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Seattle's "Know Your Place": Film Review
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As you may know, I once worked briefly as a film critic in Hollywood. This is an essay about the first film made about the communities and spaces I now work in. A meeting of my worlds!
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I won’t try to convince you it’s a great film. You can decide (watch the trailer here). But it is a special film, and not just for us Seattleites, nor just for East African immigrant communities. It will be both of those things for many of us, because it offers delights unique in our current cinematic landscape.
1. The Big Picture
As with American discourse historically, explicit mention of class is subdued in today's culture wars. You know that identity politics have experienced a renewed and forceful attention to race and gender, but what's often left out of the conversation is what every ethnic studies student knows: it's never just race, but always race and class. Films nowadays tend to depict either the incredibly wealthy or the spectacularly destitute. Now that the middle class has become the working class, where are the films about that vast swath of American life? The films about people who drive Honda Civics? Not everyone lives in either a back alley or a high-rise.
Know Your Place is, to its great credit, not a political film. It makes its points by showing, not telling. The title reminds us of the pronounced importance that geography has in the identity of working-class peoples, but this isn't something the characters reflect on; they're too busy living the realities of their lives to academically analyze their inclinations. When a Black boy gazes upon John Gast’s painting American Progress, that symbolic epitome of White westward expansion, we are invited as viewers to reflect on the ironies and losses implicit; but the boy remains silent, and the filmmakers wisely refrain from telling us what, or how, to think about the moment. Contemporary studio pictures are desperate to tell us what we should believe; director Zia Mohajerjasbi feels instead more like a student of 1970s New Hollywood, wherein the audience was assumed to be perceptive, a crucial ingredient in ‘completing’ the picture, adding to it by supplying their own interpretation.
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I won’t try to convince you it’s a great film. You can decide (watch the trailer here). But it is a special film, and not just for us Seattleites, nor just for East African immigrant communities. It will be both of those things for many of us, because it offers delights unique in our current cinematic landscape.
1. The Big Picture
As with American discourse historically, explicit mention of class is subdued in today's culture wars. You know that identity politics have experienced a renewed and forceful attention to race and gender, but what's often left out of the conversation is what every ethnic studies student knows: it's never just race, but always race and class. Films nowadays tend to depict either the incredibly wealthy or the spectacularly destitute. Now that the middle class has become the working class, where are the films about that vast swath of American life? The films about people who drive Honda Civics? Not everyone lives in either a back alley or a high-rise.
Know Your Place is, to its great credit, not a political film. It makes its points by showing, not telling. The title reminds us of the pronounced importance that geography has in the identity of working-class peoples, but this isn't something the characters reflect on; they're too busy living the realities of their lives to academically analyze their inclinations. When a Black boy gazes upon John Gast’s painting American Progress, that symbolic epitome of White westward expansion, we are invited as viewers to reflect on the ironies and losses implicit; but the boy remains silent, and the filmmakers wisely refrain from telling us what, or how, to think about the moment. Contemporary studio pictures are desperate to tell us what we should believe; director Zia Mohajerjasbi feels instead more like a student of 1970s New Hollywood, wherein the audience was assumed to be perceptive, a crucial ingredient in ‘completing’ the picture, adding to it by supplying their own interpretation.
2. The Concept
Know Your Place depicts a milieu without judgment, involving the viewer in Seattle’s Ethiopian community in all its rich complexities. We follow two boys over the course of a day as lessons are learned, friendships are tested, and insights are gained. The familiarity of this underlying structure is a useful counterpoint to the intense specificity of the world shown. Seattle's Rainier Valley, Central District, its ethnic enclaves and their secrets and joys– these have not been seen in American film before. We need the archetypal journey to grab onto, the better to be able to appreciate the local detail. Also, Mohajerjasbi goes further in his structural gambit, attempting and somehow succeeding in the deeply implausible prospect of a coming-of-age that happens within a single day. Our heroes, two teen boys with preciously undeveloped emotional registers, go about their day as many of us once did, deeply unaware of what we will later cherish and value.
Do you remember the youthful days of careless abandon, both restless and happy, when the opinions of peers felt like the only thing that mattered? None of us were our best selves then, and the same is true here. Joseph Smith and Natnael Mebrahtu, nonprofessionals playing versions of themselves with impressive verisimilitude, exude the blustery aimless confidence they haven't yet realized would benefit from direction, introspection and vulnerability.
As in many immigrant communities, these children are desperate to be “American," to separate themselves from their families, refusing to speak their parents’ language and dressing, walking and talking in an inarguably West Coast urban vernacular. Only we viewers are made aware of the vast cultural knowledge these youngsters are throwing away. When an adult family friend and community member encourages them to embrace their heritage, pointing out that it's ultimately the central element of their identities and always will be, they are unable to respond with anything but dismissive humor… but in a beautiful moment of nuance, you can sense the idea is landing within them, a first seed settling, destined to one day take root. The ego death that cements one's coming of age may be a long ways off for these two young friends, but the birth of that journey is hinted at throughout the day depicted, beautifully, subtly, and with great nuance.
Mohajerjasbi favors a cinemascope frame and wide lenses, together with a filmlike tone curve, to capture a lived-in authenticity that recalls both New Hollywood and the Italian Neorealists. There are echoes of Cassavetes in the naturalism of the performances– entirely by first-time actors and friends of the director, who is deeply embedded in the communities he depicts– and the quality of these performances is uniformly excellent, a testament to both the actors and Mohajerjasbi’s ability in coaxing such talent out of newcomers. As a director myself the challenge of pulling this off can't be overstated. Of particular note is an extended monologue delivered in a kitchen, in simple close-up, which has all the power of Ibsen or August Wilson.
Know Your Place depicts a milieu without judgment, involving the viewer in Seattle’s Ethiopian community in all its rich complexities. We follow two boys over the course of a day as lessons are learned, friendships are tested, and insights are gained. The familiarity of this underlying structure is a useful counterpoint to the intense specificity of the world shown. Seattle's Rainier Valley, Central District, its ethnic enclaves and their secrets and joys– these have not been seen in American film before. We need the archetypal journey to grab onto, the better to be able to appreciate the local detail. Also, Mohajerjasbi goes further in his structural gambit, attempting and somehow succeeding in the deeply implausible prospect of a coming-of-age that happens within a single day. Our heroes, two teen boys with preciously undeveloped emotional registers, go about their day as many of us once did, deeply unaware of what we will later cherish and value.
Do you remember the youthful days of careless abandon, both restless and happy, when the opinions of peers felt like the only thing that mattered? None of us were our best selves then, and the same is true here. Joseph Smith and Natnael Mebrahtu, nonprofessionals playing versions of themselves with impressive verisimilitude, exude the blustery aimless confidence they haven't yet realized would benefit from direction, introspection and vulnerability.
As in many immigrant communities, these children are desperate to be “American," to separate themselves from their families, refusing to speak their parents’ language and dressing, walking and talking in an inarguably West Coast urban vernacular. Only we viewers are made aware of the vast cultural knowledge these youngsters are throwing away. When an adult family friend and community member encourages them to embrace their heritage, pointing out that it's ultimately the central element of their identities and always will be, they are unable to respond with anything but dismissive humor… but in a beautiful moment of nuance, you can sense the idea is landing within them, a first seed settling, destined to one day take root. The ego death that cements one's coming of age may be a long ways off for these two young friends, but the birth of that journey is hinted at throughout the day depicted, beautifully, subtly, and with great nuance.
Mohajerjasbi favors a cinemascope frame and wide lenses, together with a filmlike tone curve, to capture a lived-in authenticity that recalls both New Hollywood and the Italian Neorealists. There are echoes of Cassavetes in the naturalism of the performances– entirely by first-time actors and friends of the director, who is deeply embedded in the communities he depicts– and the quality of these performances is uniformly excellent, a testament to both the actors and Mohajerjasbi’s ability in coaxing such talent out of newcomers. As a director myself the challenge of pulling this off can't be overstated. Of particular note is an extended monologue delivered in a kitchen, in simple close-up, which has all the power of Ibsen or August Wilson.
3. The Place
I had the fortune of seeing the film theatrically, and as an audience we gasped at the beauty of our city onscreen. This is not the Seattle of Sleepless in Seattle or Singles or even the wonderful Lynn Shelton pictures. It's the city of my passengers, an aged, ethnic and multi-seasonal beast, sometimes awash in fog and autumnal hues, other times blazing with hard winter light, alive to our famously mercurial atmospheres.
Additionally, no film has shot in the neighborhoods Know Your Place goes to: the CD, Rainier Beach, Little Saigon, Brighton, Sodo. Over and over I found myself struck by the emotional authenticity of the location scouting: when Mebrahtu steps outside of Sunset Café, the Ethiopian restaurant on Rainier and Rose, and gestures toward the train station for the next plot point, he's pointing in the correct real-world direction. When the boys miss their bus in Chinatown and we cut to them completing their walk at 26th and Alder, I heard the audience sigh at the reality of that distance. Some of us have walked it.
Things like this help a film feel grounded, even if we don't know the local geography. It helps the performances. Even moments that are geographically fanciful, such as a clever match-cut involving 4th and Edgar Martinez Drive, strike us as ingenious, causing us to see the city in a new way. In the most subtle bit of insider baseball, the first intra-bus dialogue scene, although shot on a diesel coach, actually features the sounds of an electric trolley bus in motion– as would be the case on a route 3 heading east on Cherry Street. They had to have known almost no one would notice that detail. But they did it anyway (did they know I'd be watching this??).
The significant presence throughout of public transit, as a liminal but essential space where life happens, is likewise not commented on, but remains noticeable in its contrast to other films, which often lack awareness of this reality in working-class life. There are things a Hollywood screenwriter just isn't going to know.
I had the fortune of seeing the film theatrically, and as an audience we gasped at the beauty of our city onscreen. This is not the Seattle of Sleepless in Seattle or Singles or even the wonderful Lynn Shelton pictures. It's the city of my passengers, an aged, ethnic and multi-seasonal beast, sometimes awash in fog and autumnal hues, other times blazing with hard winter light, alive to our famously mercurial atmospheres.
Additionally, no film has shot in the neighborhoods Know Your Place goes to: the CD, Rainier Beach, Little Saigon, Brighton, Sodo. Over and over I found myself struck by the emotional authenticity of the location scouting: when Mebrahtu steps outside of Sunset Café, the Ethiopian restaurant on Rainier and Rose, and gestures toward the train station for the next plot point, he's pointing in the correct real-world direction. When the boys miss their bus in Chinatown and we cut to them completing their walk at 26th and Alder, I heard the audience sigh at the reality of that distance. Some of us have walked it.
Things like this help a film feel grounded, even if we don't know the local geography. It helps the performances. Even moments that are geographically fanciful, such as a clever match-cut involving 4th and Edgar Martinez Drive, strike us as ingenious, causing us to see the city in a new way. In the most subtle bit of insider baseball, the first intra-bus dialogue scene, although shot on a diesel coach, actually features the sounds of an electric trolley bus in motion– as would be the case on a route 3 heading east on Cherry Street. They had to have known almost no one would notice that detail. But they did it anyway (did they know I'd be watching this??).
The significant presence throughout of public transit, as a liminal but essential space where life happens, is likewise not commented on, but remains noticeable in its contrast to other films, which often lack awareness of this reality in working-class life. There are things a Hollywood screenwriter just isn't going to know.
4. Broadly
There are these decisions and others, of which I'll leave you to discover. I'll mention just one more– the scene in which our heroes are accosted by an overzealous police officer. Depicting such moments on film is a fraught enterprise, as audiences often interpret them as broadly representational rather than specific, and the grating temptation toward preaching to the converted is strong. Mohajerjasbi chooses to intercut the interrogation with various adults of color confronting the camera silently, with calm and resilient dignity. He both undercuts the scene’s tension and deepens it, tying it to universal histories and asking us to consider the larger picture, in a way that lets us decide how we feel.
Mohajerjasbi and his crew have created something that, in earlier times, would have made a huge splash. The corporate obsession to try to remove cinema from the domain of art and plant it firmly in the realm of product, of satisfying the quarterly bottom line, has reduced its cultural value. We used to expect films to comment on society, to reflect and refract the best and worst of our times in ways that were complex, edifying, and artistically trailblazing. Such work is now relegated to the margins, but our future film historians will celebrate, dissect, and advocate for these works with a vigor that will make us wonder how audiences ever bothered to watch anything else. (For a precedent of this, look at the highest grossing films of each year in the 1980s, a decade similarly obsessed with finance, and notice how many of the titles aren't even recognizable to us now.)
Time sifts out the dregs. Know Your Place may not join the pantheon of canonized classics, but it will remain special for Seattleites for a long time. Is it a masterpiece? I use that word sparingly, so I have to say no; but does it need to be a masterpiece? Do we always have to rate everything, evaluate, have a “hot take?" Can't an artwork just be what it is, and can't we just appreciate what it has to offer, and what it makes us think about? Because there's no doubt Know Your Place does all that and more.
There are these decisions and others, of which I'll leave you to discover. I'll mention just one more– the scene in which our heroes are accosted by an overzealous police officer. Depicting such moments on film is a fraught enterprise, as audiences often interpret them as broadly representational rather than specific, and the grating temptation toward preaching to the converted is strong. Mohajerjasbi chooses to intercut the interrogation with various adults of color confronting the camera silently, with calm and resilient dignity. He both undercuts the scene’s tension and deepens it, tying it to universal histories and asking us to consider the larger picture, in a way that lets us decide how we feel.
Mohajerjasbi and his crew have created something that, in earlier times, would have made a huge splash. The corporate obsession to try to remove cinema from the domain of art and plant it firmly in the realm of product, of satisfying the quarterly bottom line, has reduced its cultural value. We used to expect films to comment on society, to reflect and refract the best and worst of our times in ways that were complex, edifying, and artistically trailblazing. Such work is now relegated to the margins, but our future film historians will celebrate, dissect, and advocate for these works with a vigor that will make us wonder how audiences ever bothered to watch anything else. (For a precedent of this, look at the highest grossing films of each year in the 1980s, a decade similarly obsessed with finance, and notice how many of the titles aren't even recognizable to us now.)
Time sifts out the dregs. Know Your Place may not join the pantheon of canonized classics, but it will remain special for Seattleites for a long time. Is it a masterpiece? I use that word sparingly, so I have to say no; but does it need to be a masterpiece? Do we always have to rate everything, evaluate, have a “hot take?" Can't an artwork just be what it is, and can't we just appreciate what it has to offer, and what it makes us think about? Because there's no doubt Know Your Place does all that and more.
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