He’s sunken his remaining life savings into buying Kathy’s house, at a tremendous bargain, planning to reinvent himself as a real-estate speculator, and he has no wish to sell it back when informed that the county made a bureaucratic error. Sympathetic to her plight, Les lines up legal counsel and makes sure she has a place to stay, but his optimism (and the lawyer’s) hits an immovable object in proud ex-Colonel Behrani, formerly of the Iranian Air Force, who fled his homeland with his family when the Shah was deposed and who has struggled secretly in San Francisco for years to maintain appearances until his daughter can make a good marriage. Then she also had to fall for the guy who evicted her, Deputy Les Burdon-married, with two kids. It was bad enough when Kathy Lazaro stepped out of the shower one morning to find herself evicted from her house, a small bungalow to be auctioned the very next day in a county tax sale bad enough that her recovering-addict husband had left her some time before, and that she had no friends at all in California to help her move or put her up. It fails to sustain a sense of tragic inevitability and that prevents it from being truly involving.In an enthralling tragedy built on a foundation of small misfortunes, Dubus ( Bluesman, 1993, etc.) offers in detail the unraveling life of a woman who, in her undoing, brings devastation to the families of those in her path. Bahrani are all superb, and the adaptation of the award-winning book is a thoughtful and serious, if uneven, translation of the book's language and tone. But the fairy tale becomes a nightmare.Ĭonnelly, Kingsley, Ron Eldard as the cop who evicts Kathy, and Shohreh Aghdashloo as Mrs. She wakes up the next morning in the house, swathed in silks like an Arabian nights princess. The Behrani family alternately treats Kathy as an intruder, a guest, and ultimately almost as a member of the family when they take her in at her most devastated and care for her as though she was a child. Behrani's devotion to his children parallels Kathy's loss of her father and the house he left to her when he died, as well as her own longing for a child. Both are too proud to tell their families the truth about their situations. Both must take on menial jobs and change their clothes in public bathrooms. The lives of Kathy and Behrani circle, parallel, and intersect each other. Pride, anger, loss, desperation, law, love, strength, and weakness collide to create vast tragedy in this contemplative story of a battle for a house that overlooks the water.
But she cannot do that without destroying the lives of other people. Kathy must return to the house to be healed. For Kathy and Behrani the fight is not about money it is about home. He plans to sell the house at a profit to start his return to a position consistent with his education and ability. For him, buying the house will make it possible for him to quit his construction job.
The buyer is an immigrant, an Iranian colonel named Behrani (Ben Kingsley), who has spent almost all of his savings to maintain a lifestyle that enabled his daughter to marry well. Because she did not respond, the county evicts her and auctions the house for a fraction of its value. She has retreated so completely that she has not read her mail, which included an erroneous notice of an overdue tax bill. Following the breakup of her marriage, Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) retreats to her house - the house her father left her and her brother in his will.
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