|
|
JUSTIN TANNER REVIEWS GRASSHOPPERS
“I’ve been working on my monologue for years,” says Nijm (Saleh Bakri, “Costa Brava, Lebanon”) to his lover Irina (Iva Gocheva, “Embers”) at the start of the long day of drinking and soul-searching that constitutes the main activity of Brad Bischoff’s remarkably assured debut feature, “Grasshoppers.” It’s the couple’s anniversary and Nijm’s bright idea for how to celebrate is to engage in a ‘pub crawl’ through their neighbor’s mostly vacant houses in search of the best one, or, as Irina puts it, “the filet of the neighborhood.” So, after chugging down tall screwdrivers and huge shots of bourbon, they step out of their generic, marble, three-story monstrosity of a mansion into the crisp winter morning and proceed to make their way across the gated, off-season vacation community where they currently reside.
And it is but one of many metaphoric touches that enrich the smart and often hilarious dialogue that screenwriter Bischoff provides for his marvelously adept cast. Photographed in a sequence of beautifully composed shots by cinematographer Daphne Qin Wu (”Accepted”) and filled with lacerating conversations as painfully raw as they are poetically rich, “Grasshoppers” lives comfortably in that singular place where reality and symbolism overlap. With a trajectory that feels like a modern take on Frank Perry’s 1968 film adaptation of John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer,” where Burt Lancaster uses a string of backyard swimming pools to traverse his upscale suburb, Nijm and Irina drop by, or break into, a series of homes in order to drink white wine, Moscow Mules, and/or chocolate martinis and attempt to make love. All while arguing — sometimes violently — about money, jobs, children and what the future holds for them. The fully realized chain of escalating conflicts, along with Bakri and Gocheva’s complete inhabitation of their complex characters, transcends the simplicity of the plot, allowing for a deeply immersive experience, and bringing us into the beating heart at the center of the couple’s achingly unmet need for fulfillment. At times there’s a performative nature to the psychodrama the couple inflicts on their unwitting audience of entitled homeowners, a sense that this might not be the first time they’ve gone through these particular moves. But whether they’re playacting — there’s more than a hint of Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” in the blistering tone of their sucker-punch cruelty — or lashing out in earnest, the result is a riveting emotional dance that swings from calculated provocation to explosion to contrition to forgiveness. Rinse, repeat. As the couple wanders more and more drunkenly through this hermetically sealed landscape of privilege, their ethnicity (he is Palestinian, she is Bulgarian), coupled with their obvious inebriation, causes increasing levels of concern from the all-white inhabitants. And though couched in a studied version of politesse, the wary eyes and sidelong glances that signify Nijm and Irina as ‘the other’ ultimately gnaws away the couple’s goodwill, leading to a violent showdown at a fancy private club.
Though only a brief eighty minutes long, the movie is filled with stunning moments: Nijm seeing his shadow projected on the wall in front of him and playfully slapping it across the face, the couple’s energetic water fight in an empty bar and a late night run-in with a live crab that brings a moving level of empathy and regret to Bakri’s marvel of a performance. One could perhaps balk at the swooping camera moves that take over the last ten minutes of the film and bring us (all too effectively) into the room-spinning experience of acute intoxication. But there’s no denying the power of the performances or the confidence of Bischoff’s direction. The closing shots, which come during and after the credits, bring a whole new perspective to the proceedings, and confirm just how invested we’ve become in the reality of the relationship at the movie’s core. STREAMING ON AMAZON PRIME
|
|
Nijm is not an actor. His use of the word ‘monologue’ refers to a symbolic discourse on self-improvement: a pitch he is honing, and keeping in reserve for that moment when the spotlight will serendipitously hit and he will have the opportunity to move up the ladder of success. 
