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Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco), called Ale for short, works at an auto-body repair shop in what has come to be known as the Iron Triangle, a deteriorating twenty block stretch of auto junk yards and sleazy car repair dealers close to Shea Stadium in Queens, New York. Here customers do not question whether or not parts come from stolen cars or why they are able to receive such large discounts, they simply put down their cash and hope that everything is on the up and up. Sleazy outskirts like these are not highlighted in the tour guides but Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani puts them on vivid display in Chop Shop, a powerful Indie film that received much affection last year at Cannes, Berlin, and Toronto. A follow up to his acclaimed "Man Push Cart", Bahrani spent one and a half years in the location that F. Scott Fitzgerald described as in the Great Gatsby as "the valley of the ashes".
For all its depiction of bleakness, Chop Shop is not a work of social criticism but, like Hector Babenco's Pixote, a poignant character study in which a young boy's survival is bought at the price of his innocence. Shot on location at Willets Point in Queens, Bahrani makes you feel as if you are there, sweating in a hot and humid New York summer with all of its noise and chaos. The film's focus is on the charming, street-smart 12-year-old Ale who lives on the edge without any adult support or supervision other than his boss (Rob Sowulski), the real-life proprietor of the Iron Triangle garage. Polanco's performance is raw and slightly ragged yet he fully earned the standing ovation he received at the film's premiere at Cannes along with a hug from great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.
Cramped into a tiny room above the garage together with his 16-year-old sister Isamar (Isamar Gonzales) who works dispensing food from a lunch wagon, Ale is like one of the interchangeable spare parts he deals with. While he has dreams of owning his own food-service van, in the city that never sleeps, he knows that the only thing that may make the "top of the heap" is another dented fender. In this environment, Ale and Isi use any means necessary to keep their heads above water while their love for each other remains constant and they still laugh and act out the childhood that was never theirs. As Barack Obama says in his book "Dreams From My Father", the change may come later when their eyes stop laughing and they have shut off something inside. In the meantime, Ale supplements his earnings by selling candy bars in the crowded New York subways with his friend Carlos (Carlos Zapata) and pushing bootleg DVDs on the street corners, while Isi does tricks for the truck drivers to save enough money to buy the rusted $4500 van in which they hope to start their own business.
Though Ale is a "good boy", he is not above stealing purses and hubcaps in the Shea Stadium parking lot, events that Bahrani's camera observes without judgment. In Chop Shop, Bahrani has provided a compelling antidote to the underdog success stories churned out by the Hollywood dream factory, and has given us a film of stunning naturalism and respect for its characters, similar in many ways to the great Italian neo-realist films and the recent Iranian works of Kiarostami, Panahi, and others. While the outcome of the characters is far from certain, Bahrani makes sure that we notice a giant billboard at Shea Stadium that reads, "Make dreams happen", leaving us with the hint that, in Rumi's phrase, "the drum of the realization of that promise is beating,"


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