HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG ANDRE DUBUS MOVIE

In a strange development, one of the policemen who evicted the woman from the house then becomes her lover and her ally in the effort to retrieve the property. The two of them battle over this house – she totally outraged at being evicted and he desperate to keep it. The tight story concerns a young woman who loses her family house because of not paying a trivial amount of taxes, and its being bought by an ex-colonel in the shah's military who is trying to build a new life for his family and himself in the San Francisco area. If only the policeman had not taken on the role of Kathy's knight in shining armour.Dubus has written probably the first best-selling novel about the experience of an immigrant Muslim in the United States.

If only Behrani had not been so proud and intransigent. If only Kathy had been more diligent about reading her mail. House of Sand and Fog is the more troubling of the two, because it refuses to take sides, and tortures us instead with a vista of 'if onlys'. (They may soon merit their own coinage: 'Dubusian'). The two films have, what is more, a familial link, one being based on a novel by Andre Dubus III, the other on a short story by his father. The story's fatalistic movement recalls In the Bedroom, another tragedy that exposes a faultline in the American judicial system and its devastating impact on individual lives.

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG ANDRE DUBUS MOVIE

The argument running through the movie is that America, while fabled as the land of opportunity, is also riven with fear of dispossession and exclusion both Behrani and Kathy have felt, in different ways, the pain of separation, which is why they cling to the house as desperately as the shipwrecked to driftwood. He is good at the slow-burn of feeling, which is why his volcanic turn as the cockney gangster in Sexy Beast seemed misjudged his authority lies in stealth, not screaming fits.īorn in Kiev, Perelman lived hand-to-mouth as a teenager before he and his mother eventually found asylum in Canada. Kingsley slips into this performance as precisely as he does that grey suit, ingeniously switching between the chauvinist front that Behrani has constructed about himself, and the private, thoughtful man within. All she can hope is that Behrani will take pity and sell the house back to her, but everything about Kingsley's characterisation - his stern military posture, his control-freak domination of his wife (Shohreh Aghdashloo) - indicates that he is not a man to bend. We sympathise with her outrage: the city bureaucracy has left her dangling, and now she sees a family of foreigners installed in what was recently her home. Kathy, meanwhile, has just woken up to the fact that the house, which she inherited from her late father, has been taken away from her. Not only does its prospect remind him of a house he once owned on the Caspian Sea, it will enable him to make a profit on resale and pay for his son through college. Getting this house means a great deal to Behrani. It's a double life, maintained at some cost. But pride won't allow him to drop the illusion of status: in a telling sequence, he steals into a hotel bathroom, changes from his work clothes into an immaculate grey suit, and then drives home to his wife and son in his Mercedes. The buyer is Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley), an Iranian immigrant who was a colonel in the Shah's air force and now, in exile, does menial jobs with a road-construction gang and works as on the night shift in a convenience store. An erroneous tax demand goes unnoticed, her house is wrongly offered for auction, and is immediately snapped up at a bargain price. This is home to Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly), a troubled young woman who is recovering from addiction and a divorce, but hasn't been opening her mail for a while. Unfortunately, as someone once wrote, common sense ain't so common any more.Īdapted from the novel by Andre Dubus III, it concerns the ownership of a modest clapboard house overlooking the North Californian coast. It unfolds with an agonising momentum, for at every stage one can see how catastrophe could have been averted by common sense. And it is a genuine tragedy, a case not of good versus bad, but of good versus good: two strangers become locked in a furious battle of wills, both have right on their side, and neither can give way to the other. These are the two elements that fatefully combine in House of Sand and Fog to set a tragedy in motion.

House of sand and fog andre dubus