House of Sand and Fog

This was such a great movie for such a long time that it is really a pity it completely lost it in the last 15-20 minutes.

Kathy is a woman who is not having the happiest time of her life. Her husband has left her and due to a administrative error which is partly her own fault she has to go out of her house. She doesn't have enough money and so has to sleep in her car.
Meanwhile Behrani is a proud Iranian immigrant who a long time ago for political reasons had to flee Iran with his family for political reasons. His daughter is now married and he has financial troubles, because he had to pay for her wedding. He conceals this troubles for his family. When he learns that Kathy's house is auctioned for a cheap price he buys it, with the intent of selling it for a higher price. It's a good idea.

Kathy goes to a lawyer to get her house back, but her lawyer tells her that legally there is not much she can do anymore, since Behrani has bought the house and the law is on his side now. Not all is bad for Kathy though. The cop that had to tell her that she lost his house, has fallen for her and they start a relationship. One problem though, the cop is still married. Now in a lot of movies the following would happen: the cop would tell to his mistress that he'll leave his wife and then he'll go to his wife, have a lot of quite dinners with her while in deep thoughts, while she'll be asking him whether everything is fine and stuff like that, until he realizes he made a really big mistake and return to his wife. Well, not here. In a surprisingly good scene he tells his wife bluntly that the situation is what it is and that he loves Kathy more then her. When his wife asks him what she should tell her children, hi simply says she should tell the truth. Unfortunately Kathy has seen to much of these aforementioned movies and believes that her new lover won't come back. She gets drunk and tries to kill herself. This sets what happens in the last 30 minutes in motion, but more on this later.

Before all this Kathy and the cop try to persuade the Behranis a couple of times to leave their house. Of course they don't do this. The strength of the movie is that nobody is wrong in what they do. This are all pretty good people. And when they do something wrong they do it out of love for others and usually regret doing it. And we care about both parties without taking sides.

Ben Kingsley as Behrani and Jennifer Connelly as Kathy give great performances in this movie. I didn't use to notice Ben Kingsley much, but after this movie and Sexy Beast (which is a pretty lousy movie anytime Kingsley is off-screen) I see him as one of the best actors alive. Jennifer Connelly is a very beautiful and very good actress and her beauty is actually pretty important in this movie. We believe that the cop can be infatuated with her and that he'll go very far, sometimes too far, to help her.

The cinematography is very good too. The house is at night surrounded by a thick fog, which is very common for San Francisco These shots at night around the house are eerily beautiful and seem as if they come straight from a horror movie. They give us the feeling that the house is haunted and that things won't end well for the people involved with. Well they do not end well. Not for the people involved and not for the movie itself.

When Kathy tries to kill herself she does that in the backyard of the house. When she starts crying. Behrani hears her and rescues her and gets her into the house where the Behranis care for her. While bathing she tries to kill herself again and the Behranis save her again and realize that they should probably give the house back to Kathy. Meanwhile the cop arrives at the house realizes what happened and loses it completely. He locks the Behranis in their bathroom and only lets them out once they agree to leave the house or make some kind of deal that is good for Kathy. Eventually they reach a deal and the next morning the cop, Behrani and Behrani's son go to finish the administrative details. The cop forces Behrani's son to come too so Behrani won't do any stupid things. There is a lot of tension between them which is heightened because the cop keeps calling Behrani's son Ismael, when in fact he is called Esmail. Esmail, who during the film seems to gain respect for his roots, gets fed up and, in a moment of inattention, steals the cop's gun and points it to him. Other cops see this shoot and Kill Esmail. This was a bit too over the top, especially since the rest of the movie was so calm and realistic, but I can understand why this had to happen. There are a lot of conflicts like this one in the movie all over the world. So if you make a movie about one you got to make sure that this one has really big consequences. You got to make your audience believe that this particular conflict mattered. And as I said before the movie did, through its cinematography foreshadow that it would not end well. So if the movie ended here it would be a truly great drama.

But it didn't. What followed was that first Ben Kingsley was made to act (I can't possibly believe that it was his own idea to act like this) like a complete idiot to show us his grieve for his son. I understand that one can lose his mind when he loses his son in such a way. But Ben Kingsley acted like a retarded man losing his mind instead like a sane man losing his mind. Then his character decided that he and his wife had nothing to live for anymore, despite still having a daughter who they obviously loved. The movie seems to forget this. So Behrani poisons his wife, without her knowing anything about his intentions or that her son is dead. When his wife dies he puts on his Iranian uniform and pulls a sack over his head. This has the probably unintended effect of making him look completely ridiculous. After he dies Kathy finds them both and is devastated. When she calls the police the man asks her whether this is her house and she says no.

So in the last 15 minutes the movie manages to make Behrani a parody of himself and does not give any kind of satisfying end scene to Mrs. Behrani, thereby making it look as if she was completely unimportant, which she was not. If the movie meant to criticize the position of the woman in Muslim marriages with this it completely failed, because it basically did to her what it wanted to criticize. Furthermore the movie made it look as if Kathy was to blame for the whole situation, thereby losing its objectivity and lack of judgment, the qualities that made it so good in the first place.