However, his closest friend in the flat, mild-mannered Afghan Farhad - who begins to refer to himself as Omar’s “agent slash manager” - plans for Omar to perform a concert for the locals and his fellow refugees.īut will Omar even want to play when he is physically able?Īs a writer, Sharrock - who during film school in 2013 shot a short film at the refugee camps in southern Algeria - eschews any grand statements about the experience of asylum seekers. He also learns a lesson when he asks the owner of a grocery store if he is Pakistani by using a term to which the man objects.Įarly on in “Limbo,” Omar wears a plaster cast on one of his hands, making it impossible to play his oud, a guitar-like instrument. Omar experiences racism from a group of young locals, who, after saying he’d better not be a terrorist - “Don’t, (expletive) like, blow up (expletive) or rape anyone, right?” a young man says to him - give him a lift.
Omar makes multiple trips to a remote phone booth on the island to call his mother, who worries for the whole family and especially wants Omar to talk to Nabil - that is if the latter still is alive. While his parents fled to Turkey, his estranged brother, Nabil (Kais Nashif), stayed to fight for a cause. But in this moment, when audiences are nostalgic for a more recent past, it plays like Zhang's homage to the movies, dedicated to the heroes who may soon return to cinemas.“Limbo” ultimately centers around Omar, a promising young musician who has escaped a dangerous life in Syria. In China, Cliff Walkers is a nostalgic and patriotic tale - dedicated to the heroes of the revolution. All while slipping, sliding and - especially - shooting in a glistening, frigid landscape that would make Dr. Here he revels in the period details - sleek, fitted trench coats, vintage cars, a drowning-in-neon movie theater playing Chaplin's The Gold Rush - and sets his Communist spies to dismantling 1930s train cabins, picking locks with paper clips, drugging their own coffee, and generally playing with genre tricks that were time-honored when Hitchcock used them. Zhang, celebrated for both masterworks ( Raise the Red Lantern), and pop hits ( House of Flying Daggers), can't seem to make a film that isn't visually exquisite. And that's all before they've even gotten where they're going. Allies who aren't what they seem, enemies who may be double agents, lies, traitors, double- and triple-crosses. It's 1931 and they're Chinese agents, trained in Russia to fight the Japanese who've set up torture camps in Manchuria.īefore they quite get their bearings they're separated and up to their eyeballs in far more than snow. Omar (Amir El-Masry), a sad-eyed 19-year-old musician, has arrived with just his oud, a guitar-like instrument he hasn't played since leaving Syria for reasons we'll understand later.įarhad (Vikash Bhai) is his buddy, an Afghan who's modeled his moustache on Freddie Mercury's, and has been in this refugee camp almost three years without quite grasping the local lingo.īut they bounce up, pistols drawn, squinting in all directions. It's hard to imagine a more persuasive limbo. It offers sparsely furnished rooms for maybe 20 young men, all of whom appear disoriented, bored, or both. Limbo's is stark and wind-swept - a fictional island in the Hebrides that's been outfitted as a holding camp for would-be Scottish immigrants. Scotland's refugee dramedy Limbo, opens in select art-house theaters this weekend, as does Cliff Walkers, a spy-flick from celebrated Chinese director Zhang Yimou, and both boast visual palettes eminently worthy of the big screen. With Hollywood blockbusters still missing-in-action - it'll be weeks before A Quiet Place Part II makes your local cinema a less quiet place - it's nice to report that other countries are happy to fill American screens. Vikash Bhai (left) as Farhad and Amir El-Masry as Omar in Limbo, a Scottish dramedy about the refugee crisis.
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