“You can live any place you want,” Muhammad tells his son Yosef in “Pinball,” noting the tradition of the Bedouins who had no stationary home in their native Middle East, simply settling down anywhere the essentials could be found. Water, electricity and other basic amenities may be readily available in Louisville, Kentucky where the two ended up residing after the family was forced to flee Iraq for their safety in 2004, but still Yosef now in his early twenties and more free to think about where he’d like to spend his life has a longing to return to his ancestral home, claiming to know it in his bones when his “body doesn’t feel at home here.”
It’s a feeling that he has made every attempt to shake in Naveen Chaubal’s fascinating portrait of the displaced young man, not only appearing now fully Westernized from the Armani-branded black T-shirt he wears so casually, but trying every alternative therapy he can to put himself at ease from meditative podcasts to recover from the work he puts into a pursuit of an unlikely professional soccer career on top of standing all day at the job that keeps a roof over his head as a fry cook. “Pinball” reveals a side of immigration that hasn’t been considered much, at least on screen when Yosef ties a restlessness typically associated with his age to having to leave a homeland he never really got to know, last seeing it when he was five, and he’s been put in a tough position by his father, who can’t understand his son’s longing to return when his own memories of such a tough time are vivid yet being older, he plots the occasional trip back to see his mother and leaves his son at home to keep paying the bills. As the film wears on, you suspect that Mohammed’s habit of coming and going has left his son adrift – he tells him over the phone he’s going back to Iraq during a soccer practice as if he’s running out to grab some groceries – and a lack of consideration has likely led to a divorce from his wife and estrangement from his daughter Aazra, which has put some distance between them and Yosef as well.
With a family that’s rarely together and a nagging void in his mind about what life abroad could be, Yosef has a more complicated decision than most when deciding to proceed with his education or not, with a counselor at his community college seeming to have a better idea of his future than he has. The feeling of stasis may be deeply frustrating to work through for him, but Chaubal finds the frisson where Yosef fears paralysis, carefully composing shots that show how encumbering a life in Louisville is when it feels as if he has no one to turn to within the walls of a usually empty house and a chameleonic score from Will Epstein where it’s hardly the same emotions that crop up for Yosef scene to scene, hitting different notes that desperately tries to form some kind of rhythm as the film’s lead does. “Pinball” is engaging on a purely artistic level throughout, but really finds traction when Aazra travels to Egypt and all but confirms what Yosef thinks might be possible for himself from her dispatches, ultimately leading to another trip they’d go on together.
When only experience can give Yosef peace of mind, the film is able to quantify how much uncertainty there is without it and it’s assumed that the film’s title is a matter of geography given the number of countries that Yosef has already had to live in his young life, having made stops in Jordan and Egypt before landing in Louisville where the family received asylum, but increasingly it reflects something internal. It may not sit right with him that there’s a piece of himself that he may never be able to reach when it exists both in a time and locale he has only the vaguest memories of and Chaubal creates something indelible when vividly expressing how displacement leaves so much else unsettled.
“Pinball” will screen again at True/False on March 8th at 12:15 pm at Windsor Auditorium.