Growing Up in the Dead-End Streets
'Chop Shop' Urchin Steals Your Heart

By John Anderson
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, April 11, 2008

The hook on Ramin Bahrani's feature "Chop Shop" is that the gifted young director has made a Third World movie in the shadow of Shea Stadium. It's no stage set: On the junk-scattered streets of Willets Point, Queens, is a society that could exist in Bangkok, Rio or Soweto. The film presents a world of food carts, garages selling "moflers," and people in castoff T-shirts advertising products they've probably never seen, much less bought. Nourishment is provided by peanut butter. English is spoken, but only by default. Bahrani's outer borough is a Babel, not just of languages, but of aspirations and ethics.

The most hopeful one around has to be Alejandro (the precocious Alejandro Polanco), whom everyone pronounces "Ali," thus making him a kind of universal child and connecting him to every multi-culti street urchin who's ever run loose on the streets of New York City. But Ali's Gotham is constrained and confined, not just regarding dreams but space. That he sells candy on the G train, the only New York subway that never reaches Manhattan, is the tipoff from Bahrani that what we have here is not going to be your standard rags-to-riches menu with a Horatio Alger twist, served up with side orders of noble labor and just deserts.

Few, after all, seem to work harder than our orphan Ali, who when not harassing subway riders is hustling customers for the auto shop where he sleeps upstairs when not buffing cars, all according to the goodwill of the shop's owner, Rob (the nonprofessional but thoroughly convincing Rob Sowulski). Like the hero of Bahrani's much-lauded debut "Man Push Cart," Ali can work all he wants: His labors are like so much smoke, wafting from a trash-can fire, floating out over the East River and dissolving back into dreams.

Perhaps it's because Bahrani is of Iranian descent that his observational tack and use of a child -- one we hesitate to call a hero -- seems to demand comparisons to Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, Iran's great allegorists and masters of naturalism. In any case, the work of 33-year-old Bahrani belies his relative inexperience. His precise way with detail, and the captivating performance he gets out of young Polanco, come via a talent able to transcend place, or in the case of Willets Point, transform it and even elevate it. Bahrani has created a not-to-miss gem for the discriminating viewer.

This is Ali's movie and even when a fight breaks out during a card game at the chop shop, it's Ali's face we see, not those of the fighters. This persistent perspective becomes particularly poignant once Ali's sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), arrives to live with him. Though younger, Ali is the adult, the sober, serious, pint-sized patriarch: He gets Isamar a job with a food vendor and starts saving his money to buy his own lunch wagon. When he finds his sister selling herself in the local truck lot, his last illusions begin to drift, again, like smoke.

Everyone in the film is Alejandro's dramatic subordinate, but his interactions with those around him define who he is -- and are defining him, even as we watch. Rob, for instance, gets irritated with Ali when he pays the boy, and Ali stands there counting his money. "What're you counting it for?" Rob says, insulted. The chop-shop operator, on the other hand (played by Ahmad Razvi, of "Man Push Cart"), tells him, "Count your money." So we have Rob, the old-school American, vs. Ahmad, the new American, and the boy in the middle, ultimately trying to figure out how he'll get around both of them. He'll succeed, we imagine, without us wanting to imagine how.

Chop Shop (84 minutes, at AFI's Silver Theatre) is not rated and contains adult themes, profanity and some violence.