âLimboâ Review: A Musician in Exile Tunes Out
A Syrian refugee deposited on a remote Scottish isle seeks meaning in his isolated surroundings, with wryly funny results.
From left, Amir El-Masry, Ola Orebiyi, Kwabena Ansah and Vikash Bhai in âLimbo.âCredit.Focus Features
Limbo
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Most of the films weâve seen about the migrant and refugee situation in Europe in recent years are gritty, often heartbreaking dramas and documentaries. âLimbo,â written and directed by a ferociously talented filmmaker, Ben Sharrock, takes an insinuating, poetic and often wryly funny approach. And itâs both heartbreaking and heartlifting.
Film Shorts // April 28-May 4, 2021
OPENING
Cliff Walkers (NR) This Chinese spy thriller by Zhang Yimou (
Hero) is about a group of agents (Qin Hailu, Yu Hewei, Zhang Yi, and Zhu Yawen) who return to their Japanese-occupied country in the 1930s to find that they’ve been betrayed by persons unknown. Also with Liu Haocun, Li Naiwen, and Ni Dahong. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Four Good Days (R) Rodrigo Garcia delivers yet another dull, earnest drama about white people living on the West Coast. Glenn Close stars as a mother who takes in her estranged, opioid-addicted daughter (Mila Kunis, looking emaciated with bleached-blonde hair and blackened teeth) to help her stay clean for four days prior to receiving a shot of naltrexone that will prevent her from getting high. The film doesn’t drag, but every argument in this movie feels like something you’ve heard from a thousand other movies about drug addiction. The performances here aren’t enough to lift the film above t
Vikash Bhai (left) as Farhad and Amir El-Masry (right) as Omar in director Ben Sharrock s Limbo. (Courtesy Focus Features)
The characters in “Limbo” spend most of their days sitting around in silence, staring off at some point just past the camera lens. Granted, there’s not much else for them to do here, on a fictional Scottish island where these refugees have been temporarily sheltered awaiting approval of their asylum requests from the U.K. They’re not permitted to work, living on small stipends with multiple roommates in nondescript houses with empty walls, watching old DVDs of “Friends.” There’s no cell reception save for a remote point up at the top of the island, but there’s a pay phone on the road to town where they can try to call home from time to time. It’s a better life than the ones they’ve fled, but also more than a little dull. As Tom Petty sang, the waiting is the hardest part.
Four Good Days
About Endlessness Over the course of 20 years, Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson has remained committed to his stylistic gimmick master-shot tableaux of simple situations, often building to absurdist punch lines to the point where it’s not clear what more he might have to say within this framework. Once again, his episodic scenes aren’t really connected to any overarching narrative, though a couple of characters including a minister despairing over his loss of faith do recur at various points. Mostly, however, we have moments in the lives of everyday people, here supplemented with the voice of an omniscient narrator (Jessica Louthander) whose observations at times step on whatever simple emotion might have been found in a bit like a father pausing during a downpour to tie his young daughter’s shoes, or a woman arriving at a train station to find no one waiting for her. At their best, Andersson’s meticulously constructed shots can hit their black-humored