Soundtrack to the Tribeca Film Festival

Originally posted May 6, 2007.

Donovan: “Mellow Yellow” on a green guitar. 

(Photo by Scott Gries/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)

 By Mary Lyn Maiscott

“Music loves film, and film loves music.” I know, this doesn’t quite make sense, but what if I tell you Donovan said it? Then it kind of works, doesn’t it?

The musicians playing the wonderful Tribeca/ASCAP Music Lounge, held at the Canal Room May 1-4, sometimes felt the need to muster up a direct tie between the two art forms, but they really didn’t need to. People—often between movies—were just there for the songs, and many of the songs were great, especially as delivered in such an intimate setting (and with an open bar nearby). Nevertheless, Jon Auer, of the Posies and Big Star, introduced one song as “an audio version of a Douglas Sirk film”; Adam Schlesinger and Mike Viola performed Schlesinger’s über-catchy “That Thing You Do!” from the eponymous 1996 movie; and Donovan—elfin as always in striped pants and a black waistcoat—revealed that his friend David Lynch loves “Season of the Witch” (as did we, the audience).

Mary Gauthier: Hardscrabble lives set to music. 
(Photo by Scott Gries/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)

Another recurring theme was the sad song, with which many of the artists identified: Folk singer Mary Gauthier, declaring herself the “anti-Donovan”—the ’60s icon was on the same Wednesday bill—said at one point that she should be playing a happy song for a change but that she hadn’t yet written one. Similarly, as a kind of disclaimer for a love song he’d written for his wife (“Angelita”), Jon Auer, whose new album is entitled Songs from the Year of Our Demise, asked rhetorically, “Who am I, fuckin’ Paul McCartney? Fuckin’ Ben Lee?” This was another inside joke of sorts: Lee had played only two sets before, and had wowed the crowd with his self-possessed charm (the David Lee Roth scissor kicks went over big), slightly askew tunes, and peace-and-love vibe (especially with “We’re All in This Together,” sung standing on the bar). John Doe and Exene Cervenka, founding members of the punk band X, reminded us of our current political situation with “Lonesome War” and “Will Jesus Wash the Bloodstains from Your Hands?”

John Doe and Exene Cervenka: X marks the spot. 
(Photo by Scott Gries/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)

Which brings me back to Mary Gauthier. Her songs are indeed filled with gravitas, as befits a middle-aged woman who has seen some hard times. And now we’re all seeing hard times as a nation; I think that’s one reason that her eloquent “Mercy” struck a nerve. The wonder of art is that even when it’s evoking the terrible, if it’s good it lifts us up, and Gauthier’s music was truly transporting.

Another thing about art: even within one form, it comes in many varieties. For the Music Lounge, Loretta Muñoz and her crew at ASCAP put together an eclectic lineup. Besides the artists already mentioned, it included such diverse talents as songwriter legend Jimmy Webb, bluesy chanteuse Alice Smith, and, in a rousing finish to the four-day event, rock ’n’ roll idol John Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls. To quote Donovan again (quoting Pink Floyd), “Shine on, you crazy diamonds.”

Manhattan Rhapsody

Originally posted May 3, 2007.

Kate (Debra Messing) finally gives Murphy (Edward Burns)
the time of day in Burns’s Purple Violets.

Purple Violets
Written and Directed by Edward Burns
Starring Selma Blair, Patrick Wilson, Debra Messing, and Edward Burns
 
By Mary Lyn Maiscott

“Pulp and popcorn and the same old crap.” This is Brian Callahan (Patrick Wilson), author of several popular detective novels and one unpopular “literary” novel, talking about what people seem to want from writers and other artists. Fortunately, those things are not what Edward Burns gives us (well, maybe a little of the popcorn) in his lovely new film, Purple Violets. Burns has taken the LIRR from Brothers-McMullen Long Island to Woody-Allen Manhattan, a land of cozy Soho restaurants, charming Village streets, and expensive big lofts, with the occasional foray into the Hamptons. (As in Allen’s films, you never believe anyone has financial concerns, even when he or she is supposed to.)

Patti Petalson (flower theme?), played by Selma Blair, has writer’s block, a lousy boss (in a real estate office), and a lousy marriage. But her luck changes when Brian, her college love, drops into one of those nice restaurants—kind of an ex-boyfriend ex machina—where she’s dining with her best friend, Kate (an acerbic Debra Messing). Of course, Patti has that pesky husband, the British Chazz (Donal Logue, who’s not afraid to be odious), and Brian has a girlfriend (Elizabeth Reaser)—even though she, a much younger indie-label A&R person, thinks he’s hopelessly square. He also has to explain to her that The Great Gatsby isn’t a band, but Burns has the confidence and knowingness not to hit us over the head with too many literary allusions just because two characters are writers (unlike the publishing-world movie Suburban Girl, and oh yeah, Patti, like that other movie’s female lead, reads while walking, but in her case it’s only from the bus stop to the door). Rounding out the main foursome is Burns himself, nicely portraying “the Murph,” Brian’s lawyer and best friend and Kate’s former beau, whom she has never forgiven for an indiscretion during those often-referred-to college days.

Blair has the right touch for Patti; she’s darkly beautiful but in a low-key, contained, slightly mysterious way (and I’m hereby bestowing on her the first Frances-McDormand-in-Laurel-Canyon-Small-Breasts-Are-Sexy Award). When Brian says that Patti is more talented than he is, we believe him, because she seems to have more reserves within her than he does (this could partly be due to Wilson’s all-American, Pat Boone looks, very effective in Little Children). Messing’s bitter, funny Kate is a good foil for her, as is Burns’s urban-good-ole-boy Murphy, who stalks Kate into letting him apologize for that long-ago dalliance.

In the parlance of cliché, Patti needs to find herself, and that she’s able to do so in a way that does not invoke the same old crap, but instead is intelligent and even somehow restorative (to the audience, I mean), is a blessing. With Woody in London (director-wise), it’s good to have Ed Burns in New York.

The Butterfly Effect

Originally posted May 1, 2007.

In a segment called “Happiness,” Forest Whitaker contemplates
the delicacy—and power?—of a butterfly.

The Air I Breathe
Directed by Jieho Lee
Written by Jieho Lee and Bob DeRosa
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Brendan Fraser, Andy Garcia, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Forest Whitaker, and Julie Delpy

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

No sooner had I watched Sarah Michelle Gellar extract herself from the tender hands of Alec Baldwin in Suburban Girl than I witnessed her tumbling into the rough (metaphorically speaking) hands of Andy Garcia in The Air I Breathe, in which Garcia plays an elegantly dressed gangster whose nickname “Fingers” refers to his tendency to separate digits from the bodies of debtors. His cruel ways set into motion a series of events that only become clear once we’ve seen all four stories of people whose lives interconnect (partly through a car accident, in the way of Amores Perros and 21 Grams).

The titles of the four stories are “Happiness,” “Pleasure,” “Sorrow,” and “Love”; according to notes on the film, these emotions refer to a Chinese proverb that calls them the cornerstones of life. But since a butterfly theme keeps popping up, audience members might instead latch onto the idea of the “butterfly effect”—the theory that the mere flapping of lepidopteran wings can cause a ripple in the atmosphere that eventually leads to something huge, like a tornado.

In this movie, when a bored and boring stockbroker portrayed by Forest Whitaker decides to get crazy and bet his all and then some on a horse (named Butterfly, of course), he triggers a tornado that won’t quit—usually taking the form of mayhem, which is why my eyes were shut for a lot of the film (this is also the way I watch, or don’t watch, The Sopranos). Whitaker’s carpe diem actions apparently bring him happiness, but there’s a twist to its source, as there is in the next segment to Brendan Fraser’s pleasure and, finally, to Kevin Bacon’s love.

More straightforward is the sorrow of Gellar, who plays an unstable singer traumatized early in life (another car accident—these people should watch where they’re going). This may be no surprise to Buffy fans (I never saw the show), but Gellar has range. I fully believed her terror while under the thumb (no worries: she keeps her own) of Fingers—however improbably; it’s as though John Gotti were the manager of Britney Spears and no one blinked. Gellar’s pop princess goes by the name Trista (obviously a play on triste, the word for “sad” in both French and Spanish) and, in a climactic moment, reveals her closely held real name to Fraser’s sensitive, psychic thug (but not to us, making it a tad non-climactic).

The other main characters do not appear to have names but are listed in the credits as the emotions they embody; thus Fraser is “Pleasure,” and the actor playing him as a teenager is even identified as “Young Pleasure” (aha! perhaps Trista’s real name is Sorrow). As signaled early on by the exciting, pulsing opening music, this is not a subtle movie—its color, sometimes grainy, sometimes dark, often looks ugly and feels assaultive. But Fraser and Gellar’s jump-started relationship does have an exquisite quality, rooted in urgency and mysticism. Can he save her (sadly, Fingers is no vampire, so she can’t do it herself)? Or how about that other fellow from whom she’s separated by only two degrees.

Bookgirl

Originally posted April 29, 2007.

Archie Knox (Alec Baldwin) and Brett Eisenberg
(Sarah Michelle Gellar) engage in some editing foreplay.

Suburban Girl
Directed and Written by Marc Klein
Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

“I left her a message.” This line from the romantic comedy Suburban Girl, based on two short stories from Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, is not meant to be funny. Indeed, it’s meant to be poignant, as it’s spoken by a middle-aged man who has just called his estranged daughter. Unfortunately, that man is Alec Baldwin, so of course the entire audience at the press screening I attended burst into laughter. You can’t blame that one on the screenwriter/director; it was simply a case of art and life colliding (the Baldwin character also refers to having “two ex-wives and a spiteful daughter,” making me wonder if the actor did perhaps have a hand in the script). But who do we blame for the guffaws that erupted at the sight of a tear-streaked, beefy Baldwin face turning toward his delicate young girlfriend, Sarah Michelle Gellar, who has just discovered him falling off the wagon with a bottle and a blonde?

Something is amiss with this movie, and you sense it from the start. The titles montage shows Gellar editing a thick manuscript while walking down the street. I’ve worked in publishing many years, and I’ve never seen anyone do this (a reckless pedestrian, she reads books while walking, too). As she’s engaged in this ambulatory process, she crosses out an “of” and replaces it with a “that.” Huh? (I’d like a cup that coffee, please.) Named after Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Gellar’s book editor—or rather, associate editor, as we’re often reminded, as though the title were shameful—seems to know everything Dante and Byron did or didn’t say and makes remarks like “Don’t you just love alliteration?” Even her doofus soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend says something to the effect of, “I cheated on you because I was reading too much Strindberg.” Her new, older squeeze, a high-powered publishing-house head named Archie Knox, also speaks Literarese, but Baldwin manages to soft-pedal the writer references and has some funny lines, including one about his own early novel’s being on “Amazon’s endangered species list.”

Ultimately, this is one of those Shopgirl, thanks-for-teaching-me-now-I-must-move-on movies, with a big dose of de rigueur Sex and the City New York glamour. At least it’s more realistic than its cousin The Devil Wears Prada, if only because you can imagine yourself wearing Gellar’s India-inflected pretty clothes. And Gellar and Baldwin are appealing, both separately and as a couple. Still, I can’t quite trust a film in which a young woman wears a black lace low-cut cocktail dress to her father’s funeral—especially when she’s a devoted daughter who always answers his calls.

A Goy in the Land of the Jews

Originally posted April 28, 2007.

Mauro (Michel Joelsas), right, and Hannah 
(Daniela Piepszky) with the gang from Bom Retiro.

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (O Ano em que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias)
Directed and Written by Cao Hamburger
Starring: Michel Joelsas, Germano Haiut, Daniela Piepszky, Paulo Autran, Eduardo Moreira, Simone Spoladore, Caio Blat

By Robert Rosen

Brazil, 1970: The people are under the iron-fisted rule of a vicious right-wing military dictatorship, but they’ve gone soccer-mad anyway. Everybody, regardless of age, sex, religion, or political affiliation, can’t wait for the impending World Cup tournament to begin. And why not? Pelé’s in his prime, he’s just scored his 1000^th goal, and Brazil’s already won two World Cups.

Twelve-year-old Mauro (Michel Joelsas) is a soccer fanatic of the first degree whose ambition is to be a goalie. He obsessively plays a tabletop version of the game, collects pictures of the Brazilian players, and talks passionately about them with his father, Daniel (Eduardo Moreira), a Jewish communist whose wife, Bia (Simone Spoladore), is a Catholic communist.

To avoid arrest, Daniel and Bia have to flee the country, and they tell Mauro that they’re “going on vacation,” promising him that they’ll be back in time for the World Cup. They then drop their son at his grandfather’s house in São Paulo’s Bom Retiro district—which is composed of Yiddish-and-Portuguese-speaking Eastern European Jews—and drive away in their blue Volkswagen Beetle, leaving Mauro standing there holding his suitcase.

It’s hard to believe that loving, responsible parents like Daniel and Bia would, under any circumstances, dump their son on the street without first making sure that the grandfather’s home. But that’s what they do, and it’s this one flaw, as easily overlooked as it may be, that tarnishes an otherwise extraordinary film.

Mauro’s grandfather, the local barber, has died of a heart attack just a few hours earlier, and Mauro’s left to pound on the apartment door until Shlomo (Germano Haiut) the next-door neighbor and superintendent of the synagogue, finds him and tells him what’s happened.

The community gathers in the temple to debate Mauro’s fate. Are they obligated to take care of him because he’s the grandson of a member of the temple? Or is he not their responsibility because he’s a goy—they know this because Shlomo saw Mauro’s uncircumcised penis. To Shlomo’s alarm, they agree that Mauro should live with him until the parents return.

And it’s here we embark on a classic tale, beautifully acted and totally believable, of a goy among the Jews, a twist on the biblical story of baby Moses being taken in by the Egyptians—a fact not lost on the Bom Retiro community; they begin calling Mauro “Moses.” The other twist, of course, is that this is Brazil, a country not exactly known as a hotbed of Old-World Judaism—though an unsuspecting viewer might think that the story were set in Boro Park, Brooklyn, or in Williamsburg before the hipster invasion.

Adrift in this strange milieu, trying to adjust to his situation, Mauro, like a tramp from Godot, waits for his parents to return, seeing them in every car that resembles their blue Volkswagen. He tries his best to get along with Shlomo, despite the fact that the old man feeds him fish for breakfast, which Mauro finds disgusting. (And Shlomo, in turn, tries his best to get along with Mauro, despite the fact that the boy unwittingly desecrates his talis, using it as an accessory for his soccer uniform.)

Mauro also meets Ítalo (Caio Blat), a young revolutionary who knows his father, and the film perfectly captures the look and atmosphere of a student union circa 1970. But mostly, as the adults try to track down his parents, Mauro hangs out with a group of neighborhood kids reminiscent of the gang from The Wonder Years. Though they sometimes play soccer—with Mauro as goalie—the boys have another hobby, which they find infinitely more interesting. Their friend Hannah (Daniela Piepszky) allows them to peep into the changing room of her mother’s dress shop from a secret spot behind the wall—for a price. “First time’s free,” she tells Mauro.

As the entire country comes to a halt to watch the World Cup, Mauro’s parents still haven’t returned, leaving him in despair, unable to enjoy Brazil’s great victory, a moment of national ecstasy tainted by brutal scenes of political repression.

This is the kind of movie that could leave one feeling irrationally hopeful about the state of filmmaking. And one would hope—perhaps irrationally—that it might even provoke a few Hollywood studio heads to ask themselves: Why are we so often incapable of telling a coherent story that isn’t marred by gaping plot holes, and why do we so rarely make films like this?

The Reluctant Vampire

Originally posted April 26, 2007.

Khalil Shams (Carlos Chahine): doctor, vampire, scuba diver.

The Last Man (Atlal)
Directed and Written by Ghassan Salhab
Starring Carlos Chahine

By Robert Rosen

As if Beirut, Lebanon, doesn’t have enough problems, now they’ve got vampires on the loose? That’s an intriguing premise for a movie. And The Last Man does get off to a promising start, stringing together a number of compelling images: a flamenco dancer, a Christ-like man sitting up in his bed, the world beneath the sea as seen by a scuba diver. But the film doesn’t deliver on its promise, and it takes about 45 minutes to realize that this is a movie that goes nowhere slow—real, real slow.

The plot: Corpses of young men and women are turning up with puncture wounds in their necks, drained of blood. The authorities suspect a garden-variety serial killer. A kindly family physician (and scuba diving enthusiast), Khalil Shams (Carlos Chahine), participates in the victims’ autopsies and begins to suspect that he himself may be the one responsible. This disturbs him; he’s a compassionate man of medicine, he thinks, not a supernatural killer. At first he seems to have no memory of the murders, but he discovers that he has developed a taste for blood. For the most part, the good doctor—an attractive, balding bachelor—wanders the streets of Beirut and haunts its nightclubs, giving people the creeps and wearing a cool pair of shades during the day because the sun hurts his eyes, though it does not turn him into a pile of dust. Except for one ambiguous scene (is the doctor having sex with a patient?), it’s only later in the film that we see him feasting on his victims. And at the end he meets a fellow vampire, a white-haired man in a white coat (the Man from Glad?). They do not speak.

So, yes, the bodies pile up, yet nothing really happens. There’s no suspense, no drama. Most of the time, like the doctor, you don’t know what’s going on. But the crux of the problem is that you don’t get to know the victims in any depth, or care about them. No real relationships between vampire and victims are established. There’s no cat-and-mouse game—think Dracula and his unsuspecting houseguests. Nothing is adequately explained. What do the recurring shots of a flamenco dancer mean? Why is the vampire a recreational scuba diver? What does that have to do with anything?

There are some artful, arresting images—a shot of a lighthouse against the sky, the underwater scenes—and you are left with a visceral sense of modern-day Beirut, a city once known as the Paris of the Mediterranean but now ravaged by over 30 years of intermittent war.

But it’s the pace of this movie that ultimately drives a stake through its heart. A good vampire yarn should be rousing, and this one is somnolent. For my money, it’s hard to beat the original Dracula (1931), and Carlos Chahine is no Bela Lugosi. Actually, he’s not even Tom Cruise.

Freaky (Russian) Movie

Originally posted April 25, 2007.

Valya (Yuri Chursin), sits in his Moscow bedroom, 
brooding about what to do with his life.

Playing the Victim
Directed by Kirill Serebtennikov
Written by The Presnakov Brothers
Animation by Roman Sokolov
Starring: Yuri Chursin, Vitaly Khaev, Marina Golub, Anna Mikhalkova, Lia Akhedzhakova, Yelena Morozova, and Marat Basharov

By Robert Rosen

My sister-in-law, who’s visiting from St. Louis, and whose taste in film is rather adventurous, asked me, about 15 minutes after I saw Playing the Victim, if I’d recommend it.

“I don’t know,” I said, realizing that this was not an easy question, and that I hadn’t even figured out if I liked it or not. The film, I told her, was certainly different, and it had its inspired moments of twisted post-Soviet comedic absurdity, to be sure (as well as its flaws, like subtitles that sometimes didn’t flow, making them difficult to read). It was, I said, a very freaky movie filled with allusions to Hamlet: the main character Valya (Yuri Chursin)—whose job is to act as the victim in police video reconstructions of murders—is visited by his father’s ghost, and he’s constantly dithering about what to do with his life.

But then I began to describe a scene: “Well, Valya’s in his bedroom, fucking his girlfriend, Olia [Yelena Morozova], you know, she’s riding him in the woman-superior position and she’s bitching about how they’re never going to get married and she’s going to be 33 and nobody’s going to want her, and she’s got a scarf wrapped around his neck to cut off the oxygen to his brain to enhance his orgasm (she’d read about this technique in Marie Claire), and then Valya’s mother [Marina Golub] walks in…she’s a piece of work, too…she might have poisoned his father and now she’s banging his uncle, who might have also had a hand in the murder…anyway, she starts talking to Valya like nothing’s going on, like his girlfriend isn’t even there. She wants him to go out and buy bread and they start arguing if he should get a regular loaf or pita bread, which she thinks is ‘more flavorful.’ But Valya refuses to buy pita bread because he’s afraid that terrorists have poisoned it. ‘What terrorists?’ the mother asks. ‘Those who bake the pita,’ Valya says, and then proceeds to pantomime the events of 9/11, showing two planes crashing into the World Trade Center, complete with sound effects. Then, as he’s having his orgasm, the movie switches to animation, with trains going through Valya’s skull and stuff like that. Well, maybe that was two scenes, but you get the idea.”

She did get the idea, I think, and it was after delivering this spontaneous soliloquy that I realized I must have liked Playing the Victim—and the more I thought about the movie, the more I liked it. Part of my problem, perhaps, was that it took me a while to figure out what the hell was going on. The opening scene is a murder reconstruction, as seen through a video camera operated by a less than competent policewoman, Lyuda (Anna Mikhalkova), who seems more interested in making dinner plans over her cell phone than concentrating on the job at hand. Apparently, a man has dismembered his girlfriend in a portable toilet outside a snack bar in a Moscow park. But who’s that guy sitting on the toilet making goofy faces at the camera and providing fart-like sound effects when the murderer says, “She farted,” in response to the chief detective’s (Vitaly Khaev) question, “What happened after you stuck the knife in her neck?”

Part of the film’s absurdity is that these murder re-creations—there are five altogether, and they’re all seen through the wandering, amateurish eye of the video camera—seem to serve no purpose whatsoever, beyond a vague explanation that they’re being done as an “investigative experiment” for legal reasons. The murderers are already in custody and they have already confessed (or have sworn that it was only an accident), sometimes on camera, sometimes dispassionately, sometimes hysterically.

But the real point of this film is to show the yawning chasm between Valya’s post-Soviet generation—a neo-lost generation, which he symbolizes with his aimlessness, his ambivalence, and his South Park T-shirt—and the older, more serious generation that came of age in the Soviet Union, symbolized by Valya’s boss, the middle-aged chief detective. All the detective’s frustration comes pouring out of him in the penultimate murder re-creation, a shooting in a Japanese restaurant. He delivers a fierce and eloquent Shakespearean soliloquy on the theme of “What the hell’s the matter with you kids today, shooting each other in the head over stupid insults…I had a wife and kids when I was your age.” And it has been set off by the detective’s distaste for sushi, which he sees as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the new, open and “democratic” Russia.

Impressively, Playing the Victim was shot on a budget of $750,000, and there is much to be learned from it—about the art of filmmaking and storytelling in general, and about black comedy in particular.

Yes, Cecilia, by all means, go rent it when you get back to St. Louis—if you can find it.