The Best of the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival
April 21 – May 2 
 

The best discovery (out of 35 films seen) at the recently concluded Tribeca Film Festival was found in the international Showcase selection, which had a strong slate with My Queen Karo; Road, Movie; and Lola. In comparison, the selections in the more attention-getting world narrative competition were wobbly. It’s unfair to set a film like Open House against veterans Mohammad Rasoulof (The White Meadows) or Ferzan Ozpetek (Loose Cannons). Competing against these art films, Andrew Paquin’s slasher flick, featuring a predatory vixen out of an early ’90s sex thriller, looked out of place. Because the audience knows the identity of the killers (no spoilers here) and sees the film’s many victims innocently walk into their traps, the deaths-by-butcher knife are perfunctory. The only suspense lies in whether a chained-up Rachel Blanchard can break free out of a basement. Anna Paquin, the director’s sister, makes a brief appearance before starting off the body count. The film would have been more at home in the Cinemania section made up of midnight genre movies. By scheduling it in such a high profile slot, the programmers have done it a disservice.

A Brand New Life, also made by a debut director, Korean-born, French writer/director Ounie Lecomte, has already made the festival rounds, but this simply told gem would have done the recent New Director/New Films proud. It’s no small achievement to direct a moving drama that rests solely on the shoulders of a nine-year-old actress, the steely Kim Saeron. She plays Jinhee, abandoned by her father and left in the care of a Catholic all-girl orphanage outside of Seoul in 1975.

The film sidesteps the temptation to wallow in the adorableness of the orphans. Of course, they’re cute. But Jinhee, a diminutive force of nature, doesn’t want to be loved by anyone except her father, who’s never coming back. Head lowered, eyes averted, and barely speaking, Jinhee’s more exasperating than cuddly. I had to think back to Margaret O’Brien’s mental breakdown in Meet Me in St. Louis for another girl at a loss as to how to vent her anger other than through aggression. Jinhee eventually opens up and finds a slot within the pecking order, learning the in’s and out’s of how to be adopted—you have to be good. Knowing a bit of English doesn’t hurt.

Never wasting a moment, Lecomte has a great sense of pace, and there are more captivating storylines here than in most films. Life flows, but it doesn’t feel by design because she lets her actors set the tone. There’s a sense that she has surrendered control to the young cast—all it takes is one kid to get the giggles for a tense scene to veer in a new direction. This film, plus My Queen Karo and The Hedgehog from France, are smart and universal coming-of-agers, the year’s most welcomed new trend.

Another favorite on the festival circuit, the down-and-druggie Blood and Rain, is a raw, edgy film noir via Columbia. It’s in large part like Michael Mann’s Collateral, with cabdriver Jorge driving all night through Bogotá searching for his brother’s killer. The nocturnal tracking shots of streetwalkers prying their trade bring to mind Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa, which also centered on a lost, self-destructive woman the camera loves. In Blood and Rain, it’s party girl Angela (Gloria Montoya, a knockout, especially considering how much booze and cocaine Angela consumes). But filmed on location, the film has a texture all its own.

Jorge may be too easy to read—you really do see him fall in love with Angela—and one-dimensional. He’s saintly, even packing heat. Yet there’s mystery to Angela—why she clings to Jorge throughout the night, a man she just met when she jumped into his cab, or why she swills brandy or snorts coke every other minute. Almost everyone on screen, though not Jorge, does blow, but the repetitive snorting slows down the plot. Director Jorge Navas concentrates more on capturing Bogotá in all of its seediness than in filling in all of the blanks. You almost get a contact high.

When We Leave won the best narrative award, and its star, Sibel Kekilli, rightly won the best actress award. Eric Elmosnino took best actor for his spot-on portrayal of French singer Serge Gainsbourg in Gainsbourg, Je t’Aime… Moi Non Plus, head and shoulders above most biopics. The script does away with the excessive exposition that usually weighs down the genre. Directing his first film, graphic novelist Joann Sfar leaps over years and Gainsbourg’s many affairs/marriages. A lot happens off screen. Besides the usual highs and lows of a show biz career, the film personifies the huge cultural changes of the late 20^th century, and not only in France, through Gainsbourg. 

The film begins with his childhood, growing up Jewish in Nazi-occupied France, to his lean years as a painter before he became a songwriter, churning out hit after hit in the ’60s.  However, his style of music, spoken rather than sung, and the lightweight melodies really never caught on as part of the American songbook, although most audiences will perk up when he records his heavy-breathing hit, “Je t’Aime… Moi Non Plus,” with Jane Birkin (played by the late Lucy Gordon, to whom the film is dedicated), but you’ll need to know his music to fully appreciate the film. Of all the European celebrities on parade here, by far the most familiar on this side of the Atlantic is Brigitte Bardot, appropriately clad in a mini-skirt or only in a loose bed sheet. Gainsbourg really takes off when the narrative turns less literal and most fantastical. Unseen by anyone else besides Gainsbourg is his alter-ego, a large Muppet-like creature—resembling a giant Mr. Potato Head when Gainsbourg is a boy and morphing into an anti-Semitic caricature egging the adult Gainsbourg to bed groupies, drink, and snort to excess.

Loose Cannons, from Italy, joined the foreign-language winners When We Leave and Gainsbourg, Je t’Aime… Moi Non Plus, receiving a special jury mention. The storytelling for all three is accessible, but not necessarily linear. Each is idiosyncratic in its own way. Mainstream? Sure, if that means pitting a young Turkish woman against Muslim traditions in When We Leave or a film fluctuating widely between melodrama and farce in Loose Cannons, with surrealistic touches thrown in for good measure. However, with fewer foreign films finding screens here and an already crowded video-on-demand pipeline, Tribeca may be moving toward solidifying a larger mission—leaving American indies for Sundance and instead focusing on spotlighting international fare. There’s no denying that these are the stronger feature films in the festival, or that they need an American launching pad, now more than ever. Kent Turner
May 7, 2010