| New York- Amir Naderi's
Manhattan By Numbers manages to become a mesmerizing
quest for meaning simply by projecting Manhattan
into the foreground and its narrative in the
background. Is this the city (or, rather,
the borough) that launched a thousand dreams?
Hardly. Mr. Naderi is closer in spirit to
the George Orwell of Down and Out in Paris
and London. Mr. Naderi has been living on
the Lower East Side since 1987, and has been
walking around Manhattan much of that time
with his movie camera. Before that, in his
native Iran, he had written and directed 11
feature films since 1970, seven of which found
their way into festivals around the world.
I am familiar with only two: The Runner (1984)
and Water, Wind, Sand (1985). Both works reflect
their creator's recurring concerns with poverty,
struggle and survival, concerns that are reiterated
in Manhattan by Numbers.
Bahman Maghsoudlou profiled the director
in 1991 in The Asian Film Magazine, writing,
"Naderi was born in the port city of
Abadan. Orphaned at the age of five, he
grew up as a street urchin, struggling to
support himself and survive in an impoverished
society by selling iced water to passers-by,
shining shoes and gathering and selling
empty beer bottles that had been dumped
into the sea by passing ships."
This could serve as a synopsis of The Runner,
which suggests that Mr. Naderi has remained
faithful to his rootless angle of vision
throughout his career, all the way to a
Manhattan that is far from being a tourist's
mecca. Indeed, Manhattan By Numbers seems
to reinforce the many grim forecasts of
New York degenerating into a Third World
city, and America belching its way to the
status of a banana republic where the rich
get richer, the poor get poorer, and the
middle class barks louder and louder as
it gets fewer and fewer crumbs off the tables
of the self-satisfied CEOs.
The initial premise of Manhattan By Numbers
is as much geographical as existential,
placing an unemployed newspaperman, George
Murphy (John Wojda), in a dingy Washington
Heights apartment he will lose at the end
of the day unless he can come up with $1,200
in back rent. His wife and daughter have
moved in with his father-in-law in Queens.
Through a series of expositional telephone
calls, we learn that Murphy has used up
all his friends and contacts as sources
of financial aid, and is down to the last
frail reed, a fellow unemployed journalist
named Tom Ryan who seems to have mysteriously
disappeared. By foot and public transit,
Murphy descends diagonally through Manhattan
from Washington Heights to the Lower East
Side, the closest thing we have to hell
in this city, except possibly Wall Street,
where a sculpted bull provides Mr. Naderi
with the final ironic visual coup for an
odyssey that is too transparently serendipitous
too early on.
Though in my old-fashioned way I would
have preferred more narrative and more psychology
in Murphy's journey, I am indebted to Mr.
Naderi for plunging into the gritty experience
of Manhattan without an airbrush on his
lens. Of course, he couldn't afford one,
but he has made a virtue of necessity all
the same.
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