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By Barbara Vancheri / Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008
At last, some real festival films, not movies I could see back in Pittsburgh this week or next. And nothing put me more in the festival frame of mind than this morning's double feature: "Kabuli Kid" and "Wendy and Lucy."
The first is set in Afghanistan and tells the story of a taxi driver who discovers that a woman clad in a full-length blue veil -- her only identifying characteristic is a tiny birth mark near her ankle -- has left her baby boy in the back seat of his cab. The infant appears to be about five or six months old and the driver has daughters but no sons and is encouraged by his father to keep the boy.
As the driver tries the police, an orphanage and a radio plea for the mother to step forward, the movie shows what life is like in Kabul with traffic patterns that are non-existent or chaotic, children who beg for money or peddle such goods as plastic bags and toilet paper on the street, and a little girl says she doesn't want to get married because "they beat wives."
It provides a vivid window on another world, which is just what a festival movie should do.
"Wendy and Lucy" is a modest film from Kelly Reichardt ("Old Joy") starring Michelle Williams as a young woman from Indiana who is driving to Ketchikan, Alaska, with her dog, Lucy. Wendy hopes to land a job at a fish cannery but her 1988 Honda Accord conks out in an Oregon drug-store parking lot.
Everything she clings to, from Lucy and the car to her modest stash of money, are suddenly in jeopardy. Williams, with a cap of dark hair and wardrobe that comes from a couple of bags in the Honda trunk, gives a beautifully subtle performance that conveys the panic, fear and increasingly muted hope just beneath the surface.
Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632.
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