Gathering bits and pieces to assemble the dream

Ramin Bahrani is surely the father of new American social realism. His debut film, Man Push Cart, had its centre a Sisyphean struggle of a food vendor, Ahmed, attempting to establish some financial security in New York in the aftermath of some major personal setbacks. Much as I admired Man Push Cart, it left me cold. (It may have had something to do with the spartan soundtrack and the way in which a few sparse notes are used to hammer home a leitmotif.)

In his follow-up feature, the superior Chop Shop, Bahrani immerses himself into a disenfranchised community where every day is a battle for socio-economic survival, and often at great cost. The film is set in a community built around scrap metal and car parts on the outskirts of Queens, where blue collar workers can spend their entire lives without leaving the area known as the Iron Triangle. Not that the people are downtrodden; life is hard, but the inhabitants know it as such, and understand that you do what you have to do to get by. It’s in this setting that the film first introduces young Ale (Alejandro Polanco) and his older sister Isamar (Isamar Gonzales). 

Ale has a dream: to buy his own vendor cart so that he and his sister can live with greater financial security (there are no parents, and most adults in the film come across as ethically dubious). It’s a coming of age tale without a saccharine coating. In one affecting scene, Ale understands something about his sister, and against what one might expect, orders her to do what she must but does not want to. The scene is heart breaking because there is no alternative for these characters, and because a young boy expects a measure of sacrifice from his sister. Some things become less and less important as they inch toward their dream. 

Some of the characters in the film are people starring as themselves; the dialogue is often improvised and adds to the film's realism. The child actors, all amateurs, are nothing short of astounding, and while the film isn’t exactly easy viewing – its world of hardship is far removed from what American cinema usually shows us - Bahrani manages to make it a surprisingly uplifting affair. The director immersed himself into the community to study their ways; with Chop Shop Bahrani becomes in his directorial methods something of a filmmaker-anthropologist, and he manages to construct an authentically inhabited world that feels at once dangerous and safe, strange and familiar.