America dopo

Here's a film I knew very little, if anything, about going in, found utterly compelling in the beginning, thoroughly intriguing in the middle and completely frustrated at the end as the story veered off so wildly in the third act.

That's not to say "Sorry, Haters" isn't a fascinating movie to see.

The main reason to see this is Robin Wright Penn's mesmerizing performance as a woman - Phoebe - who just keeps twisting and turning our expectations of who she is. Watching Phoebe come undone while Penn keeps her completely rational makes the character that more frightening.

Abdel Kechiche - as Ashade, a Syrian chemist working as a New York cab driver and trying to get his brother out of Gitmo - is so believable in the role. You don't doubt his anger and frustration at what's going on and you can understand why he he is who he is.

Writer-director Jeff Stanzler provides an interesting landscape of post-9/11 America. He also provides one of the scariest rationalizations a character can provide for that horrible day.

Stanzler doesn't let us get all that comfortable with the story and throws in a doozy of a twist in the middle. We never see it coming and it just makes the film that much stronger and powerful.

But then comes the denouement.

It's almost as if Stanzler just had no idea how to end his film given the circumstances in which he had placed his two leading characters. So he devises this rather ludicrous change that takes the story completely off-kilter. He just keeps going and you can sense the story going off-track. But Stanzler doesn't seem to mind and, ultimately, the film veers off course and winds up with an utterly preposterous and unconvincing finale. I was never looking for something happy; I just wanted something that I could believe.

This moving is very polarizing. I didn't like it, because I am an Arab and a Muslim and I felt the injustice of the taxi driver more personally the most of the audience, but my friend loved it, and thought it was thought provoking. Which it is. I will not ruin the ending for the reader, but it will shock you, so be prepared. Additionally, it isn't one of those movies that is very well balanced. In a sense, I didn't really care what Philly's motivations where in the movie, and the director's efforts at showing her as unstable were a bit heavy handed and clichéd. Other than that, the movie was fine, but not exceptional and NOT about Guantanamo.

This is a film about Ashade, a Syrian chemist who drives a cab in New York, and a woman who works for a TV station, and 9/11. I hesitate to say more about the characters or plot, because all of them are complex and tricky, and saying any more would lessen your experience.

What I can tell you is that the plot has a fascinating Hitchcockian twist in the middle, and an ending just about no one sees coming.

On the other hand, watching a film about Moslems, terrorism, and one truly nasty white girl left me immensely depressed. I wasn't seeing any light at the end of the tunnel, no shining sanity anywhere. Maybe that was the point.

The screening I saw featured the director/writer afterwards for Q&A, but I was so bummed, I just fled the theatre. Not a bad film per se, but disturbing and dark.

In New York, the Muslin taxi driver Ashade (Abdellatif Kechiche) drives a woman (Robin Wright Penn) to New Jersey and back and witness she scratching a car with a stone. She tells that her name is Philly and she is the powerful producer of the show "Sorry, Haters", and the owner of the car is the woman that "stole" her husband and daughter. Philly snoops in Ashade's life and he tells that he has doctorate in chemistry in Syria but is supporting his sister-in-law Eloise (Élodie Bouchez) and his nephew working as taxi driver since his brother, who is also a Canadian citizen, was arrested in JFK while in transit and deported back to Syria. Philly promises to help the family using a lawyer that is a friend of her. However, sooner his and Eloise's lives and hope are affected by the actions of Philly, whose name is indeed Phoebe.

"Sorry, Haters" is an impressive and disturbing movie about the prejudice and lack of respect with immigrants (and tourists) in the United States of America after the tragic September 11th by a minority of the American citizens and authorities. The treatment spent to Ashade by the security guard and the policewoman in the very beginning discloses the prejudice and indifference to the Muslin taxi driver. Robin Wright Penn has a top-notch performance in the role of an insane masochistic schizophrenic sociopath lonely woman and her complex character deserves to be studied by psychologists. The destructive behavior of the authorities based on an anonymous denounce, treating the innocent Eloise without the minimum respect, is very sad. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Esperança e Preconceito" ("Hope and Prejudice")

With semi-well known actors giving powerful performances, this was a surprisingly good movie. Kechiche and Penn touch each others lives in ways no one should. Penn plays a vulnerable woman whose life has taken some horrible turns as she enlists the aid of the Muslim cabbie Kechiche to be her friend while she offers him legal help for his family. As events unfold, Kechiche realizes that everything is not as it seems, and has to make some critical life decisions in an attempt to get things back on track. Penn plays the role with absolute precision, giving you the chills the character masterfully manipulates the other characters, especially Kechiche, as you watch events unfold in disbelief.