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Derek Malcolm's rating
Quiet drama in Goodbye Solo
By
Derek Malcolm
9 Oct 2009
All three of American-Iranian director Ramin Bahrani’s films have won festival prizes, possibly because their simplicity and directness refreshes the parts Hollywood can’t generally reach.
This winner of the International Critics’ Prize at Venice has Souleymane Sy Savane as Solo, a Senegalese taxi driver in North Carolina. He is promised $1,000 by a depressed 70-year-old man (Red West) to take him in two weeks’ time to Blowing Rock, the peak of a jagged mountain. He senses the veteran will end his life there.
Solo is concerned and tries to befriend the old curmudgeon. He takes him with him on taxi rides and introduces him to his Mexican wife (Carmen Leyva) and nine-year-old stepdaughter (Diana Franco Galindo).
Working to a spare screenplay, Bahrani offers none of the usual clues about either the cabbie’s surprising determination to prevent the tragedy or the old man’s reasons for suicide. This doesn’t always help the quiet drama. What does is the way Bahrani and his cinematographer Michael Simmonds paint the urban scene and the artless performances of the cast.
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