Covering the Tribeca Film Festival in toto can be a challenge even with a full staff; this year, I’m going it alone, and in order to do so I’ve had to rethink the way I think about film festival coverage. Obviously, I can’t do it all alone, so why waste time on films in which I have no interest just because so-and-so publicist says it’s a “must see”? And so though you may find that my coverage of this festival skews greatly towards films that match up somewhat to my personal proclivites (slow and character based, or ostentatiously weird). I’m also not going to worry too much about cranking out discreet reviews of every film I see. Though there may at some point be stand-alone posts about films that merit them, in general my plan is to do this in a more diary-like style. If I devote only 200 words to something on which you’d like to read 2,000, let me know and I’ll elaborate if I can when time permits.
And so Thursday marked the first full day of official festival screenings, after an opening night gala for Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, to which I was not invited. I spent the day at the AMC Village, one of the Tribeca venues that lies far outside the titular neighborhood’s boundaries, a seven-screen skyscraper multiplex which has been fully commandeered by the Festival this year for screenings for both press and the public. I saw two films, one technically, formally outstanding but not entirely narratively satisfying; the other, thrillingly ambitious but only in its riskiest moments able to justify its daring with conceptual clarity and technical chops.
A film that can change tone on a dime and sell each transition as though its natural is to be respected. About Elly, which won big in Berlin, is a tightly constructed verite relationship dramedy which, with a sequence that’s genuinely gripping, first turns into a you-are-there thriller, then into a very talky mystery, then into a tragic melodrama of morals. A group of college friends travel with their spouses and children from Tehran to “the north”, to spend a long weekend at a crumbly villa on a desolate shore. Sepide (Golshifteh Farahani), simultaneously well-meaning and careless, invites her son’s nanny Elly (Taraneh Alidousti) to come along with the intention of fixing her up with Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini, offering ample evidence that he’s Iran’s version of Mark Duplass), a young looker recently divorced from a German woman, who Sepide is determined to lure back to Iran by pairing him off to a member of the home team before vacation ends. Elly is bashful and reticent, and when she disappears one afternoon, the friends aren’t sure if she drowned, or just left the villa without saying goodbye. As the weekend wears on and the vacationers struggle with how to proceed, it’s revealed that Sepide brought Elly along under false pretenses, and has continued to weave a web of lies in order to protect both the missing woman’s honor and her own culturally unacceptable intentions.
It’s an update/translation of sorts on L’Avventura, but About Elly has a limited interest in Antonioni’s evocative questioning. Its refashioning of the missing woman as MacGuffin works up to the point where it abandons existentialism to deliver a religiously and culturally correct moral lesson on honor and fidelity. Its glimpse into the lives and moral quandaries of modern, cosmopolitan Iranians fills a valuable niche, but the film’s insights on the general human condition don’t go much farther than to suggest that meddling matchmakers should be punished with unthinkable tragedy.
Less successful a tonal juggling act is Damien Chazelle’s Discovery sidebar feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. I had heard about this film months ago — someone called it the “mumblecore musical” — but I wasn’t prepared for the extremes to which Chazelle would take either m-word. Shot on black and white 16mm film and beautifully transfered to pixelly video, Guy and Madeline shifts wildly between sub-Cassavetes exploration of three young, musically inclined Bostonites –– trumpet playing Guy; Madeline, a shy jazz fan who becomes obsessed with the single kiss she shares with Guy in a park; and Elena, a woman who dances her way into Guy’s bed and subsequently declares herself his girlfriend –– and full-on musical numbers, some obviously inspired by old MGM musicals, others more Jacques Demy in structure and feeling. The numbers, most of which comment on the narrative but rarely actually move the story along, are pulled off beautifully; imagine living in a world where most if not all aimless twentysomethings who display little to no charisma in conversation make up for it by being virtuoso tap dancers!
It’s the narrative threads that tie the dances together that constitute the problem: Chazelle doesn’t give us nearly enough of Guy and Madeline’s encounter for us to care about whether he ends up with her or Elena, whose own adventures outside that relationship are initially intriguing but finally interminable. It’s frustrating; when Guy and Madeline is firing on all cylinders, as it does every time Jason Palmer picks up his trumpet or Desiree Garcia bursts into song or out into dance, it’s one of the most thrillingly innovative American indie I’ve seen in a long time, but the tenuous character drama threads that tie together each musical number increasingly try patience.
About Elly is a “better” film than Guy and Madeline, but its the latter film’s inclusion in this festival that, at the end of the day, is more enervating. About Elly’s formal exellence is beyond question, but its form and general theme (ie: the realist approach to melodrama, its insight on the contemporary progressive Muslim experience offering a Culture of the Week twist for American audiences) marks it as a very “now” work of international art cinema, so trendy that it’s almost cookie cutter. Guy and Madeline is full of failure, but its willingness to experiment, and particularly the alchemy that Damien Chazelle hits on within the musical numbers, is actually exciting. And excitement is in short enough supply that this has got to be worth something.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth