Writer-director Ian Harnarine’s Doubles effectively captures what it feels like to be caught between promise and heritage, between anger and forgiveness, and between two rough situations, only one of which looks marginally better than the other. An extension of his exemplary 2011 short film, Doubles with Slight Pepper, Harnarine’s examination of fraught father-son relationships (inspired in part by the director’s own experiences with his dad) is fully immersed in Toronto’s Trinidadian community, and as such, speaks volumes to the experiences and weighty expectations faced by many immigrants and their families still living in the homeland.
In Trinidad, Dhani (Sanjiv Boodhu) and his mother, Sumintra (Leela Sitahal), are dedicated sellers of doubles, a beloved street food typically sold out of carts. But they are on the verge of financial destitution, something that only gets worse when Simintra is robbed one night while Dhani is out on the town. Dhani worries about his mother and the viability of the family business. Dhani would love to open up a proper shop selling “proper food,” but there’s no money to be found. To top it all off, most of Dhani’s friends see him as an unsuccessful punchline. When Dhani gets wind that his estranged father, Ragbir (Errol Sitahal), is making a killing as a chef in Toronto, the young man in his early twenties decides to use what little money he has at his disposal to see the old man.
But when Dhani gets to Canada right around Christmastime, it turns out that the rumours about Ragbir’s solvency are unfounded. Ragbir works as an undocumented dishwasher, lives in a windowless basement apartment, and is in poor health; desperately in need of a bone marrow transplant and unable to afford the medication he needs to live. Ragbir is excited to see his son, and wants to bond, but those feelings go unreciprocated. Since he knows dad has no money, Dhani asks instead for Ragbir to sign over the deed to the family’s ancestral lands so he can sell them and build a better life back in Trinidad.
Doubles illustrates a delicate situation, and while Harnarine’s story gets off to a start that’s a little too quick for its own good, the film settles into a nice groove once Dhani starts exploring the complex differences between Trinidadian and Canadian culture. In Canada there are marginally more opportunities for Dhani (even without a lot of trade skills and education), but there’s still little money to be made and the culture isn’t the same. There’s also little of the respect Dhani is subconsciously seeking to be found in either place. Dhani can see that his father has something that he and his mother have been missing, but he also questions if such little advancement is worth all the hardship and toll that has been taken on the family. Harnarine doesn’t claim to have any easy answers for his characters, but he’s willing to walk through such a complicated situation with them and treat them without judgment.
Dhani is quite sullen and harsh, but that mindset is understandable, and his mother wisely and sagely advises her son to help his father, but not to become him. Ragbir is suffering and excited to catch up with his son, but Harnarine never lets that character off the hook. Dhani forms a close bond with Anita (Rashaana Cumberbatch), a server at the inauthentic island themed restaurant where Ragbir works, but not after he gets over his jealousy at the fact that his dad was a surrogate father figure for her instead of caring for the family left abandoned in Trinidad. Once the stage is fully set, Doubles is able to confidently examine each character on their own flawed terms. The bonds between Dhani and Ragbir have been frayed, but the few strands left holding them together are unusually strong, and strengthen over the course of the film. The dynamic between father and son is deftly portrayed by the actors, with Errol Sitahal making a major impression as the ailing father.
Harnarine captures the city of Toronto in a loving light, especially its international food scene, but thankfully never portrays Canadian culture as a substitute for the warm feelings of an ideal life back home in Dhani and Ragbir’s native Trinidad. The constant pile up of varied cultures throughout differing neighbourhoods with divided or mixed identities is a nice visual metaphor for the experiences of the characters in Doubles. Harnarine’s work allows the viewer to feel like part of a community, even if that sense of togetherness is hard to define and is built on a bedrock of loss and hard decisions. No one in Doubles has life figured out, but they don’t need to. They all experience variations of the same themes.
Doubles opens at The Revue in Toronto on Friday, July 26, 2024, with a special cast and crew Q&A following the 6:30pm screening on Saturday, July 27. It also opens the same day at Cineplex Eglinton Town Centre, Burlington, Ajax, and Winston Churchill.
