![]() 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” exposes the unsettling truth that it is sometimes our hopes and not our hatreds that divide us.Position and possession. What begins as a conflict over a small, rundown bungalow spirals into a clash of cultures that propels everyone involved towards an inescapable, and ultimately heartbreaking, climax. Caught in the maelstrom are Behrani’s wife, Nadi (Shohreh Aghdashloo), and son, Esmail (Jonathan Ahdout). Now he pours the last of his life savings into the purchase of the house that will, at last, bring back the prosperity his family once knew.Īs Kathy and Behrani ’s fight for the house escalates, Kathy finds an unlikely ally in the officer sent to evict her, Deputy Sheriff Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard), who becomes dangerously devoted to her cause. A former Colonel in the Iranian Air Force, Behrani has been reduced to working menial jobs to maintain a pretense of affluence. The new owner, Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley), sees the house as the fulfillment of the American Dream he has been pursuing since he fled Iran with his family years earlier. When a bureaucratic error forces her eviction, Kathy is left homeless – helpless to stop the house from being sold at auction for a fraction of its worth. It is only a small bungalow in Northern California, but to Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly), it is the last vestige of hope for reclaiming a life that was nearly lost to addiction. A gripping exploration of the American Dream gone awry, “House of Sand and Fog” is the story of two people driven to desperate measures to claim ownership of a house.
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