Film Feedback
New This WeekAround TownMusicFilmArtTheaterNews & FeaturesFood & DrinkAstrology
  HOME
NEW THIS WEEK
EDITORS' PICKS
LISTINGS
NEWS & FEATURES
MUSIC
FILM
ART
BOOKS
THEATER
DANCE
TELEVISION
FOOD & DRINK
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
PERSONALS
CLASSIFIEDS
ADULT
ASTROLOGY
PHOENIX FORUM DOWNLOAD MP3s



"BOSTON ASIAN-AMERICAN FILM & VIDEO FESTIVAL"

Abraham Lim, who wrote and directed and stars in Roads and Bridges, got his start as Robert Altman’s editor on Cookie’s Fortune (Altman returns the favor here as executive producer). Too bad his debut doesn’t evince any of Altman’s subtlety or depth of thought. He’s an inventive visual stylist, with a fine eye for the movement of small details (see his visually striking delineation of a train’s headlong rush), and he evokes the kind of stultifying humid summer days that heat simmering racial tensions to a boil. But this tale of racial unrest on a Kansas road crew — specifically the relationship between struggling African-American family man Daryl (Gregory Sullivan) and Johnson (Lim), a surly Chinese-American who refuses to speak — is done in by middling performances, muddled moralizing, and brick-to-the-head metaphors. As Daryl and Johnson set to square off against a group of violent rednecks, for instance, we hear a sourceless voiceover explaining the rules of the road: "Warning signs are yellow and black. White signs tell you what to do." Get it? By the time Johnson is saved from a roiling torrent by a lifeline fashioned from the same American flag he’d only recently ripped up, what could have been a meaningful exploration of race, place, and identity has been compromised by Lim’s ham-handed symbolism.

The best of the series’s shorts, on the other hand, Shanti Thakur’s autobiographical "Seven Hours To Burn," is a poetic look at ethnicity, history, and family. As she watches the glowing embers of her Indian grandmother’s funeral pyre, Thakur thinks back to her father’s seismic decision to reject his Hindu roots and marry a Danish woman, and she extrapolates to her parents’ experiences of both the Hindu/Muslim violence that followed the departure of the Raj and the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Her reminiscences are enlivened by the use of manipulated stock footage bled together with blurred, impressionistic color segments.

BY MIKE MILIARD

Issue Date: April 11 - 18, 2002
Back to the Movies table of contents.