Window Horses starts poorly, but it becomes engrossing fairly rapidly. The animation style of the film is ugly and uninteresting and the early plot maneuvers are heavily based on multiple contrived coincidences. Yet, the film is absorbing once it hits the second act. The narrative, however implausible in its nascent stages, is set by this point, the animation, too, is established and the core of the story is able to shine through. That core is about heritage, diaspora, cultural encounter and identity, themes that Window Horses treats with careful agility and genuine pathos.
The film tells the story of budding poet Rosie Ming (Sandra Oh), a Vancouverite of multicultural heritage. Her mother was ethnically Chinese, but born in Canada, and her father was an exile from post-revolution Iran. Rosie lives with her Chinese grandparents, as her mother died when she was a young child and her father vanished.
In the first act, Rosie gets invited to a poetry festival in Shiraz, Iran. She did not apply to the festival, but was instead discovered by the organizers and offered a spot on the performance roster. Rosie is both excited and unsure; she would love to travel but is a Francophile with eyes only for Paris. Her grandparents—with whom she still lives—too, are reluctant to allow her to go. Yet, she decides to make the journey, her first one abroad.
Once in Shiraz, Rosie begins the festival by embarrassing herself, or so it seems. Window Horses has a puerile way of putting large information dumps of cultural exposition within the dialogue. After her first poetry reading, several characters explain to Rosie that her style and choices were not ones that would be received well by an Iranian audience. This structure—poetry reading by a character followed by a minute-long line of dialogue explaining something about Persian culture—is repeated multiple times throughout the film. It is neither dynamic nor interesting filmmaking.
The poetry festival presents little to enjoy throughout Window Horses. The characters are generally banal stereotypes and unlikable. Where the film gets its energy is a plot line involving Rosie translating one of the other performer’s poems from Chinese to English so that she may read it. Again, this plot point’s existence is a bit of contrivance: it is quite convenient that a Chinese-Iranian-Canadian such as Rosie would happen to participate in a festival in Iran with a Chinese man.
Still, in spite of the way this narrative strand is commenced, it is here that the film takes off. Window Horses dives deep into questions about language—Rosie does not know Mandarin and the only dictionaries she can find are Chinese-Farsi and English-Farsi, so she must translate the poem twice, from one of her heritage languages into the other, neither of which she knows, and then into her own native language. This is a salient and ultimately beautiful commentary on exile, identity and globalization, even if takes some silly plot acrobatics to set it up. Rosie must explore what it means to be the unique person that she happens to be, and in the process Window Horses grapples with questions of central importance for people living in the 21st century.
Rosie also learns, and here some eye rolls are appropriate, that her estranged father is living in Shiraz. She tracks him down, expunging some demons related to his abandonment of her during childhood in the process. The film culminates in a rather predictable and way too-heavily foreshadowed climax that resolves some of the principal issues while riffing on Window Horses’ thesis about the importance of cultural encounter.
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