As with most famous film cities, the New York of cinema is idealized as a land of opportunity, defined by open avenues and wide thoroughfares, whether these roads lead its strivers and aspirants to success or to ruin. Yet for most residents of America’s biggest metropolis, the ambitions of wide-eyed dreamers are largely incidental to their everyday reality, a fact that seems especially pertinent as rampant gentrification drives cost of living through the roof. Tapping into this discomfort, and pulling inspiration from gritty noir classics like Naked City and Blast of Silence, recent films like Good Time have drawn on this undercurrent of mounting outer-borough angst. Andrew Dosunmu’s Where is Kyra?, meanwhile, approaches a similar subject in an entirely different vein, charting the gradual unraveling of a woman on the margins, a string of bad choices pushing her from into a decidedly unspectacular conflict with the law.
Yet what results from this imbroglio is a surprising, stylized enigma of a film: a story about the struggles of aging wrapped inside of an acute economic parable, utilizing a spare Neorealist plot entwined within the sinewy simplicity of a ‘50s B-movie. Set in the shadows of the elevated cross-Queens 7 line, in gloomy, windswept locations from Long Island City to Jackson Heights, it depicts a functional underworld without the usual criminal elements, the kind of environment explored in work like James Gray’s similarly stygian Two Lovers, with some clear tricks borrowed from the Brooklyn director’s style. Here though, the oppressiveness of overwhelming family structures is replaced with the prominent absence thereof, in working-class neighborhoods where any sense of community has by now dissipated.
This presents a clear pivot from Dosunmu’s previous effort, 2013’s Mother of George, whose Bed-Stuy Yoruba milieu imagined family as a fraught—albeit intensely vivid—network of familial and cultural affiliations. While that film’s heroine was forced to embark on a secretive quest amid a labyrinth of prying eyes and questioning relatives, this one’s does the same in a setting defined by its lack of close relationships. Michelle Pfeiffer plays Kyra, a few years off a divorce but still not quite back on her feet, now serving as her elderly, housebound mother’s sole caretaker. After her mother dies, saddled with the stress of finding work while settling the old woman’s affairs, she eventually falls into impersonating the old woman, in order to continue cashing her weekly pension checks.
Ensconced in her mother’s cluttered, tomb-like apartment, Kyra dons the gray wig, heavy coat and cataract sunglasses necessary for this transformation, surrounded by old objects which she cannot sell off. Building upon the masterful camerawork exhibited in their previous films, Dosunmu and cinematographer Bradford Young again prove precise cataloguers of such stifling, overstuffed spaces, an aesthetic extended to rain-streaked streets and narrow barrooms. Pfeiffer tackles her difficult role with aplomb, managing to evoke the exhausted ambivalence of a beautiful, dignified woman forced to flirt with decrepitude as a means of survival, too old to land receptionist jobs but too young to qualify for social benefits. Kiefer Sutherland, meanwhile, offers an impressive turn as Kyra’s embattled ex-con love interest, a man whose inborn impulses are similarly frustrated, his quasi-heroic efforts to assist this wounded woman derailing his noble attempts to stick to the straight and narrow.
Besides functioning as a decent argument for a universal basic income, Where is Kyra? also works as a distinct marriage of stylistic bombast and narrative nuance. As with Mother of George, it abounds in unorthodox setups and sophisticated split-frame compositions, characters placed in awkward positions that emphasize negative space and interpersonal isolation. The film’s only real flaw is its incessant visual dreariness, which fits the somber tone but lacks the eye-popping intensity of Mother of George. That gets made up for via an increase in overall complexity, a compelling pocket drama that also serves as a fascinating portrait of people out of place and a community in flux, layers laid atop one another to form a dense, dizzying composite work.
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