“Concrete Valley” opens with a man wandering in the woods around Thorncliffe Park, one of Toronto’s first postwar high-rise neighborhoods and one of its most diverse areas. He’s Rashid (Hussam Douhna), a Syrian doctor who recently relocated to Canada with his family. And he’s lost. The film that follows is an oblique, deceptively placid study of the emasculation of exile.
Rashid lives in a tower block with his wife Farah (Amani Ibrahim) and son Ammar (Abdullah Nataf). Farah, a former actress, works in a beauty shop, stocking shelves and sweeping up. She has greater aspirations: she takes off work to volunteer with a local community development program, hoping it may lead to a job. Instead, she ends up spending her day off picking up garbage.
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Directed by the Canadian filmmaker Antoine Bourges, with contributions from the Aleppo-born co-writer Teyama Alkamli, “Concrete Valley” has understated scenes, muted sound, and a very still camera, though its still waters run deep. The undertones of its low-key drama eventually harmonize into an urgent and nuanced consideration of the desire to be useful—it’s a study of restless masculinity forced into a lower, more passive status and the question, left open-ended, of what Canada has to offer new immigrants beyond charity.
Unlicensed to practice medicine in his new home, Rashid spends his days aimlessly; these days often begin on the living-room day bed, with kiddie sheets, where his son sleeps. Bored and alienated, Rashid tries to be proactive, offering natural remedies to the parents of Ammar’s playmates. He takes English classes, vacillating between ace-student showing-off in some moments and sullen silence when he doesn’t feel progress. It’s hard for him to accept gifts—getting a lift from a Syrian classmate and ride-share driver, Rashid grills his friend on why he’s doing it for free.
The same friend later tells Ammar that Rashid “reminds me of my father,” who “loved helping people”—a compliment tailor-made for a man striving to restore a sense of himself as a community leader. With Farah—especially after he sees her at the facility where he takes English classes, meeting with a nonprofit worker and prospective colleague—Rashid is prickly and passive-aggressive, but always with a depressive flatness. Noticing that a neighbor, an African woman, walks with a cane, Rashid offers her unsolicited medical advice over a series of visits, increasingly domineering in his benevolence.
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At a neighborhood picnic, spread out on a blanket, Rashid explains to Farah and two other women that, when he goes to a job interview, he’s playing a double game, decoding the prospective boss’s questions and calculating whether he’ll be able to work with him. His grandiosity at this moment is underscored and undercut by Bourges’s canny framing, with the camera behind Rashid and his audience facing him, three women, listening oh so patiently.
At every turn, the film’s gentle rhythms—its lengthening late-afternoon shadows and burble of children at play—invite Rashid to simply luxuriate in the moment, to be present and unbothered, to make himself at home. Maybe it’s a generational thing; maybe it’s his gender. Crouching in a nearby stream, Farah and Ammar lift a rock and gently grab hold of an electric-blue crawfish in a pure moment of pastoral rapture. They hold it for a few moments; Bourges extends the shot long enough to let you forget why you’re watching it.
It’s a bit difficult to find your footing in the first half-hour of “Concrete Valley,” and it’s arguable that in addition to starting too shapeless, the film ends too shaped. But niggles about calibration aside, the on-the-nose ending is a gut punch: a sad patriarchal fantasy of mastery and healing, undercut by a humiliating reminder of unrecoverable loss. [B+]
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Abdullah NatafAmani IbrahimAntoine BourgesHussam DouhnaTIFF 2022