‘Sand City’ Review: Two Dhaka Loners are Minerally Connected in a Quietly Beguiling Debut
A heavy, rheumy smog, its hue somewhere between lint and robin-egg blue, hangs over every scene in “Sand City,” further bearing down on lives already plenty burdened with troubles of their own. But the real weight, as implied by the title, is beneath their feet: Sand connects everything in this striking, supple debut feature by Bangladeshi writer-director Mahde Hasan, forming some people’s livelihoods, sparking others’ dreams, or simply providing the ground they walk on. From the heaving metropolis of Dhaka, Hasan’s film limns two lives separate but alike in their unassuming loneliness: one a stifled office worker repeatedly targeted with race hate, the other a glass factory drone with lofty ambitions of being the boss.
Long-established traditions of film storytelling set up false expectations for “Sand City,” though the film itself does not: It’s really our assumption that these characters must be cosmically connected in some way, their paths eventually sure to be aligned by fate or screenwriting contrivance. But while Hasan occasionally dangles the possibility of intersection, he’s largely content to unfold their stories in parallel. These lives needn’t merge to be worthy of individual scrutiny, as each reveals something particular of an isolated, yearning urban condition, while the film functions both as intimate human portraiture and a collective snapshot of a city in perpetual, exhausting motion. Winner of the more experimentally-oriented Proxima competition at Karlovy Vary, it’s a lightly enigmatic, visually seductive but emotionally accessible work primed for extensive further festival exposure.
“Sand City” opens on two tidily sand-themed literary quotes — one from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” one from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” — though such overstatement will thankfully be rare going forward. The gritty beige stuff has value to both Emma (Victoria Chakma), a young ethnic minority woman, and middle-aged Hasan (Mostafa Monwar): The former takes it from building sites to line her cat’s litter tray, while the latter steadily steals industrial silica from his workplace with the intention of ultimately starting his own glass-making business. Sand may be one step up from dirt, but they’re not alone in prizing it, as all around Dhaka, it fuels a construction boom and creates labor.
It also marks the passage of time — too slowly, perhaps, for these solitary souls — and holds secrets, never more ominously than when Emma one day find a severed finger in her intended kitty litter. Neat and petite, with the attached nail painted a vivacious red, the mystery digit speaks of other, more tortured stories playing out in Dhaka’s permanent haze. But lest you think the discovery might cue a “Blue Velvet”-style trip into the city’s darker underbelly, Hasan dodges that expectation too: Not so much troubled as intrigued by the morbid item, Emma merely holds on to it, observing with some melancholy as it decays and discolors over time. Between her dull, unsociable job and the racist graffiti she repeatedly finds on her scooter, her life is short on tactile human contact: The finger might be the next best thing.
Hasan’s fragile existence takes a turn, too, after he’s caught poaching sand and fired from the factory. With his career dreams in limbo, he roams Dhaka’s streets in pursuit of distraction if not connection: For him as for Emma, a city of over 10 million souls does little to shore up an internal sense of drift and not-belonging.
Though both actors give affectingly restrained, edge-of-desperation performances, Dhaka remains the star attraction of “Sand City,” unprettily but beautifully shot by French DP Mathieu Giombini. In stark contrast to his sun-ripened, poster-painted work on Mahamet-Saleh Haroun’s “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” the compositions here are suitably grainy and textural, in a misty, melting palette of khakis and moldering grays. You sense that this robust city could, at any point, crumble down into the mineral fragments from which it’s built. Hasan’s ruminative, heart-stilling debut reminds us that we all return to dust, sometimes while we’re still living.
