SpoutBlog on spout.com

Youssou N’dour: I Bring What I Love was shown at SXSW in a 35mm print. Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi announced she’d brought it with her having last shown it in Burkina Faso three weeks ago, and it showed the wear-and-tear of having only one print to go around for a year: it was scratchy during the reel changes. But it was worth it: the doc had slow-burning visual texture and a sense of contextual place I don’t really look for in documentaries anymore. I expect this to be the last time in my life I see a documentary screened in a print at a festival, and it was a good note to go out on. As the story of a controversy, N’Dour takes its time: the first half gives you Senegalese musician superstar N’Dour’s normal routine, the second the fracas around his 2004 album Egypt. Vasarhelyi’s obviously a fan, and she has enough concert footage to show why she was drawn to N’Dour before the drama started, but N’Dour morphs into one of the more nuanced documentaries on modern Islam around.

Not that Vasarhelyi isn’t very clear on what the stakes are, or might initially appear to be: she throws in footage of the Twin Towers on fire to get that out of the way. But part of what’s refreshing about this film is how the whole issue of Islamic terrorism is completely avoided: this is a story about negotiating the norms of Islam in a country where 94% of the population is Sufi Muslim, arguably the most peaceable form. N’Dour is devout, but — until Egypt — his songs were politically didactic, bluntly instructing his listeners to work hard and follow the path of Stephen Biko. (He’s less than revelatory in interviews. Sample quote: “If we save the planet, all of us will benefit.” Yes.) Vasarhelyi has the live concert footage: musically, it’s not precisely my thing, but N’Dour’s a riveting performer, and you get a sense for why he has such a following, even where audiences can’t understand Wolof (hilariously, Robert Christgau shows up to tell him how awesome he is). Then the trouble starts: N’Dour records a series of devotional songs, confusing those who think a political singer shouldn’t come anywhere near devout matters. Worse yet, he releases it during Ramadan.

There’s no riots or violence, but N’Dour’s sales, for once, flatline. He goes abroad and receives passionate approval; he comes home and is torn apart in the papers. Nationalism trumps religion, though: when Egypt wins a Grammy, suddenly he’s a national hero once more, meeting with the president and lecturing schoolchildren. Vasarhelyi mostly avoids all the cliches of filming Africa. No dusty villages or impoverished rural people –– this is the urban Senegal. What Vasarhelyi gets bang-on is the way N’Dour adjusts his self-presentation wherever he is. Visiting his family, he’s in traditional garb, and the same goes when he represents Senegal at foreign concerts; when it doesn’t count, he wears globalized jeans. He contemplates what it means to be Muslim, and what it takes to represent it: is Sufism a recognizable form of Islam to the outside world? Is his devoutness communicated to his audience, and does he have the right to speak on behalf of his religion?

Vasarhelyi’s film is fascinating because it’s not really about N’Dour as a musician; it’s about negotiating internal religious schisms that make the Vatican look like a joke. While N’Dour presents religious songs to a religious country, in Europe and America he presents them to appreciative white audiences who have zero emotional connection or historical attachment to his songs of praise; they’re there for secular musical kicks. On tour, audiences have to meet the devout musicians halfway: remarkably, a pub in Dublin cheerfully ceases drinking so that they can play in an alcohol-free room. So I Bring What I Love is ultimately heartening, showing not just Muslims reconciling with themselves, but with the outside world. Seeing that in action, frankly, is more interesting than anything the film’s ostensible subject has to say, which is just fine.

As someone who has been to an untold number of swing parties in NYC, and often had a hilarious time, I’ve never found them the least bit sexy. Truth be told, average Joes engaging in group sex is rather boring to me. So I was hoping that through interviewing Jon Hart and Matthew Kaufman, co-directors of the Plato’s Retreat doc American Swing, they’d upend my POV, get to the essence of why the notorious 70s sex club was so alluring. I spoke with the filmmakers during their opening night screening at the Museum of Sex.

Jon, since you’d already exhaustively researched Plato’s Retreat and written about its founder Larry Levenson for “The NY Times” and “The Village Voice,” what drove you to want to tell the story through film?

JH: He was a larger than life character. He just had a great story. It was moving and funny. And Larry was an actor, he was a ham – there were just so many elements. I always knew it was a film.

And Mathew, what was your attraction to the subject?

MK: Well, I produce documentaries so I’m always looking for a good story.

Oh, I didn’t know that. What documentaries have you produced?

MK: I did a two-show special for “Nightline” in 2004, I worked on something with evangelical Christians – I like weird subject matter.

You and Alexandra Pelosi have something in common. (laughs)

MK: A friend of mine introduced me to Jon. But I’d read his articles before we even met. It was such a fascinating story. No one had done a documentary on Plato’s Retreat. It would be a first so that excited me.

And could you talk a little bit about the audience you hope to reach with your film?

JH: I don’t really think about that. It’s just such a great story, even without all the salacious elements.

MK: I just felt like “If you build it they will come,” the Field of Dreams bullshit – no, seriously. It’s just such a great story.

I’m also wondering where did you get your “never-before-seen” archival materials? I mean, who was allowed to film at Plato’s Retreat?

MK: The archival footage was absolutely necessary, because without it it’s just a bunch of talking heads.

JH: On very special occasions they did allow cameras on the premises. On those nights people were informed that filming would occur.

MK: We also got the rights to a documentary that was made in the 80s called Coupling, and then some other TV shows. We just dug with absolute determination, trying to get every scrap of footage we could find.

Getting back to the talking heads, in the film they range from Buck Henry to Melvin Van Peebles to Helen Gurley Brown, yet hardly any of the well-known names interviewed were famous at the time of Plato’s Retreat; they only became famous later on. This strikes me as quite different from Studio 54, which operated at the same time as Plato’s and also ran into trouble with the IRS, where all the celebrities wanted to be seen. Was this the case or were you just unable to interview any stars that frequented the club?

MK: (laughing) We tried. I must have called Richard Dreyfuss’ office at least every two weeks!

JH: He even wrote about Plato’s in an “Esquire” article at the time. Look, if you were at Plato’s you’re admitting that you enjoy a certain aspect of human sexuality, and people are a bit squeamish about that. Even so it was really the atmosphere that was the star more than any celebrity personalities.

I also noticed you have Annie Sprinkle, who talks about Plato’s Retreat dying a “natural death.” In other words, even without the tax evasion charges that sent Levenson to prison, even without the AIDS epidemic that caused Mayor Koch to padlock Plato’s Retreat’s doors for good, the club had run its course, much like disco and Studio 54. Wasn’t Levenson’s biggest mistake in not realizing the 70s were over a decade before?

JH: Larry had no plan B. He didn’t even have a plan A. A clock exists for not just Plato’s, but for any club in NYC. They all eventually become passé.

MK: But if you equate that with Larry’s character, it kind of makes sense, you see the egotism and the hubris –

Which is what allowed him to take a chance on a sex club in the first place.

MK: But New York is such a fast-moving city, and he refused to see that.

JH: Larry wasn’t a businessman. He liked the attention and the media hype, but after Plato’s had been open for a couple years it became a job.

He also wasn’t an artist, but an entrepreneur who craved being around kinky creative types, which is usually the case with people in charge of sex businesses. I felt that this social connection to people beyond his suburban milieu might have superseded the actual screwing for him. I know Al Goldstein chides Levenson in the film for not realizing that sex is just “friction,” but I think Levenson’s optimistic hope for connection is what drove him to create Plato’s Retreat in the first place. Do you have any thoughts on this?

JH: Larry was a small businessman who didn’t look at Plato’s as a business.

MK: In the beginning maybe.

JH: But he did love the connection. He never stopped enjoying meeting with people. He became a cab driver after Plato’s closed.

Which makes total sense.

JH: He loved being “the host” above all. That’s what he was meant to be.

Which is kind of the opposite of what Al Goldstein was saying, that Larry was only there for the sex.

JH: Al Goldstein was on the dark side. He’s a very intelligent guy. But Larry believed in what he was doing. He drank the Kool-Aid. He truly believed.

MK: Look, I didn’t know Larry like Jon did but I have a different viewpoint. I really think that Larry had to have known at some point that the Kool-Aid he was drinking wasn’t working. We tried to show in the documentary that he had to have known.

JH: Had to have known what?

MK: That it was doomed to failure, that it was just commerce after a certain point.

JH: Sure, it became a job at some point – but this is all he knew. There was no plan B. I don’t know what he knew or what he didn’t know. Larry lived completely in the moment, not looking ahead.

When I was watching the film I felt that Levenson wanted to bring the middle class swinging lifestyle to the masses, but the problem with doing this is he’s simultaneously trying to play it both ways – promoting the wholesomeness of the people involved while hyping the unwholesome titillating excitement. Levenson seemed pretty uncomfortable with what his dream in the end had become, evidenced by his ludicrous denial that prostitutes were working the club.

MK: He played a character. He played a role.

JH: Yes, that’s true, that’s true. But Plato’s was contrived to begin with. Swinging is an activity that’s supposed to be organic and Plato’s was forcing people, in a sense that people in that setting are pushed into the activity. Larry knew Plato’s was a business from the get-go. It blew his innocence from the moment the financial portion became involved.

Which is the case with everything. (laughs)

JH: Yeah, it’s like a rock band. You start playing music in the garage and the next thing you know you’ve got silent partners to answer to.

Something big happened this week, and Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo — an unassuming, nonthreatening, ultimately uplifting indie drama with no stars and, one would think, no immediate hook for press coverage other than its merits ––  was at the center of it. Solo, which opens today in New York and L.A., motivated A. O. Scott and Richard Brody, two grown-up film critics for venerable New York publications (the New York Times and the New Yorker, respectively), neither of whom are known for engaging in public battle with the online rabble, to get into a blog fight.

It started when Scott published a long story (5 pages online) in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on an emergent genre he called Neo-Neo Realism, which he says unites festival favorites such as Ballast, Wendy and Lucy and Treeless Mountain with the works of Bahrani, as films concerning “fictional characters most often played by nonactors from similar backgrounds… [who are] familiar on a basic human level even if their particular predicaments are not. And if the kind of movie they inhabit is not entirely new — the common ancestor that established their species identity is a well-known Italian bicycle thief — their unassuming arrival on a few screens nonetheless seems vital, urgent and timely.” In other words: a number of filmmakers are making art films about the daily lives of poor people, and also the economy is bad. Coincidence? Scott thinks not.

Brody didn’t buy it, and on March 20 — two days before Scott’s piece was even published in the magazine, and about a day after it was posted online –– he posted an 8-point rebuttal on The Front Row, his New Yorker blog. “These films are made skillfully and sincerely under difficult circumstances; they are, in many ways, admirable,” Brody wrote. “But I think that Scott makes too much of them.” Brody went on to question Scott’s definition of neorealism and its influence on/inroads into American independent cinema prior to this new neo wave; his basic contention is that the films the Scott piece embraced are marked by “the willful rejection of complexity and ambiguity; a sympathy for ciphers based on their social position and reinforced by the downbeat warmth of the performers.”

Three days later, Scott took to The Carpetbagger (the NYT Oscar blog recently repurposed as an off-season online multi-contributor Hollywood column) to respond to Brody’s response. Scott’s blog post seemed to boil Brody’s reaction down to a difference in opinion. “This is Mr. Brody’s way of saying he and I like different movies.” This is a memorable comeback, and an instructive one. On one hand, it’s a new iteration of the old apathetic debate stopper, “Let’s agree to disagree.” On the other hand, it’s an incredibly concise, ordinary language description of what it is that we’re doing –– some of us every day, for recreation or professionally or both; others only when pushed to in self-defense –– here on the internet. Our blogs, our fights, our weekly storms minor and major: this is our way of saying we like different movies. And that is contemporary film culture.

Except when it isn’t — except when, for whatever reason, a film inspires no substantive debate whatsoever. That fragment from Brody’s piece quoted above, regarding willful rejection and sympathy for ciphers, so exactly encapsules my problems with Goodbye, Solo that as soon as I read it, I assumed that this point of view would circulate widely, and any traditional review I could write of the film would be superfluous. But with the help of David Hudson, I realized that, ironically, this film which sparked this notable spat has otherwise been the subject of a discourse uniquely lacking in dynamism. Basically, everyone likes it, and yet the arguments about why it’s so great are remarkable similar, even when coming from iconoclasts.

Here’s what I can offer in terms of praise for Goodbye, Solo: Bahrani has, across his three films, displayed an interest in repetition as both a theme and as a visual language; he tends to focus on worklives which involve doing the same set of tasks over and over again, and he’s not afraid to subject the audience to a reiteration of images describing the sameness of his subjects’ day-to-days. There is a braveness about this which is to be admired, and in Solo, he condenses the key images to be repeated (most memorably, close-up shots of Senegalese immigrant cab driver Solo behind the wheel at night, unprettied stretches of Winston-Salem flattened to abstraction in the window of the taxi to polka dot lights, black and brown and gold) into things of painterly beauty. There is an unwillingness to offer narrative information that elevates the film into a work of mystery beyond the points of its actual narrative, and thus what is a film which seems not terribly dissimilar from what might happen if Driving Miss Daisy were transposed to the millieu of the contemporary working poor is given a tinge of existentialist noir.

But that refusal to offer information has a flip side which, to my mind, does Goodbye Solo in. There’s a common weakness to some of the films mentioned in Scott’s piece, particularly Solo and Wendy and Lucy, which Scott even nods to in the quote above, with the word “familiar”: these stories, so invested in the struggle of the socio-economically disavantaged as to zero in on that struggle’s hourly materialist minutia, are much less interested in the minutia of the characters, to the point where the players going through the motions often correspond to Hollywood types ––  a scared young woman, a grizzled old man, an immigrant absurdly optimistic in the transformational power of America. What I particularly bristle at is the notion that 1 + 1 = realism. Look at the tropes that form the backbone of Solo: A would-be saint in the form of a wage worker? A man who wants to die and yet lets the stranger who he’s paid off to be part of the plan move into his motel room? Structurally, this is an odd couple story that chugs along for long stretches on nothing but one actor’s charisma and the other’s enigma. It’s so dependent on having us watch the clockwork of superficial star power in motion that, if it were German or French or Japanese in origin, one could easily imagine a studio optioning the remake rights, with Jack Nicholson and Will Smith in mind for the leads.

When you watch movies like Solo and Wendy, you realize how rare it is to see the minute-by-minute negotiatons of lower class life seen on screen. But too often these crumbs dropped by engaging screen presences seem to be the point in and of themselves. Not to presuppose the filmmakers’ intended audiences, but thanks to the realities of indie film distribution, Goodbye Solo is no more likely to be viewed by actual Senegalese immigrants in North Carolina than Wendy and Lucy was likely to have been seen by girls with scant savings with no recourse but to drive to Alaska in search of a factory job. If I was in Wendy’s straits, I would not have seen Wendy and Lucy. Neo-neorealism is not a trend destined to be consumed by many people who will see their own lives onscreen. The films thus function, in a way, as travelogues to Poorsville, to be consumed almost chiefly by folks for whom the experiences depicted are totally foreign.

Some of Brody’s 8-point rebuttal may best be filed as throat clearing by way of nit picking, but I think he’s right on to suggest that there’s something suspect about the notion that these films could somehow offer nutritive value or even comfort in these tough times (when Scott wonders if these are the kind of movies “we need now” when “we feel an urge to escape from escapism,” his “we” seems to be in sharp contrast to the “they” who are turning Paul Blart, Knowing and Taken into hits). It’s also enervating to see a sole voice suggest, as Brody does in his response to Scott’s response, that we simply ask for something more interesting than films in which “the decision not to disrupt the urbane conventions of naturalism goes together with an unwillingness to endow characters or stories with elements that may disrupt the programmatic sympathies the filmmakers are arousing,” that we seek out “the work of artists who dare to offer up disturbing ideas, shocking facts, dangerous emotions to reinforce, even expand, my humanism.” This is our way of saying we like different movies:  ironically, my misgivings about Solo are other critics selling points. Take, for example, this closing note from Scott Tobias’ Toronto capsule review of the film:

In [Bahrani’s] last three films alone, he’s introduced us to a Pakistani street coffee vendor (Man Push Cart), a Latino orphan working in a black-market body shop (Chop Shop), and now a Senegalese cabbie. It’s been nice—and certainly novel—to make their acquaintance.

That’s what Bahrani’s films are — nice, novel.  They give film critics and an extremely small segment of presumably educated, monied film goers a glimpse into immigrant pockets they’d otherwise be oblivious to, and that’s both nice and novel. But how long can a filmmaker coast on nice and novel? At what point does nice and novel stop being enough?