![]() ![]() The other narrative thread concerns a once-wealthy Iranian family of high standing that has fled the oppressive circumstances in their home country and is struggling to make do in California. The sympathetic deputy sheriff present during the repossession, Lester Burdon, advises Kathy to consult a public defender and offers his support. Kathy, we gradually learn, works as a cleaner and has been living a disorganized life since her husband left her eight months earlier. Nevertheless, what is interesting about the film is that it raises issues concerning our sense of justice, which go beyond the traditional simplistic Hollywood moral tale.Īt the outset of the film, Kathy Nicolo, the protagonist of one of the “lower-class American” narrative thread, is awakened with the news that the house in which she is living (and in which she grew up) has just been repossessed by the county for nonpayment of a $500 property tax. ![]() Unfortunately this promised profundity is never realized. Since the two sides comprise an upper-class Iranian family and a lower-class American, such narrative balance, along with exceptionally good acting, builds up an expectation as the plot develops of interesting and dramatic social interactions. Although highly melodramatic, the film actually does encompass a rather nuanced and sympathetic view of the two competing groups and avoids obvious bias in the conflict: throughout the film the focalization and sympathetic perspective is almost equally divided between the two competing sides. The story concerns an irreconcilable struggle over the ownership of a California beach house. ![]() Then it shows the tragic consequences of that vengeance when the people are neither entirely good nor entirely bad, and when the vigilante is (as any vigilante in the real world will be) unstable and non-omniscient.House of Sand and Fog (2003), the much-praised feature film debut of Vadim Perelman, was based on the acclaimed 1999 novel of the same name by Andre Dubus III that was nominated for the US National Book Award. It engages your hatred, your anger, and your lust for vigilante vengeance. Like In the Bedroom (2001), based on a short story by Dubus’ father, House of Sand and Fog makes vigilantism seem both inevitable and horrific. That’s not to suggest that this is a straight-ahead vigilante movie. ![]() The action unfolds in a political and social vacuum in which the state taketh away but cannot restoreth. After the opening eviction, there are no county or bank officials to be seen in House of Sand and Fog-no sense of anyone but her vigilante lover-boy on this woman’s poor side. And that’s it, folks, for authority figures. Although she does have a lawyer (Frances Fisher), the woman is low-rent, stridently left-wing, and not especially effective in getting the county to house Kathy as efficiently as it sent her into the cold. That Kathy needs a vigilante is one of the trumped-up aspects of this story. He does not bear these insults with equanimity. Every day he leaves home in a business suit and changes into blue-collar duds at a nearby hotel every day, he is questioned by a security man when he returns to that hotel to change back into his immaculately tailored business uniform. Once an esteemed military aide to the Shah of Iran, Behrani now leads a semifictional existence, posing as a Boeing executive for friends and potential in-laws (he is trying to marry his daughter into a well-off family) yet working in a demeaning (for him) construction job. Behrani (Ben Kingsley) circles a notice of the property for sale in the newspaper. Nearby, in the San Francisco Bay Area, Col. Apparently she owed some back business taxes (for a business she doesn’t have), but rather than dealing with the county’s mistake, she let it slide. A depressed young woman, Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly), abandoned nine months earlier by her husband, awakens in her Northern California coastal house to find sheriff’s deputies nailing an eviction notice to her door-just above her piles of unopened mail. Although told in a minor key, the first act gets your blood boiling. ![]()
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