![]() Limbo presents a very human story in an incredibly isolated place. However, the picture is not merely a copy of someone else’s work. Comparisons to Wes Anderson or Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) will be immediate. Limbo has a striking visual look, nothing too ornate, but immaculate focused cinematography. I personally will always enjoy a picture where the narrative is most in focus, but having well-crafted visual sensibilities at work can’t hurt. Other times you find movies veering wildly in one direction over the other. ![]() Sometimes the two gel together perfectly so that tension is barely felt. This is superlative film-making from Sharrock.Cinema is always a tension between aesthetics and narrative. The scene in which he points all this out to Farhad is almost unbearably sad. He treasures the design of his oud, the front of which is a stylised representation of their garden in Damascus. The emotional centre of the film is Omar, and El-Masry’s tremendous performance – particularly in the heart-rending conversations he has with his mother over the phone, demanding detailed recipes in a doomed attempt to eat in exactly the way he ate back home. Their inner lives are largely a closed book, although Farhad does let something slip about his life back home. Their contact with the state comes in the form of the drolly dramatised lectures they receive from two officials, Helga (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Boris (Kenneth Collard), who tell them how to apply for menial jobs over the phone and the correct, respectful way to behave with women while dancing with them at a nightclub – a particularly bizarre instruction as these poor lonely men will never get near anything as exciting as that. Sharrock superbly suggests the growing atmosphere of fear and anger that hovers like cloud cover: the men believe that they are deliberately kept in this stage of depression and desperation so that they will crack and ask to be sent home. He carries his oud around in its case, as Farhad says, like a coffin for his soul. El-Masry superbly conveys Omar’s fear that to play the oud under these wretched circumstances would be an act of futility and disloyalty. He can’t play at the moment, supposedly because of a wrist injury, but this is just an excuse: he is creatively and spiritually blocked. Omar is (or was) a brilliant musician, a soloist on the oud, a stringed instrument. Omar is stricken with repressed rage, guilt and doubt that he has amputated his Syrian identity to spend his days on this godforsaken island in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile his brother has gone back to Syria – or never left in the first place – to fight Assad. But his mum and dad are still in Turkey while Omar took the gamble on moving onward to try for residency in the UK. Most dramatically there is Omar – a hugely gentle and intelligent performance from Amir El-Masry – who has left Syria with his family. The situation is taken broadly from real life. And as the narrator says at the beginning of Casablanca: they wait … and wait … and wait. Forbidden to do any paid work, they must simply wait for the official word on whether they can stay. Here a number of refugees from Syria and elsewhere – single men with no families – have been relocated in grimly functional hostels with a bare-minimum subsistence allowance. The setting is an impossibly bleak and starkly beautiful Scottish island, fictional and mostly deserted, almost resembling a stage-set for Waiting For Godot (but filmed partly on Uist in the Outer Hebrides). ![]() It reminded me at various moments of Aki Kaurismäki or Elia Suleiman or Bill Forsyth, with a distinct touch of Bruce Robinson’s Withnail And I. Limbo is about refugees and asylum seekers in Britain, and it’s a bracingly internationalist and non-parochial piece of work: film-making with a bold view on the world but also as gentle and intimate as a much-loved sitcom. ![]() Despite an elegant deadpan style established from the outset, Sharrock soon gets you to invest in the characters and care deeply about what happens to them. W hat a thoroughly wonderful sophomore feature from the British director Ben Sharrock – witty, poignant, marvellously composed and shot, moving and even weirdly gripping.
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