Speaking of good science fiction, Attack the Block envisions the marginalized urban periphery as a literal war zone where authorities are content to let both their homegrown poor and intruding illegal alien invaders eat themselves alive in a bloody struggle for survival — until a Respectable Attractive White Girl is put in danger, of course. It’s one of the many conscientious moments elicited by writer-director Joe Cornish in his The Warriors-with-aliens romp, which provides thrills and laughs in equal measure while always being acutely conscious of the social environment that serves as its backdrop.

Just as The Warriors transposed Xenophon’s march-to-the-sea military narrative Anabasis from ancient Greek hoplites to New York street gangs, Attack the Block uses another potent war metaphor to frame its story: the castle under siege. Its primary defender is Moses (John Boyega), the leader of a band of teenagers who all live in the same council estate in South London. Boyega radiates an aloof gravitas beyond his years, and when he gives his compatriots terse commands such as “Allow it,” the words drop with the weight of royal assent.

When meteors rain from the sky and let loose their alien cargo — strange creatures, all jagged edges and darkness, save for their neon rows of razor-teeth — Moses is there to make first contact in the most direct way possible, leaving the creature dead and the jingoistic battle cry “Welcome to London, motherfucker!” ringing in the air.  But there are more of the things, an invading horde, and Moses and his gang reluctantly take up the role of ramshackle garrison to defend their home from the rampaging aliens.

Cornish makes great use of the architecture of the setting, turning their public housing project into a fortress with its walkways and tunnels and elevators providing one of the few advantages Moses and his crew have over the aliens, as they use their knowledge of the geography to outrun and outwit the creatures. The castle even has a keep: the vault-like drug safehouse manned by spaced-out dealer Ron (Nick Frost), who provides the adult voice of wisdom, such as it is. But he’s only the caretaker for the real king, bloodthirsty boss Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter), who at once provides a glimpse into a possible future for Moses — if he manages to live through the night — and a deadly rival who adds another complication in the midst of the siege.

They also cross paths with Sam (Jodie Whittaker), the aforementioned R.A.W.G., who was mugged by Moses and his crew earlier in the night but becomes a reluctant ally in their fight against the aliens. In one of the film’s quieter moments, a repentant Moses tells her that if he knew that she lived on the block — that she was one of them — they wouldn’t have mugged her. Her response — that his sentiment doesn’t make things right — also makes clear that she isn’t one of them, and regardless of the threat in front of them, she comes from a different (cultural) place entirely.

That’s at the core of it all: forget space aliens, the council estate might as well be on another planet. When someone floats the idea of contacting the police, the kids immediately laugh it off, as if the idea that the police had any ability or purpose beyond harassing them was anything but ludicrous. When talking about alien invasion, they immediately reference The X-Files and the FBI, while struggling to name its British equivalent. Most films that feature civilians (as opposed to police or military) dealing with alien encounters require the characters to be isolated from their surroundings, but as opposed to the rural quietude of Super 8 or Signs, Cornish is cognizant of the isolated and invisible spaces that exist inside the city. The block is a fortress that wards away the outside world just as it corrals those who live within. It’s this paradox that drives Moses: they can’t run because there is nowhere to run to. They have to stand their ground because this is the only ground they know.

Lest I make the film sound more like a sociological treatise than a movie where a kid fights an alien monster with a katana, let me be absolutely clear: this is a movie where a kid fights an alien monster with a katana. (It’s an impeccably tense sequence, by the way.) Attack the Block packs thrilling setpieces and wall-to-wall banter in its 88 minutes, but what holds everything together is the obvious respect it has for its characters. They could have been caricatures run through the cinematic meatginder, but there’s heart and nuance to them, self-conscious without self-congratulatory irony. The film eschews the trendy vérité aesthetic yet finds the truth in its characters anyway. How else can one explain its strong black protagonist, literally bloodstained, a scapegoat for his community’s sins, making a bid for fiery redemption with a death-defying stunt that leaves him clinging to the Union Jack? Welcome to London, indeed.

Like its contemporaries Tree of Life and Melancholia, Another Earth (written and directed by Mike Cahill) deploys astronomical imagery in order to provoke what the Catholic Church used to call the “fear of the Lord” but which now goes by the slightly more mundane “wonder and awe”:  the sense that the celestial body which dominates your gaze, in its implacable ambiguity, is either passing judgment on the drama of your life or an omnipresent reminder of how insignificant that drama is in the face of eternity. The film does this from the outset, presenting low-res telescopic footage of Jupiter that is nonetheless hypnotic, as Rhoda (Brit Marling, also co-writer) — her narration hypnotic in its own right — describes how she became entranced by looking up into space, enough to make it her life’s work.

That entrancement kicks off the film as Rhoda, distracted while driving by the appearance of the titular planet in the night sky, crashes into and kills the wife and son of composer John Burroughs (William Mapother). Four years later, the former MIT-bound student turned ex-con janitor emerges from prison and is on a path to put her life back together — a path that leads to John’s doorstep. She spends time with him under the guise of being a house cleaner, something he’s in desperate need of, as his tragic loss has left him a bitter shell of a man. And so Rhoda proceeds to get close to the man whose life she ruined (he’s unaware of who she really is), not entirely sure if she’s trying to make amends or assuage her own guilt. And the second Earth hangs up in the sky, a reminder that perhaps there’s another Rhoda who didn’t make the mistakes that she did — and there just happens to be a contest for a chance to visit that planet…

Trying to get too specific about genre classification only leads to narrow-minded arguments about definitions rather than addressing the heart of the work, so I’ll tread lightly here: the power of science fiction does not lie in outlandish settings or chrome-plated visuals. What matters in science fiction–in good science fiction–is using concepts at the frontiers of human understanding as a way to rattle the assumptions we make about everyday experience so that we can view our society and ourselves in a different light. The science is a means to an end, a signpost towards catharsis and enlightenment.

Herein lies in the problem with Another Earth: it seems like it should be kindred spirits with something like the two Solaris films, with its stretches of introspection and its planet-sized reflection of human-sized loss and guilt. And yet that reflection is ultimately shallow. Cahill and Marling are in love with their concept, and the scenes that are on point with that concept resonate with power, such as when Rhoda and her family watch a broadcast of SETI attempting to make first contact with the other Earth. But this power is a power of surfaces, and the trappings of science are used to provide easy visual metaphor for a story that would struggle in a more mundane mold. The visual vocabulary of space and the planets is meant to give weight to the human drama, which asks us to read it in terms of the trajectory of human orbits and cosmic coincidences; an instrumental performance by Mapother’s character recalls what astronomers once called the “music of the spheres”.

But those are all merely curlicues on a simple melodrama about penance and guilt and heartbreak, about a woman longing to undo the mistakes of the past while the night sky makes her inner demons literal. The concept is enticing but the execution wanting: Rhoda and John’s trajectories are clearly marked but rather than plumb their psychological depths, they are content to stagnate in the mechanical repetition of emotional beats — a process which may reflect the doubling motif of the film but is ultimately frustrating. And amidst its grand conceptual machinery there are elements which ultimately ring false, as when magical minority Purdeep (Kumar Pallana), Rhoda’s janitorial colleague, is offered up as a sacrificial lamb by the film in order to show Rhoda the path to True Wisdom.

Yet it’s difficult to fault these filmmakers too strongly for missteps that seem borne from an excess of ambition. Though its concepts and images are put into service as crutches for flawed melodrama, those images still have power. Perhaps out there is another Earth where this film is a masterwork. (Talking about regrets, perhaps there’s also another Earth where that joke landed properly…)

The Stateside debut of Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive (adapted by Hossein Amini from the James Sallis novel) is obsessed with the directionality of time. In a city like Los Angeles that’s built more for automobiles than for people, a slick driver with a fast car is an aspirational avatar that provides the promise of freedom, of escape from the shackles of a stationary past. But that promise is an illusory high-speed mirage, one that Refn dissects amidst a flurry of car chases and brutal acts of violence. Like a samurai film, Drive proceeds for long stretches of reflective calm before exploding with pent-up, embattled fury, its bloody and passionate moments crystallized and suspended in time. And like a samurai film (or a medieval Norse saga, or the films noir that are this movie’s forebears), there is no force fast enough to elude the binds of past sins and inevitable vengeance.

The anonymous Driver played by Ryan Gosling tries to master time; he works as a stunt driver for the movies, where a split second is the difference between getting the shot and getting sent to the hospital. He’s also being groomed by his conniving garage-owner boss Shannon (Bryan Cranston) for the racing circuit. On top of all that, he’s a getaway driver for any criminal that can pay his fee and abide by his razor-precise timetable.

Of course, that mastery is challenged when a woman comes into the picture: Irene (Carey Mulligan), a young waitress who lives down the hall from the Driver. He quickly forms a rapport with her and her son Benicio (Kaden Leos), new connections in his life — but those connections have connections of their own. Viewed through Refn’s lens, Los Angeles is a small city, and an act of violence compels the Driver to perform a good deed (however tarnished it might be) that only plunges him deeper into an inextricable web of treachery and brutality where neither his ironclad rules nor his wheelman skills seem like enough to save him.

The entire film is tainted with a sense of inevitability, where the characters all seem fated to die, and their struggle is merely to reach their appointed hour rather than meet their end as a random casualty, faceless and forgotten. So many of them, from Shannon to Irene to Albert Brooks’s dagger-smiling crime boss Bernie, tell stories of how they met one of the other characters, an ironic recognition of beginnings even as we can see the approaching ends. Those ends are captured in an aestheticized brutality in the mold of Hong Kong-style heroic bloodshed — but leeched of as much heroism as possible, edging towards the the revulsion of the abbatoir.

Throughout, Gosling glides through the film as a paragon of that bloodshed, capable of terrible violence but staying curiously detached, evoking those demons through the subtlety of a single line or gesture. It’s not that he’s sleepwalking through the story (though Cliff Martinez’s ethereal score has the effect of transforming Los Angeles into a hellbent dreamscape), but there’s the eerie sense that the world has no place for him unless he makes one. Refn helps find that place through his use of slow motion, which accentuates certain moments and lets the rest of the world fall away.

And yet we must return to normal speed and to the ticking clock, where the Driver and all those connected to him have to live with irrevocable consequences. Much is made of the inevitability of human nature; witness the scorpion imagery associated with Gosling’s character, as if to announce to everyone that they should have expected what lies within. And the telling moment is a quiet one, as he watches television with Benicio and asks the kid how he knows the shark character they’re watching isn’t the hero. He receives a reply with just the right note of condescension: “Does he look like a good guy to you?”

(This year’s Los Angeles Film Festival may have drawn to a close, but I have a steady backlog of entries to work through…)

At times, Mamitas (the feature debut of writer-director Nicholas Ozeki) doesn’t know what it wants to be: parts of it are teenage romance replete with sizzling repartee, before it segues into family drama about questions of personal identity, and there are hints throughout of an analytical, ethnographic lens, only half-deployed. But this kind of instability feels right for the piece, a coming-of-age story following Jordin Juarez  (E.J. Bonilla), a delinquent high school kid growing up in East Los Angeles. When we’re first introduced to him, he seems to tread a familiar path: a brash, self-styled ladies’ man rebelling against both parental and scholastic authority. But Ozeki takes time to peel back those layers, and when Jordin runs into Felipa (Veronica Diaz), a studious and cynical transplant from New York, the first hints of the depth of this character piece begin to emerge.

(Disclosure: I am socially acquainted with some of the people involved in this production. I also offered notes on an early draft of the script, though I’m unaware if they fell on anyone’s ears.)

(Oh, and an aside: While Felipa wears specs as a signifier of her “dowdy egghead” status, as a glasses partisan I have to give the film points for showing — despite Dorothy Parker — that passes can be made at those that wear them.)

There is a driving force to the plot — Jordin finds a memento that puts him on the path of investigating his enigmatic mother, who died in childbirth — but Mamitas is leisurely in getting there, preferring to slowly build on Jordin’s dynamic with Felipa and his relationship with his ailing grandfather Ramon (Pedro Armendariz, Jr.). At times this looseness seems unpolished but otherwise feels organic; the core conflict doesn’t dominate everything because at that age, everything feels like a core conflict. Events don’t proceed in a clean arc; sometimes things are forgotten, or you give up and try again later. Considering its focus on the large yet mostly cinematically-invisible Latino culture in Los Angeles, the novelistic, observational approach works.

But this film is not a sociological document; it leans on emotion rather than analysis, and while there is an air of authority helped along by the unobtrusive camera work, the film knows its heart is in the classic Bildungsroman. A boy becomes a man, and there is revelation, heartbreak, and struggle intimately intertwined with that journey. While there may be third-act problems where the film struggles to find its ending, we’re nonetheless buoyed along by the work of not only the able supporting cast (Joaquim de Almeida sketches the outsized personality and troubled history of his Professor Viera in but a handful of scenes), but especially in the rapport between Bonilla and Diaz. At its highest points their interplay feels like an ethereal Hollywood archetype distilled into a unique cultural container. When the film doesn’t know what to do with them, it suffers, but those moments are mercifully sparse.

(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.)

Though it wasn’t the official close to the Los Angeles Film Festival, the live musical production of The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman is perhaps the best reflection of its ethos. It’s a Los Angeles story that reflects on the city’s cinematic legacy, a clash between the unstoppable force of Hollywood and the immovable object of art cinema, and a display of interdisciplinary virtuosity that’s ultimately a love letter to the power of the movies.

Seduction was originally a radio production commissioned for Swedish public radio and produced by the Los Angeles-based rock duo Sparks as their 22nd album. The musical’s transition from radio to stage—and hopefully to the screen—came about as a series of happy Hollywood accidents. Ron and Russell Mael, the brothers who make up Sparks, were introduced to Canadian surrealist director Guy Maddin when they revealed in an interview that he was one of their favorite directors; the interviewer just happened to be a close friend of Maddin’s. Meanwhile, the genesis of the live production came when the organizers of the Los Angeles Film Festival saw that the band was following the festival’s Twitter account.

At an open-air performance of the musical at Ford Amphitheatre, Maddin takes the stage with the Mael brothers and the rest of the cast. The director reads from his screenplay as we watch the action unfold in front of us and a series of sketches, storyboards, classic movie posters, concept collages, and script snippets are projected onto a giant screen behind them. It’s a technique that evokes Maddin’s films, with the barrage of film clips and text and stills flying by at synaptic speed while performers amble in front of obviously artificial projections. With it, Maddin conjures up a clash between the real and the unreal.

The style perfectly suits the narrative: Following his 1956 Cannes “Best Poetic Humor” win for Smiles of a Summer Night, Ingmar Bergman (Peter Franzen) enters a Stockholm movie theater to watch a blockbuster from Hollywood and finds himself transported to that place—or perhaps it’s more of a sensibility. There he’s given the hard sell by a smarmy Studio Chief (Russell Mael) to come and make big-budget Hollywood movies; Bergman also embarks on a phantasmagoric tour of the city led by an enigmatic Limo Driver (Ron Mael). Franzen dominates the stage as Bergman, gruff and imperious in his grey sweater and black beret, an intellectual as icy as the Scandinavian snowscape he calls home. He’s a lone genius with critical cachet, meaning that in Hollywood’s eyes he’s ripe for the picking. The Chief uses every trick in his arsenal to tempt Bergman, from money to busty blondes to “crews that can read your mind and work all night.”

One of the highlights comes as Bergman is given a tour of the studio commissary; there the Chief tries to sell the Swede on Hollywood’s special brand of artistic expression fused with extravagant consumption. Backed by a chorus of laughing executives and an off-kilter polka melody, he points out the pantheon of émigré auteurs that made the Hollywood leap: Among them are Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, and Alfred Hitchcock (the Chief points out the example of “The Man Who Knew Too Much done twice, in Hollywood done twice as nice!”).

Of course, the whole thing is a Faustian bargain that begins to unravel even as soon as Bergman considers it; at the heart of the drama is an existential crisis straight out of one of the man’s films. Sparks’s rock stylings transform a director-actress squabble into a clash of apocalyptic fury, and Bergman’s situation explodes into a dramatic and delirious escape attempt from his gilded prison; he reflects on the irony that he’s “now an actor in a bad big-budget Hollywood action film.” By the time Bergman crumples on the Santa Monica pier calling out for rescue from a God he’s not sure exists, Maddin and Sparks make a convincing argument that the subsequent film—which will undoubtedly screen at a future Los Angeles Film Festival—will be an intensely fascinating product from a group of offbeat talents. It’s a collaboration the real Bergman would have smiled upon.

(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.)

The 2003 film Suite Habana is the Cuban film at the festival most disconnected from questions of politics, mostly because it’s also the most disconnected from questions of narrative. Director Fernando Pérez crafts a solid entry in the genre of the urban symphony—not fiction, but not exactly a documentary. Instead the film creates a rhythm for the titular capital through a day in the lives of ten of its inhabitants. Pérez searches for the soul of Havana and finds it in an overlapping mosaic of minutiae—the routines of the everyday.

There’s little dialogue in the film, none of it necessary; instead, the film communicates with us through image, gesture, and action. Patterns and connections unfold before us as hour after hour passes, and there’s a sense of the two sides to Havana: The doctors and rail workers and laborers of the day are the clowns, dancers, and jazz musicians of the night.

The pace of the film is a measured, languorous one, and though there are scenes of building and construction and labor, Pérez eschews any high-energy urban kinetics in favor of lingering on the tiny details. An inordinate amount of time is spent following these people as they buy, prepare, and eat their meals. Perhaps this is one way the film finds inroads into the political discourse: Is the proportion of time we spend watching these Habaneros with their food reflective of the time and energy required for such a basic facet of survival? The importance of food is made explicit in the film’s epilogue, which profiles the characters we follow; one of them is an elderly woman who sells peanuts to survive. We are told each person’s dream in life, and with her Pérez tugs at the heartstrings by informing us “she dreams no more.”

At times the movie finds its strength not in the lives it follows, but in the identity of the city itself, the urban framework that gives structure to these people. The oh-so-photogenic lighthouse and breakwaters of Havana’s harbor are a sight we return to like a refrain; also featured in Habana Eva (#73) and Boleto al Paraiso (#74), they’ve become the city’s cinematic signifiers. We spend quite a bit of time wandering through Havana’s sun-dappled plazas and boulevards, almost to the point of a travelogue—until we snap back to the characters and see the streets as the conduits by which they conduct their lives. The power of the city symphony film—a power that Suite Habana trades on—is that by locating and observing the spirit of a city, we can see how that environment shapes the identities of those who call it home.

(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.)

Operation Peter Pan was a facet of the powder keg that was early 1960s U.S.-Cuban relations, less visible than the Bay of Pigs or the Missile Crisis, but with its own traumatic historical legacy. Supported by the CIA and the Catholic Church, over 14,000 Cuban children were sent by their parents to live in the United States. The children’s parents were spurred in part by reports of a law—later revealed to be a forged false-flag document—that the revolutionary government would take their children and send them to Soviet re-education camps. Although many of the kids were later reunited with their families, others were separated from their parents and siblings and sent to live in orphanages and foster homes. A half-century later these Peter Pan children, well into adulthood, still struggle with the consequences of the operation.

American filmmaker Estela Bravo documents that struggle in Operation Peter Pan: Flying Back to Cuba, tracking down both the people involved in organizing the operation and the children who were sent to live in the United States. Bravo is entirely unconcerned with presentation: The movie is mostly talking heads shot on low-grade digital video backed by a sentimental score, an aesthetic package that’s reminiscent of an infomercial. She’s confident that the stories and memories delivered by those talking heads are powerful enough to stand on their own—and for the most part, they are. With such a wide-ranging group of people, there are all sorts of stories; some made the American transition relatively smoothly, while others found abuse and exploitation at the hands of their supposed caretakers. But the stories are all tied together by a common shock at being uprooted and deposited in a foreign land at such a young age, and the growing realization that they were used as pawns in geopolitical gamesmanship.

While the film meditates on questions of physical and emotional and diplomatic isolation, it’s ultimately designed to be a narrative of reunion, one that closes divisions and makes connections between America and Cuba. These Peter Pans are men and women without a country, their homeland indeterminate, but years later they make a journey back to Cuba to find their roots and see what they left behind. Bravo does deploy some flair in this latter segment; there’s a scene where she weaves a contemporary performance of a Cuban national song by the singer Candi Sosa with a film of Sosa as a child at one of the Peter Pan holding camps, singing the same song. It’s a moment of quiet resonance that bridges past and present. But that’s an isolated moment in a final act that seems disjointed. There’s no real sense of journey or progression in the vignettes capturing the return to Cuba. They’re disconnected from space and time and only pasted together by the talking heads in between. Bravo works to bring intriguing and important facts to light, but the film seems content with merely a flat recitation of those facts.

(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.)

Boleto al Paraiso, directed by Gerardo Chijona, is somewhat more explicit in its political examination. It’s set during the Cuban “special period” following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting economic downturn, taking us on a journey through the fractured underbelly of Cuban culture and counterculture. It’s a story of love in the time of AIDS with the way Chijona weaves together a tragic romance with a glimpse of the methods used by the Cuban government to try to curb the spread of HIV.

The film follows Eunice (Miriel Cejas), a country girl who escapes the clutches of an abusive father by falling in with a group of “freakies,” young vagabonds who party hard, deal drugs, and listen to Metallica and the metal band’s Cuban equivalents. As the group journeys to Havana, Eunice forms a bond with idealistic punk Alejandro (Héctor Medina), who has grand plans for a new life in the city. But their romance takes a dark turn as the hardships of Cuban society press down upon them. It’s a harsh tour through the ills of social decay as we’re buffeted by street crime, homelessness, and prostitution—with the specter of AIDS as yet another affliction upon the body politic.

Chijona takes a dour, jaundiced lens to the society on display, and Eunice’s struggle for survival is evoked through moments that come to us by turns melodramatic and operatic. As with Habana Eva (#73), Boleto al Paraiso is quite self-conscious about the signifying qualities of its narrative; it’s especially clear in the film’s sexually charged moments, where the themes of family, community, disease and decay all converge and reach a boiling point. They’re staged and shot and scored in a way that infuses them with a symbolic weight they struggle to bear.

Yet amid the heightened energy of the fiction there are intriguing glimpses into the realities of this historical moment, especially when it takes us into the AIDS hospices. Part of Cuba’s top-down command approach to preventing an epidemic, we see the patients are well cared for, but they’re also unable to leave. The weight of that paternalistic restraint is emblematic of the narrative as a whole. And even as the film veers straight towards the histrionic in its final act (a trait it shares with Habana Eva), it still provides a window on the youth of Cuba struggling to make the best out of a set of bad options. They try to forge personal identities in a society ill-equipped to support them, and cling to idealistic hopes in a place where there seems little to hope for.

(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.)

The representation of Cuba in cinema is exceptionally difficult to separate from its political context. Whenever the island is invoked in the movies, narratives turn into statements, if not full-blown mystery plays, designed for the exorcism of geopolitical demons. It’s something that can be seen all the way from Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s landmark interrogation of his post-revolution society in Memories of Underdevelopment (#48) to the imperialist bombast of Bad Boys II and its “Let’s invade Cuba, and do it right this time” finale.

Along with the premiere of the architectural documentary Unfinished Spaces (#66), this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival shone an international spotlight on Cuba, screening a quartet of films from and about the island nation. The films run a gamut of genres from reflective documentary to romantic comedy, but they are all unified by the ease in which one can read them simultaneously as small-scale reflections of life in Cuba and as footnotes in the political conversation.

Case in point: The festival’s artistic director David Ansen prefaced his introduction of Habana Eva, directed by Venezuelan Fina Torres, by saying that the film could be enjoyed as a simple romantic comedy, or as a parable for contemporary Cuba’s international dilemmas. And at first blush, it does glide right into a familiar genre pattern: Eva (Prakriti Maduro) works as a factory seamstress in Havana, but dreams of becoming a top-flight fashion designer. Her complacent engagement to good-natured but quasi-doltish architect Angel (Carlos Enrique Almirante) is thrown into disarray when sexy and wealthy expatriate Jorge (Juan Carlos García) drops into Eva’s life and she becomes his tour guide around the capital. The dilemmas of this love triangle play out in front of an array of photogenic Havana backdrops, and if you were to guess that there are romantic misunderstandings and turnabouts, bawdy sex jokes, and plenty of forlorn gazing over the water into the Cuban sunset, you’d be correct.

Yet the political reading leaps right off the screen. What does it say when the salt-of-the-earth Angel can’t finish building his fiancée a home because of lack of time and building materials? Or that Jorge, ensconced in Armani and Audi, is the scion of a capitalist exile eager to wrest control of colonial-era land holdings from the populist protagonists? Even the simple romantic gesture of a single red rose in hand becomes fraught with import if you also recognize it as a traditional symbol of socialism, and Eva changing her hairstyle by straightening out her cornrows seems to be one of a multitude of minor allegorical swatches.

Late in the game there’s a bizarre leap into some kind of magical realism that is neither particularly realistic nor magical, but instead resembles the premise of a ’60s American sitcom. The film barely manages to sell its third-act shenanigans—whipsawing from one plot point to another as if trying to set a speed record—through Maduro’s portrayal of Eva. Torres asks her to vault from sexy to goofy to rebellious to introspective, and she handles the challenges with aplomb. She charms both her lovers and the audience, and she holds the entire enterprise together even as it threatens to rip at the seams.

(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.)

A sunrise cutting through the haze overlooking a dusty cityscape, a gang of ragged street kids playing among crumbling buildings and burnt-out military vehicles: These are familiar establishing shots from any number of Afghanistan documentaries. (And Iraq films as well, which speaks to the visual interchangeability between the two spaces to foreign lenses.) Those shots are also in the opening to Skateistan: Four Wheels and a Board in Kabul, from German director Kai Sehr, but here they serve as an incongruous backdrop for the later images of kids on skateboards rolling down the streets of the Afghani capital.

Sehr traces the development and growth of the Skateistan organization, started by Australians Oliver Percovich and Sharna Nolan. It begins as nothing more than showing a few kids’ skateboard tricks in a dried-out fountain, but the group eventually grows into a full-fledged organization; the film captures their ambitions to build a permanent facility. For them, skateboarding is a community-building foundation from which they can provide health and educational services to the kids of Kabul.

At times the MTV-inflected expository opening evokes the feel of a promotional video for the group, but Sehr quickly finds his way into the material by lancing right into the contradictions that Percovich and his people run into as they develop Skateistan. They’re outsiders with open minds trying to build a community out of kids fractured along lines of ethnicity, gender, and social class. The last is personified in Mirwais, a charismatic and rebellious teen that the other street kids look up to. Mirwais impresses Percovich with his dedicated work ethic, but comes with his own set of problems, as when he convinces the other street kids not to take medications offered by Skateistan, or when he displays troubling moments of casual violence and inculcated misogyny.

Skateistan’s role in the lives of young Afghani girls is another avenue explored; we’re informed that skateboarding is the only public sport in the country allowed to girls, and one of the motivations behind the group’s drive to build a permanent indoor facility is so that girls “of marrying age” can participate. While both Salaam Dunk and this film feature interviews with men decrying the practice of girls in sports, here those pronouncements seem to carry a bit more weight as we witness women walking down the streets in full burqa. As Skateistan’s visibility increases, they’re joined by an international team of pro skaters to provide support; one of them, the Dutch-Algerian Louisa Menke, quickly becomes a role model for the girls of the group.

Sehr crafts a strong narrative by making the unfamiliar familiar, but he finds the heart of the story in Percovich, the driving force who keeps the entire enterprise going. Moments where Percovich provides stilted narration (as if reading from a prepared speech) actually come off as endearing; we’re presented with a man who seems uncomfortable with the spotlight but is so animated by passion that he’ll do anything to bolster his cause. It certainly pays off as we see him build a coalition of support from NGOs, government officials, and celebrities. Skateistan is a story of growth and transformation, a structural examination that lets us witness how a small group of people can make their mark on the life of a city.