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Too many filmmakers with sociological interests reduce their films to being “illustrative” parables where everything becomes symbolic.

What’s so admirable about him is his lack of totality, his disdain for the iconic. Why? What is it that’s in a Bahrani that isn’t, for instance, in a Reichardt? Why do I admire a Bahrani in a way I wouldn’t a Katz or a Tully (aside from the presence of a certain conscience)? Maybe because he makes films for a purpose without reducing cinema to that purpose. You can be as certain of that as of the fact that the Valentino crowd didn’t come to see “a Matt Tyrnauer movie.” Every Bahrani inspires a certain excitement in me. But the few us that are there to watch Goodbye Solo (and there are very few of us) probably didn’t come because we wanted to see a movie about a cab driver and a suicide we came to see a “Ramin Bahrani movie,” even if we’d never seen one before. We know what Goodbye Solo’s got that Valentino doesn’t: doors and windows ( Valentino is nothing but cars and hotels and dressing rooms). Valentino’s crowd is much larger-the film promises “Europe,” but it gives only images, flat as a computer screen Goodbye Solo promises nothing, and gives you the world.

So people going to either movie must take the same path down the same bit of hallway and then turn their respective theaters: they to see the world of glamour in Paris, Venice and New York we to see a cab driver in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

The theaters are the exact same size, but there are obvious differences: Theater 1, playing Valentino, is home to a state-of-the-art HD projection system Theater 2, playing Goodbye Solo, is the one with the disclaimer warning patrons that, due to a mistake on the part of the architects, their theater absorbs the shocks of the parking lot and the adjacent Bally’s gym and will therefore occasionally shake and shudder. It’s one of those strange accidents of moviegoing: the Landmark Century Center, one of two cinemas in the country currently playing Goodbye Solo, has put the movie in their leftmost wing, a shadowy little nook with two theaters-the other playing Valentino: The Last Emperor, a dull movie with a better trailer.