Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

“The movies are like a machine that generates empathy,” Roger Ebert once said. “It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.” Stand Clear of the Closing Doors illustrates this principle as well as any fiction film in recent memory. The second feature from Sam Fleischner—and his first solo directing effort—has a meandering, somewhat underdeveloped quality to it, and yet this drama compensates with a quiet compassion for its characters. Like the film itself, they’re initially unremarkable but slowly and modestly begin to assert themselves, rewarding our patient attention without ever demanding it.
Set over the span of about a week in late October 2012, the film stars Jesus Sanchez-Velez as Ricky, a 13-year-old living in Rockaway Beach with his overworked illegal immigrant mother Mariana (Andrea Suarez Paz) and bratty sister Carla (Azul Zorrilla). A non-professional actor with Asperger’s, Sanchez-Velez is supremely vulnerable in the role of a boy diagnosed with autism. Ricky is sweet, but he’s also a handful. When he doesn’t take his medication, he can make mistakes like peeing on the toilet lid. And, in the incident that sets the film’s plot in motion, when he becomes distracted while his mom is scolding him on the phone, he can wander into the New York City subway system instead of coming home from school.
Stand Clear of the Closing Doors concerns Mariana’s realization that her son is missing, and the film is split into two sections: one in which she and Carla unsuccessfully try to track him down, and the other in which Ricky endlessly rides the subway, observing his fellow passengers both in the cars and on the platforms. Rose Lichter-Marck and Micah Bloomberg’s screenplay isn’t constructed to be a tense search picture, however. Atmospheric and languid, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors seems to be channeling Ricky’s wandering, obsessive mind. The camera focuses on real-life subway passengers with documentary-like simplicity, but the film also conjures up a dreamy mood as subway lights and random images overwhelm the frame for a few moments. At the same time, Mariana and Carla tensely live in the same apartment—Carla didn’t pick up Ricky after school like she normally does, which makes her mother furious at her—and Mariana hopelessly roams the beach, one of Ricky’s favorite spots, in the off chance that he might be there.