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Dispatch from the 45th New York Film Festival
An online exclusive
T: Red Balloon B: Persepolis R: Go Go Tales
Monday, October 15, 2007
The 45th New York Film Festival
Sept. 26 – Oct. 13
By Michael Joshua Rowin
Up, down, up, down . . . So continues the wildly uneven career of Gus Van Sant with Paranoid Park, an experimental, existential suburban skater drama (whew!) that displays the hipster director’s ability to go modest after so many ambitious failures (Psycho being the most egregious), but represents a step back from his mostly excellent Death Trilogy (Elephant being the sole stinker). Strangely unique and clichéd at the same time, Paranoid Park rides the coattails of a now no longer exotic or marginalized subculture, meaning it’s only as riveting as the first-person disorientation of Alex (Gabe Nevins), a privileged high schooler who accidentally kills a man one night while riding the rails with an older, more dangerous skater punk. Van Sant pulls off some sweet shallow-focus shots and a feverish soundtrack that express the dream-like functions of consciousness, but wipes out on moves more difficult to pull off like hackneyed slo-mo and Super-8 skating footage.
The depths of artifice have always fascinated Brian De Palma, which is why his Redacted is such a fascinating and problematic film. A fictional account of the 2006 rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl by US soldiers stationed, Redacted is woven from various viewpoints and textures (a polished, pretentious French documentary about the soldiers’ daily routine at a vehicle checkpoint, a soldier’s digicam diary recordings that he plans to use to get into film school, personal YouTube videos). De Palma makes scattered valid points about the mediation of truth during the fog of war, but the film is hampered by clunky plot contrivances, hammer-blunt dialogue and characterizations, and some seriously amateurish acting. These flaws might be intentional considering De Palma’s love of fakery, and, however unexpectedly, they do buttress the film’s main theme. But they also leave a strong impression of De Palma’s tone-deafness when it comes to generating actual empathy and understanding of the film’s real-life referent.
Nobody will complain that Go Go Tales is not fun. But, really, it’s not very good, just a thin little wisp of a film that probably wouldn’t get the attention it will inevitably receive if it didn’t take place in a struggling, mom-and-pop strip club evoking the last vestiges of pre-Guiliani Manhattan vice. Abel Ferrara has an unabashed love of the sordid world with which he has intimate knowledge, and he caresses it beautifully with his camera. The rich lighting schemes and requisite T&A make Go Go Tales a pleasure to behold, but Ferrara weighs down the Paradise Club, run by Ray Ruby (Willem Dafoe), with too many obvious, broad jokes: the customer shocked to see his girlfriend among the strippers; the shrill Jewish landlord who wants to turn the place into a Bed, Bath, and Beyond; the lost lottery ticket Dafoe needs to find to prevent the joint from going under. Nonetheless, Go Go Tales features some perfect moments of tacky transcendence, most notably the one where Ray croons a gorgeous, melancholy tune about “the most beautiful girl in the world” as his employees writhe around him onstage. Oh, and Asia Argento kisses a dog.
Three Times didn’t work for me. The triptych structure, the Kar-Wai-esque pop tunes, the slight return to The Flowers of Shanghai: the whole project felt like Hou Hsiao-Hsien was simply coasting, waiting for to create something more coherent in which to expand his vision. The Flight of the Red Balloon, an homage to Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (the round floating piece of plastic makes several appearances, all miraculous) and HHH’s first French production, is that film. It’s amazing how well the Taiwanese director adapts to the rhythms and atmosphere of foreign cities while still retaining his trademark long-take tranquility, as he did so effortlessly in Tokyo for Cafe Lumière (a minor masterpiece) and now so in Paris here. Hsiao-Hsien keeps alive the childlike wonder of the original Red Balloon and Paris itself even as he incorporates “adult” concerns in the form of harried single mother Juliette Binoche who hires aspiring filmmaker Fang Song as her son’s nanny. Unassuming and yet overwhelming in its peaceful beauty, Flight of the Red Balloon is buoyant artistry and wondrous cinema.
Persepolis, adapted from the graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi, isn’t horrible by any stretch of the imagination, but it hits the major stumbling blocks so frequently encountered by such movies — trying so politely and tastefully to win the audience’s favor (and animation should never be polite and tasteful), and then in compensation making lame gestures toward irreverence. The first third of Persepolis, a French production co-directed by Marjane Satrapi and comics artist Vincent Paronnaud, actually doesn’t fare too badly: the view of Iran undergoing internal revolution and then war with Iraq from a young girl’s perspective is fascinating, and the exaggerated dark absurdities of such an upbringing benefit from the abstract black-and-white caricatures of Satrapi’s drawing style. But then the precocious Marji (voiced by Chiara Mastroianni, whose mother, Catherine Deneuve, plays Marji’s mom) spends her adolescence in Vienna and the film goes straight downhill, puttering through standard, uncompelling growing pains that pale in interest next to the experiencing the turmoil of the theocracy. We eventually follow Marji back to Iran, but by then Persepolis’ personal and political points have been made long before, and the strained efforts of the fanciful animation have worn thin.