Omar’s struggle to play his grandfather’s oub again, in the wake of recovering from a broken arm that he presumably incurred during his journey to Scotland, serves as a routine metaphor for resilience and rebirth. Limbo grows at once more conventional and ambitious as it proceeds. When a shopkeeper (Sanjeev Kohli) instructs the film’s Syrian protagonist, Omar (Amir El-Masry), to consult a list of banned racial slurs pinned to a wall, he accidentally reads a sign warning people not to urinate in the frozen section. When the class is asked to fashion sentences opening with “I used to,” a man says that he used to have “a beautiful house before it was blown up by coalition forces” with a casualness that’s both hilarious (for puncturing the patness of the exercise) and devastating. ![]() Running underneath these broad bits, concerning courtship rituals, job interviews, and the like is an awareness of how quickly platitudes can inadvertently reveal the unimaginable pain that refugees have experienced. One of its best and most suggestive jokes concerns a series of classes that teach the refugees how to adjust to English-speaking Western culture. Limbo seesaws between the haunting and the irritating. Certain visual flourishes are hauntingly inexplicable-such as a telephone booth in the middle of the countryside to which the refugees must go to speak to their families-while others are irritatingly cute, such as a shot of a man driving a bright-red truck that matches his coat. In other words, Sharrock has studied the compositional strategies of Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki, and Wes Anderson, and he proves to be an adept student. Sharrock uses this island’s beauty as a source of pungent visual irony, contrasting the locale with the stiff body language of his characters, who are positioned in symmetrical frames that their emphasize isolation and emotional paralysis. Considering the various alternatives, they have what appears to be a decent setup, as the island is the sort of beautiful haven that tourists would flock to see. ![]() Limbo is set on a fictional Scottish island, where refugees are awaiting grants of asylum. They’re also, unfortunately, allowed to be precious. In Limbo, refugees are allowed to be as ordinary as anyone else, with regular dreams, disappointments, and hang-ups. Sharrock persuasively intimates that to only see refugees in the context of despair and chaos and verité news footage is to dehumanize them, for defining them only by their suffering. There’s a hint of blasphemy to treating such material lightly, and this suggestion imbues the film’s early stretches with a lively tartness. ![]() Ben Sharrock’s Limbo spins the migrant crisis into the sort of absurdist, life-affirming boutique dramedy that used to be called “quirky” and was once regularly released by studios like Miramax and Fox Searchlight Pictures.
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