Ale: Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the interruption. My name is Alejandro.
Carlos: And my name is Carlos.
Ale: We are not going to lie to you. We are not here selling candy for no school basketball team. In fact, I don’t even go to school, and if you want me back in school, today I got candy for you.
Little Alejandro is only 12 years old and is already an orphan working in the streets of Willets Point, Queens along with his 16 year old sister Isamar. Eventually he gets a permanent job and home at a chop shop where his generous boss lets him and his sister reside. Like “Taxi Driver” by Martin Scorsese and “Do the Right Thing” by Spike Lee, “Chop Shop” showcases a different side of Queens that we are not used to seeing. Chop Shop by Ramin Bahrani captures a part of the city that we all seem to want to ignore. We don’t want to accept the fact that there could be kids like this living in poverty and making dangerous decisions just for the sake of survival. This is what makes this film a perfect example of a work that preserves a specific moment in our culture. It exposes a different and controversial microcosm to the people who see the city through rose-colored glasses.
Like Ale and Isy, there are so many kids out there who live in broken homes with no parental or adult guidance. They are left alone to make decisions and survive in this cold world, at the cost of their innocence. Although Ale and Isy are both good kids, Ale ends up stealing in more than one occasion and Isy even goes as far as prostituting herself. They do all this for a naive little dream they hold of buying a used food truck that they’d be able to operate together and make tons of money off of. A dream that only children would come up with. They never seemed to think about all the additional money they’d have to use just to fix up the truck and since there was no adult guiding them in their decisions they foolishly made their mistake and their innocent dream was shattered.
Which brings me to the role of adults in this movie. There are plenty of adults around Ale and Isy and although some of them do provide them with some sort of guidance they seem to hold back. I think this is because they themselves went through the same hardships and probably deem it better for them to learn by themselves how to fix the problems of life. Ale who is younger than his sister assumes the role as the man and acts even more as an adult than his sister. Emphasis on the word “acts” because he himself does not know how an adult is suposed to act. Singlehandely, Ale finds a job for himslef, a home and even finds a job for his sister. He even goes as far as to tell her to not mess it up this time, implying that she has overlooked her responsibilities in past times, just like any other normal teenager would do.
After doing a little research on the movie I found that the characters’ names were the real names of the actors who played them. This intrigued me so I googled some more as to why that was and to my surprise I discovered that Ramin had used mostly non-actors in the film. This reminded me of Slumdog Millionaire and how they used real kids from the slums to depict the younger versions of the characters. I believe this makes both movies even more relevant and valuable because they show that these are real people and this is how they live in real life, opening our eyes to the ugly side of the world.
Although this wasn’t a documentary it sort of felt like it because the ending was so open ended. There was no happy or sad ending and there was no closure. But that’s how life is. It doesn’t end until our individual lives end, and even that’s debatable. Alejandro’s and Isamar’s story could have gone on indefinitely with many more adventures and disappointments in the future, but we didn’t need to see it all.Bahrani captured a moment in time of a chop shop and child labor in Queens and showcased it to the world. A picture has no beginning or end but it still tells a story nonetheless. If the movie had given us a definite ending it would have lost its artistic value because then the feature film would have lost its identity as a preservation of culture and instead it would have become just another fairytale movie. By choosing to end it this way, Bahrani made it real and he became a curator of our culture.
Here is the trailer in case you want to check this movie out….which I recommend you do =)
