“At first, Adam seems like a textbook example of how not to create a movie protagonist.” So writes Claire Armitstead in a Guardian article about the new movie “Sky Peals” and its director and lead actor, respectively Moin Hussein and Faraz Ayub. To which a reasonable observer who’s seen the picture might respond: “At first?”
Ms. Armitstead goes on to note that while Mr. Ayub’s portrayal of Adam is “unstinting” in its “hunched-shouldered lugubriousness,” he does, in the end, cut a sympathetic figure. To which another observer, perhaps one given to more charitable opinions, would reply: “Well, okay.”
All of which doesn’t forgive Mr. Hussein, who also wrote the screenplay, for making his protagonist something of a drip or Mr. Ayub for playing along with the director’s wishes. Still, what is a filmmaker to do with a character who is preternaturally withholding even as the story is, at its core, a study of those stifled emotions? It is, admittedly, a tough narrative row to hoe.
From the outset of “Sky Peals,” we intuit that Adam’s disassociated mumbling and bumbling have been occasioned by a series of seizures or, perhaps, memories that prove too much to bear. He’s given to periodic bouts of amnesia that are prefaced by blurs of flashing lights. As such, Adam has a hard time maintaining relationships — whether it be with his mother, Donna (the indomitable Claire Rushbrook), the new manager at work, Jeff (Steve Oram), or a pretty co-worker, Tara (Natalie Gavin). These people have a lot of patience. Is it churlish to wonder why they insist on putting up with Adam?
“Sky Peals” moves with a rhythm as diffident as its lead character. Mr. Hussein does, though, throw in narrative crumbs to keep things intriguing. When we first meet Adam, he’s listening to a message being left by his father on an answering machine. There’s not much time left, the brooding voice says, and too much time has passed since we’ve been together. Adam is nonplussed, but, then, he’s always nonplussed. His father abandoned the family when Adam was young. Telling his mother about this communication is, for the moment, out of the question.
Besides, Donna has other things on her mind: She’s leaving their current flat and moving in with a new beau. Adam has a matter of days to vacate the premises, but lingers on past the end of the lease only to wind up living in his car. In the meantime, he receives bad news from Uncle Hamid (Simon Nagra): Adam’s father has been found dead and the funeral is forthcoming.
Adam attends the service at a local mosque and meets members of the Pakistani community whom he has hitherto never encountered. We subsequently learn that it was Adam’s father, rather than his English mother, who insisted on separating the immediate family from its Pakistani roots.
Or did dad have another heritage altogether? In a plot development that is as effective as it is convenient, the security camera at Adam’s job, a fast-food joint situated in a peculiarly anodyne shopping mall, was trained on a parking lot in which his father is seen parking a car. Watching the security footage on various monitors, Adam sees his father exit the car, walk up a stairwell, and then amble through the mall’s skybridge — only to dematerialize in a flash of light. Adam rewinds the tape and plays it again, seeing this unlikely event confirmed. Forget Pakistan: Dad looks to have been from a galaxy far, far away.
Mr. Hussein has made a parable — and a surprisingly conservative one, at that — about identity, integration, and gratitude. He even goes so far to suggest that there are few things quite as healing as the love of a good woman or, at least, the friendship a woman can offer. Although “Sky Peals” is marked by glitches in character and plot, it is also predicated on an understated sense of cinematic possibility.
On the evidence, and despite the film’s frustrations, Mr. Hussein bears watching as he moves forward with the stories he has to tell.