Tehran-born Milad Tangshir’s feature debut film, Anywhere Anytime, bills itself as a bold nod to Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 classic Bicycle Thieves. However, there’s a pensive tenderness in Tangshir’s direction that reframes the themes that made De Sica’s film an unwilling subject of oft-repeated pastiches. And while Anywhere Anytime follows in the footsteps of said homages, Tangshir has succeeded in creating a work that – flaws and all – is distinctly his own.
As a musician himself, Tangshir’s musicality shines in the film, with an eclectic mix of sounds and genres that blend Western and Wolof music. This is evident in the opening scene, where the use of jazz-infused music permeates the wee hours of the morning in a Turin marketplace, as vendors gradually arrive with their crates of goods, preparing for the day ahead.
The music then abruptly stops as the camera sets its sights on Issa (Ibrahima Sambou), one of the workers who suddenly hides inside the truck upon seeing random police officers patrolling the streets. That same morning, he gets the pink slip from his employer, who tells Issa that the latter’s status has been endangering the former’s business.
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Fired from his meagre job that allows him to get by, Issa asks his best friend Mario (Moussa Dicko Diango) for help. Mario, while willing to lend a hand, reminds Issa of the seriousness of his situation: As an undocumented immigrant, Issa faces an uphill climb just to secure a decent job that pays so he can send some money back home to Senegal.
Mario then convinces Issa to accept the offer to take up Mario’s old job – that of a food delivery driver. The job requires the riders to provide their own means of transport, so Mario gives Issa enough money to buy a bike, while also lending his phone and identity as Mario so that Issa could start accepting delivery orders right away.
While things go swimmingly at first – even spending a night riding around town with fellow immigrant Awa (Success Edemakhiota) – this new precarious balance collapses when Issa’s bike gets stolen on his first day of work. Driven by desperation, Issa embarks on an arduous journey to retrieve his stolen bike, unwittingly plunging himself into a vortex of events underscored by violence, racism, and a general air of indifference to his plight.
Anywhere Anytime gets its title from the food-delivery company that Issa works for, which I find very fitting for ironic reasons. As a brand name, it encapsulates the pervasive reach and demands of gig economy jobs, where workers like Issa are expected to be available at all times and in any place. Tangshir then does a commendable job contrasting the convenience for customers (hence the brand) and the harsh reality Issa faces. Imagine, something as simple as a bike can guarantee or raze someone’s survival – anywhere, at any time.
This comes to the fore in one particular scene, where in the middle of chasing a man he believes to be an accomplice to the theft, Issa receives a delivery order on his phone. However, seeing that the distance couldn’t be covered if he elected to deliver it by foot, he makes the difficult decision to simply cancel the request.
What Anywhere Anytime does well is to empathise with its characters. Even the bad guys in the film’s world, while committing intolerable criminal activities, are clearly products of an apathetic system. It helps that Tangshir’s worldview as an outsider gets centre stage here. His experience as an Iranian working with Senegalese and Italian actors in Italy is indicative of his sensitivity to the themes of displacement, belonging, and cultural hybridity. Without question, this very experience of navigating different cultures and identities clearly played a role in providing a unique lens through which he portrays Issa’s journey.
This brings me back to the Bicycle Thieves nod. Frankly, throughout its 80-minute runtime, I found myself forgetting that it riffs off De Sica’s classic. If anything, Anywhere Anytime reminded me more of Mira Shaib’s Arzé, a similarly themed film I watched earlier this year at Tribeca, and one that also found its bearings even before the third act began. What Tangshir does, however, is not to reinvent the wheels of the story, but to re-contextualise it within the framework of modern-day migration issues.
By making the film a standalone piece of world cinema, Tangshir draws inspiration from the Neorealist movement both in Italian and Iranian cinema. Whether by design or by accident, Tangshir’s direction shows an undercurrent of influence from the likes of Abbas Kiarostami and Majid Majidi, in that he chose to depict Issa’s struggles with focus on the protagonist’s resilience and dignity even in the face of hardship. In this regard, Ibrahima Sambou deserves credit, too. His performance lends credence to Tangshir’s directorial choices of zeroing in on the beauty and struggles of everyday life.
Just like with any first feature, the film isn’t without any issues. Introducing two supporting characters in the first 20 minutes of the film, only to discard them the rest of the way, is counterintuitive to what the film is trying to achieve. The late-night conversation between Issa and Awa could have been fleshed out more, or simply removed entirely. I mean, they even have a favourite bus to sleep on, and Awa even had dreams of becoming a singer.
In addition, Mario’s acts of kindness toward Issa didn’t get another scene. By omitting his character during the final stretch, it, in a way, felt like Issa didn’t deserve his kindness. Speaking of which, that same third act features the usual tendencies of heavy-handed writing. Thankfully, despite all these, Anywhere Anytime manages to explore the sense of fear and constant anxiety of those who, like Issa, live in the cracks of society – largely invisible and extremely vulnerable.
