s special rhythm focused on pauses rather than action, on silence between acts, which is an excellent film directing discovery. Spilling clouds, fog muffling pain and despair; fog in which the House is eventually lost forever.
The House emerges as an illusion from the outset. Losing it causes pain, but this pain is yet another phantom. Behrani really wants to return to his past, to his house on the Caspian Sea; he wants to return to an Iran that has long ceased to exist. Kathy struggles not to regain lost property — her house where, she admits, she was never really happy — but to return to those happy cloudless days when her father was still alive, when she was a child loved by one and all. Each for himself, and one great illusion for all. A house of sand and fog is caving in, toppling into an abyss with all its residents.
Kathy’s closing line, when she says it’s not her house, appears far more important than the absence of a happy ending.
Meaning that all those sufferings and deaths were not in vain; Kathy’s choice gives her real, not illusory freedom, something the heroes of true tragedies always eventually achieve.
— P.S.: This author feels sure that Vadim Perelman will be the second Ukrainian-born (and the third former Soviet national) to conquer Hollywood. After all, we have Edward Dmytryk (of a Western Ukrainian О migr О family) with his repeated Oscar nominations and praised by critics after The Young Lions starring Marlon Brando. In the 1980s, former Moscow resident Slava Tsukerman overwhelmed America with his countercultural Liquid Sky, but has since done nothing much to write home about. Vadim Perelman appears to have set a different course; he has succeeded in casting stars of Kingsley’s and Connelly’s caliber and receiving funds from DreamWorks, with Spielberg’s blessings.
The forty-year-old film director seems to have a very great future, one that is also ambiguous in many respects; he will continue to use special effects, producing breathtaking thrillers (he can do this, judging by his skill at handling the plot and creating the right kind of atmosphere), captivating melodramas, or climb up the stairs leading to the summits of classical drama. If he concentrates on thrillers, he is sure to come up with box office successes (scaring stiff yet another audience is very marketable). If he goes for melodramas, he is likely to get Oscars — and then find himself in a dead-end. The third and final option [classical drama] is the hardest.
There is hope that he will make the right choice.
