Plastic Bag (2009)

An epic journey of a plastic bag from the grocery store all the way to the North Pacific Trash Vortex. It is a portion of the Pacific Ocean that spans 500 nautical miles of spinning garbage. A stark reality that is shed upon in this short film by Ramin Bahrani, director of other films such as Chop Shop, Man Push Cart and Goodbye Solo.

Ramin smartly brought aboard director Werner Herzog to do a first person narrative from the perspective of the bag. It is a poetic, succinct, and heartfelt portrayal of an existential plastic bag yearning for more. The short is reminiscent of the classic short film, The Red Balloon. In both Plastic Bag and The Red Balloon, the inanimate objects have a life of their own. They're developed into a character in which the audience becomes emotionally attached. Just like the balloon in The Red Balloon, one wonders just how Bahrani was able to manipulate the plastic bag so well. Luckily for the audience, it shares more with that movie than that famous scene from American Beauty that must come to mind to some when they come upon this short film's premise.

The arc is similar to that of Spielberg's A.I. The bag yearns to return to his maker and goes on a journey to do so. Unlike A.I. though, Bahrani effectively uses subtlety to great effect while not masking his themes with sentimentality. In the bag's journey, it deals with the alienation of one's surroundings. It has no place in nature and the contrast of it's interactions with the outside world show it. With many filmmakers, this point would be hammered home, but in Bahrani's film it absorbs into the mind of the viewer over the course of it's running time with grace and fluidity.

Plastic Bag ends up a story of the loneliness of immortality and of human responsibility. A very enjoyable aspect is that after the bag is discarded by the woman at the beginning of the film, there is no human to be seen. We are spectators of a vast landscape of just the Earth and the creations of Man interacting with one another. The picture of what the world may be if everyone continues to get their chips and their sodas double and triple bagged for the sake of convenience. An artistic and subtle gem that perfectly melds with Bahrani's filmography and his stories of the American experience told through the outsider's perspective.