It’s hard to imagine that the Tribeca Film Festival is only four years old, as it has rapidly become a fixture of yearly New York City events and is steadily gaining the international recognition of festivals like Venice, Cannes, and Sundance. However, unlike those generally industry-centered film festivals, Tribeca branches out to the entire New York community with events for everyone, like the Tribeca Family Festival Fair in Greenwich Village on April 30 and the transformation of the North Cove at the World Financial Center into a drive-in.
The festival opened last Tuesday with the premiere of Sydney Pollack’s United Nations drama The Interpreter, starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, which is also slated for nationwide release today. The great British visionary Peter Greenaway will also debut his film, the Tulse Luper Suitcases, and deliver a talk on April 29. In addition, some of this year’s most highly anticipated releases will make their American debut at Tribeca: Wong Kar-Wai’s international triumph 2046; Charles Dance’s Ladies in Lavender, starring the great Maggie Smith and Judi Dench; controversial director Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, British box-office smash Layer Cake, and Audiard’s follow-up to Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped. The festival will also reflect the craze for short-films with a series devoted to them, and feature an excellent selection of revivals like Ettore Scola’s gorgeously restored We All Loved Each Other So Much. If previous editions of the festival may have been dismissed for an uneven selection, this year’s screenings should finally dispel those criticisms.
This year’s festival is also showing that Tribeca is about much more than just movies. In the tradition of Sundance, which has practically as many hot concerts as films, Tribeca has teamed up with ASCAP to present a series of shows at the Knitting Factory from April 27 to 29. Performers will include Shawn Colvin, Ivy, Suzanne Vega, Damien Rice, and Nic Armstrong & the Thieves. You can also find a variety of shows featuring people in town for the festival like renowned producer and film score composer Jon Brion (playing at Tonic on the 27th), and parties for specific films, like the Satellite show mentioned below.
Columbia students who don’t usually venture much farther than the bars across the street may find such a mammoth enterprise intimidating, but barring screenings that are rapidly selling out, Tribeca’s events are affordable (sometimes even free) and accessible, thanks to the extensive information on their Web site.
The weeks leading up to final exams are often the best time to procrastinate, and the festival’s ideal timing allows us to do so while both checking out the beautiful weirdos these festivals attract as well as taking New York’s cultural pulse which, by the looks of it, is doing great.
We All Loved Each Other So Much
One of the most beautiful, compelling, and even hysterical movies to chronicle history, cinema, and love is Ettore Scola’s 1974 masterpiece, We All Loved Each Other So Much. The film follows three friends and former resistance fighters—Antonio (Nino Manfredi), Gianni (Vittorio Gassman), and Nicola (Stefano Satta Flores)—caught in the changing political scene of World War II-era Italy. The friends are also involved in an odd love quadrangle that has all of them pining after the irresistible Luciana (Stefania Sandrelli).
The parallel political and romantic plots are skillfully woven together. Each of these men is a caricature of an Italian citizen—Antonio is an ambitious lawyer, Gianni is a spontaneous drifter, and Nicola is a misunderstood intellectual—exposing their relationship with Italy and Luciana to the audience.
A filmmaker on the outskirts of Italian neorealism, Scola pays homage to his countrymen and predecessors Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini. Additionally, he throws in his own technical devices, such as making the transition from black and white to color midway through the film, as soon as regime change occurs. The film’s timelessness is the reason it gets away with the occasionally kitschy convention, and it is the very thing that will make it a profound film forever.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
While the premise of Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped is slightly implausible, the brilliance of its unconventional hero allows us little time to contemplate the improbabilities of the story.
This remake of James Toback’s 1978 classic Fingers details the exploits of Tom Seyr (Romain Duris) who bounces between the dual worlds of his father, Robert (Niels Arestrup)—a disheveled, greasy man who sports a cringe-worthy banana-toned suit—and that of his dead and elegant mother, a former concert pianist. A chance encounter with his mother’s previous manager leads to an audition date, a desire to revive his long-dead music career, and piano lessons with a passively beautiful pianist. But, as it turns out, his teacher is Chinese and cannot speak a word of French, while Tom cannot speak a word of Chinese. While music is universal and has the ability to transcend language barriers, one wonders at the efficiency of such piano instruction.
The changing camera work signals which world Tom is currently experiencing. In the world of his father, the handheld camera takes on a frenetic, frenzied pace as it follows Tom into apartments, nightclubs, and fist fights. During one scene, the camera focuses on the hero’s fingers as they grip the handle of a pan he uses to brain a helpless restaurant cook who owes Robert rent. In the next scene, the camera gently cuts between shots of the same fingers, practicing torturously technical passages of a Bach toccata, to Tom’s naked upper body and arms, attempting to loosen and flow with the music.
Along with the thumping sound track, the highlight is Duris, an arrogantly confident young actor who does his best to evoke Belmondo, complete with skinny tie, wavy brown hair, long sideburns, and casual sexiness. The overall moral themes of the film, stemming from loyalty to one’s father to issues of retributive justice, are forced and a bit superficial, but are gratefully overshadowed by character development. We leave the theater fairly satiated, yet hungry for more Romain Duris.
Mysterious Skin
Gregg Araki’s new film Mysterious Skin, based on the book by Scott Heim, is a slippery creature to grasp. It begins with a narrative of pedophilia told from a young boy’s perspective, a subject and approach that is disturbing enough to put one in a state of discomfort for the rest of the film. While one’s unease never truly goes away (and deservedly), one eventually gets through the skin-crawling first half hour and into the more viscerally squirm-inducing body of the movie, which concerns the intertwining lives of two teenagers from a small town in the Midwest and the consequences of their childhood experiences.
Neil, who earlier narrated his relationship with his Little League coach, has become a gay hustler. Brian, who also played on the same baseball team, believes he was abducted by aliens when he was young. Neil is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt with stunning naturalism, inhabiting the role so completely and powerfully that one completely forgets his not-too-distant past life as a sitcom alien and preteen charmer. Gordon-Levitt raises the quality of the film on many levels, giving a difficult story a real soul. When the dialogue falters—“I am so sick of this stinky butt crack of a town!”—or the story starts to buckle under the weight of its ambiguous intentions, he, as well as Brady Corbet in a less showy role, give the film a warm specificity through subtle facial expressions and unpredictable line readings.
In both its content and episodic structure, the film plays like a teenage Midnight Cowboy, spending long scenes on Neil’s sexual encounters with older men and the emotional alienation that these and his childhood experiences have on how he treats the people in his life. As its title suggests, the film is ultimately concerned with the strange and inexplicable effect that sex has on the mind and life of a person. In his film, Araki asks his questions and tells his story, but has not yet found his answers.
Layer Cake
In the fine tradition of witty, fast-paced British gangster films, Layer Cake features a plethora of good-looking characters, all sorts of ugly situations, several merging plot lines, and back-stabbings on many levels, or layers, all with surprisingly good dental hygiene.
Based on J.J. Connolly’s crime novel of the same name, Layer Cake marks the directorial debut of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels producer Matthew Vaughn and follows in much the same vein as Guy Richie’s gangster movies.
The action centers around a successful cocaine dealer (Daniel Craig) on the verge of early retirement when his boss, Jimmy, (Kenneth Cranham) doles out one last job—locate a kidnapped “celebutante” who happens to be the daughter of the boss’s close friend. Along the way, our unnamed hero has to contend with a feud between competing mob bosses and their obligatory mob-boss henchmen. Throw in a healthy dose of sex in the form of love interest, Tammy (Sienna Miller—Jude Law’s arm candy), drugs in the form of roughly two million pounds’ worth of missing ecstasy, and rock ‘n’ roll (or some angry neo-Nazis), and you have got yourself one stylish little thriller of a movie.
If it sounds a little busy, it is. With all its characters and plots and subplots and sub-subplots unfolding and intertwining, Layer Cake can be a bit hard to follow at times. However, how important is plot, really, when you’ve got hot accents and British baddies (yeah, I said “baddies.”) beating the hell out of each other? It makes for a lovely end to any meal.
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