Thursday, April 19, 2012

House of Sand and Fog


The only thing left to Kathy Niccolo, a drug addict rehabilitated and abandoned by her husband, is the house his father left her when he died. But an apparent delay in a payment of taxes will make her loose it.

Massoud Behrani, a former Iranian colonel who had to flee to America years ago, buys the house with the idea of fixing it and then selling it at a better price. But Kathy is not willing to see how he takes away all that is left for her and will make the impossible to recover it, as, according to her, it belongs to her.



The film begins with a nice rhythm: you have Behrani to be hated for having taken the house from Kathy who you like for giving up drugs after her husband abandoned her.

But the situation seems to get complicated when you realize that Berahni has two jobs to support his family: as it often happens, the hated and loved characters somehow change their roles and the house seems to be good for any of them. The film becomes hard, the atmosphere heavy, sad, but the story has us totally trapped.


Ben Kingsley, Jennifer Connelly and Shohreh Aghdashloo, Iranian, caught us with their excellent performances. However, there is a point in this story in which the situation for the characters keeps on coming even harder and harder.

It is as if things were not hard enough and somehow they get even worse. The problem is not the hard parts of the story: we know before seeing it that "House of Sand and Fog" is not a film that will allow us to relax. However, that is out of bounderies. The direction the story takes drives you to keep on suffering like the characters in the movie.


Director: Vadim Perelman
Writers: Andre Dubus III (novel), Vadim Perelman Stars: Jennifer Connelly, Ben Kingsley and Ron Eldard

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