Stray Dolls: A Stylish Genre Picture With A Twist
Sonejuhi Sinha’s stylishly seedy feature film debut, Stray Dolls, is a neon drenched motel noir with a few cards up its sleeve. Recycling familiar genre elements into something that feels wholly inspired and nuanced, Sinha drives her knife deep into the American dream and somehow manages to draw fresh blood, proving she’s a bold and confident new voice worth paying attention to.
Leaving India behind to break with a life of petty crime, Riz (Geetanjali Thapa) arrives stateside and gets a housekeeping job at the decidedly landlocked Tides Plaza Motel. Its manager, Una (Cynthia Nixon), houses and employs several other young people in dire straits, including Dallas (Olivia DeJonge), Riz’s new roommate. At first antagonistic, the girls soon realize that their opposite personalities complement each other. But when Riz is forced to steal from one of the motel rooms, she inadvertently sets off a series of violent events and becomes entangled in a web of crime. Desperate for agency, Riz and Dallas are forced to take matters into their own hands.
Stray Dolls twists up the outlaw romance of Bonnie and Clyde with the “Let’s keep going” vibe of Thelma & Louise to create a neo-noir that stylishly riffs on the last-chance motel genre, filtering its events through an outsider perspective that seems cut from the same cloth as Harmony Korine or Sean Baker. The film uses the immigrant experience and our modern times (lightly grazing the Trump era with one crucial, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene) to explore the elusiveness of the American dream in a way that feels vital and pressing. At first blush, one may wonder why Sinha (and co-writer Charlotte Rabate) even chose to include President Trump, since he’s not a continual presence like, say, Obama in Killing Them Softly. However, his tiny cameo seems to loom over everything, informing Stray Doll’s world and adding a necessary layer to the ever present aroma of desperation that permeates the Tides Plaza Motel.
The American dream is elusive as ever at the Tides Plaza Motel, and every single shady inhabitant has a dream they’re chasing after, a dream that’s realistically attainable but also just beyond reach. For Riz, the fresh-off-the boat illegal immigrant, she just wants to be free — and to check out Niagara Falls — living a life free from crime as an American citizen. Una, the Eastern European owner/manager of the Tides Motel, graciously provides Riz a room in exchange for her work as a maid, a favorable arrangement for any illegal immigrant, but in a classic case of wrong-place-wrong-time fashion, matters become complicated almost immediately. After being forced by her roommate, Dallas, a wild child with a drug problem, to steal from the motel’s clientele in order to get her belongings back, Riz’s dream begins to wriggle further and further away. Her disillusionment is well rendered in her many conversations with her mother in India via the motel’s phone booth, which recalls Selena Gomez calling her grandmother in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers.
Dallas dreams of scraping together enough dough to get out from under Una and leave the motel for good, and her and her kinda boyfriend, Jimmy (Robert Aramayo), a sleazy petty thief and drug pusher who’s also Una’s son, have a scheme to make it a reality. While Riz doesn’t initially factor into that plan, she eventually becomes the third wheel to Dallas and Jimmy’s plan — until the film takes a sapphic turn, leaving Jimmy the odd man out. Meanwhile, Una hopes to one day hand over the motel to Jimmy along with a brighter future, something which seems like a distorted daydream given that Una’s allowed the whole place to become morally corrupt. She appears to have a big heart, but we also see that she’s willing to do anything to get what she ways, immediately shredding Riz’s passport as a means of keeping her held in indentured servitude.
As the character’s become continuously more entangled, Stray Dolls pushes towards a softly heartbreaking conclusion, giving the genre’s fatalistic tendencies the shimmering glimmer of a dreamlike state. Sinha approaches things in a loose, almost catch-what-you-can style, and she showcases a keen eye for small details. Giving everything a stylishly seedy grime is Shane Sigler’s cinematography. Full of chemical yellows and neon smears of blue, red, and pink, Sigler brings the forlorn qualities of the motel into sharp focus. The nighttime scenes in particular (which are aplenty) are quite eye-catching, but it’s Stray Dolls’ dream sequences that really grab hold, giving the film’s ending a nice punch. The performances are pretty solid, with Geetanjali Thapa and Cynthia Nixon being the two big standouts. Nixon, in particular, is lowkey heartbreaking; it’s nice to see her distance herself from her Sex and the City characterization.
Overall, Stray Dolls is a well realized genre picture with a nice stylish finish. It does, perhaps, feel a little too familiar, but it pulls from some very interesting places and manages to squeeze some excitement out of an otherwise tired genre, like Blood Meridian or Mean Streets did (but to not so great an effect). Sonejuhi Sinha definitely has our attention, and we think you should give her yours, too.
Recommendation: Stray Dolls doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s a nuanced genre picture full of grit and gumption. Definitely give this one a whirl!
Rating: 3.5 tainted American Dreams outta 5.
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!