TRIBECA 2011: Critic's Notebook #1
by Steve Dollar 
No one ever really knows what to make of the
Tribeca Film Festival, which marks its 10th anniversary with screenings of 93 features that continue through the week, mostly at a pair of Manhattan multiplexes?neither of which are in Tribeca. It's either dismissed as a bloated occasion for red carpet hoohah or misappreciated as a grab bag stuffed with sometimes surprising indies and documentaries, stuck in an awkward spot on the festival calendar after Sundance and SXSW, but immediately before Cannes. Which is to say, it's no country for name-brand auteurs, yet neither does it cultivate the micro-budget zeitgeist of the indie buzzfests.
Do some homework, though, and its amorphous sprawl yields a pretty decent do-it-yourself festival, particularly when it comes to foreign titles not yet acquired for distribution. That's not necessarily the case with all of these, but they're all solid contenders worth digging through the festival catalog to see.
She'll definitely piss off the documentary-with-a-capital-D crowd, and that's what I like about Alma Ha'rel and
Bombay Beach. The Israeli director, whose background is in music video, literally stumbled into making this lyrical and lovely film on a spontaneous day trip after the 2009 Coachella festival. While shooting footage for a Beirut video with some locals she met by the Salton Sea, Ha'rel discovered a host of unusual characters making a life on the extreme margins of the notorious desert wasteland. Shot with a cheap HD camera in a sun-bleached palette, the film intersects at various points during a year in the lives of three main subjects: a young African-American football player taking refuge from gang violence in his native Los Angeles, a 7-year-old boy on a strict regimen of medications for a bipolar disorder, and a sage-like codger who scrapes together a living through illegal sales of cigarettes from a local Native American Reservation. It's way more impressionistic than investigative, as the intimate personal stories veer into dance sequences set to original music by Beirut's guiding force, Zach Condon. Conventionally minded viewers may balk at the scenes, which were rehearsed and staged, but it's a lot more rewarding to go with the film's casually meta, sympathetic flow. It's an American beauty.
Giving a whole new context to the phrase "Norwegian wood," the teenage sex comedy
Turn Me On, Goddammit would deserve an American theatrical release if only for the marketing potential of its insistent title. But first-time feature director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen has more going for her, notably a deft way with the half-wistful, half-cringey foibles of youth and a Scandinavian candor about biological imperatives. Newcomer Helene Bergsholm plays Alma, a 15-year-old girl living in a nowhere town on the southwestern coast of Norway. Her adolescent hormonal eruption commands her constant attention, as indeed the movie opens with the tall blonde lass sprawled out on the kitchen floor, masturbating to the hyperbolic exhortations of a male voice on a phone sex line?only to be interrupted when mom gets home from work. Again and again, Alma's rampant fantasy life collides with reality, creating increasingly awkward situations. Most of them involve a would-be boyfriend named Artur, whose failure to reciprocate her interests anticipates the film's dramatic crisis. Ms. Jacobsen has a lot of fun with the fantasy sequences, which are more silly than horny, although it's hard to imagine any kid shoplifting a Playboy for purposes of arousal when they could just prowl the Internet. Purposefully non-specific about its time frame, the movie seems to transpire in a more innocent age, but that's also part its charm.
Across the border in Sweden, the edgier
She Monkeys doubles the trouble as 15-year-old Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser) falls under the sway of the slightly older Cassandra (Linda Moli), who befriends her when she joins a competitive equestrian acrobatic team. How the manipulative Cassandra views her new friend is up for grabs, as the tension between them suggests they are becoming lovers, or frenemies, or cold-hearted competitors or all of the above. The film leaves a lot to the imagination, making metaphoric use of the lingering summer light to frame the recklessness and uncertainty of youth. Director Lisa Aschan, who took the prize for best new Nordic film at this year's Goteberg film festival, introduces a third character into the charged dynamic: Emma's 8-year-old sister Sara (Isabelle Lindquist), a precocious troublemaker who insists on buying a leopard-print bikini, so she can flirt with an older male cousin who babysits her. The tone pulls up shy of the creepy factor that's a signature of Todd Solondz, thankfully, but adds another dimension to the director's theme of "sex is power and power is sex." When the little girl takes a wrench and starts bashing a toy plastic pony on her windowsill, it's both hilarious and a little terrifying?forecasting a decisive act of violence as Emma and Cassandra's relationship reaches a cathartic turning point.
The gals still have it a lot easier than the brutal, and brutalized, sods in
NEDS. The third feature directed by the ubiquitous (and truly great) actor Peter Mullan, this trip back to 1970s Glasgow takes its cue from glam rockers the Sweet, "turning the page on teenage rampage." Bookish wimp John McGill (Connor McCarran) appears to be the center of an awkward-comic coming of age tale, navigating through the humiliation of the local juvenile gangs to rise to the top of his class. But when his better-off best friend rejects him, McGill goes rogue. It helps that he's matured into a beefy bruiser, has an older brother long lost to the thug life, and an abusive, alcoholic father (Mullan) who's as much a staple of these memoir-like dramas as a grease-sodden newspaper laden with fish-and-chips. The kid turns into a dangerous sociopath, falling in with a colorful crew of low-rent hoodlums called the N.E.D.S. (non-educated delinquents). It's a heartbreaking tonal swivel, but the film's juxtapositions of humor and horror make it riveting.
An exercise in eyeball-throbbing perplexity, Panos Cosmatos'
Beyond the Black Rainbow seems like an early favorite for the festival's must-see midnight movie. What
Amer was to giallo, this menacing low-budget acid trip is to 1960s and '70s sci-fi movies. There's a waif-like young woman who's been consigned to some kind of asylum-cum-research-lab run by a sinister therapist who seems to have far more than a professional relationship with his patient. The story, such as it is (or, actually, isn't), creeps along for about a half-hour before everything goes 100% bonkers. The shrink, played by Barry Nyle, slips into a flashback sequence that hints at a top-secret experiment in drug-assisted mind control as colored lights flash and the soundtrack aches and oozes with Jeremy Schmidt's menacing analog synthesizer score. The special effects illustrate a mysterious transformation, as the actor emerges through some kind of wormhole looking like a lost member of the Blue Man Group. At its Kubrick-obsessed best, the movie suggests a nickel version of
Enter the Void, daring the audience to make any sense of it. But its deliberate whatzitness is an essential part of the film's appeal, simulating the director's own sense of wonder (and terror) as a childhood viewer of outer-limits cinema.
Posted by ahillis at April 23, 2011 11:46 PM
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