April 30, 2009
Tribeca weekend picks: About Elly, Cropsey, Entre Nos
NewYorkology film columnist Tim McGonagle was orphaned in a revival theater in Boston, Mass. in the mid-1970s. While other kids were outside playing, he was absorbing the films of Buster Keaton, Akira Kurosawa and the inappropriate-for-his-then-age, John Cassavettes. He contributes to “Noir of the Week” and maintains a blog of his own. Here’s his third set of 2009 Tribeca Fest reviews; read the first and second installments.
Whether we want it or not, the Tribeca Film Festival will wrap up this weekend. Aside from the half dozen previously covered here on NewYorkology, here are a few more worthy of consideration this weekend, especially About Elly which may be not merely the best film of the festival, but the best anywhere for 2009.
Entre Nos (2009) – World Premiere
Latino immigrants coming to America and struggling to survive is a story that has been visited several times before. One particular gritty depiction was Gregory Nava’s 1983 powerhouse El Norte. Much of the film dealt with the grueling physical and mental agony of the illegal journey into the United States. If you’re a recent immigrant in a new country, the process of cultural and financial assimilation must be overwhelming. To try and do both alone with two children and no money in New York sounds impossible.
Based on true events, writer/directors Paola Mendoza and Gloria La Morte deliver a remarkable narrative with Entre Nos. After bringing her two children from Columbia to Queens to reunite with her husband, Mariana (Paola Mendoza) finds herself abandoned by him. She speaks very little English, has a 10 year-old son, a 6 year-old daughter and very little money. But what Mariana does possess is a fierce protectiveness of her children and seemingly limitless drive and resourcefulness.
 The picture of Mariana and the struggles with her kids is not pretty. Eventually they are on the streets and the outlook is bleak. Yet this is where we see Mariana’s real strength. Their first night of homelessness is spent in a park. Mariana encourages the kids to play in the playground. She seems to take genuine joy at seeing her kids’ experience some happiness despite the dire situation. The scene is beautifully filmed at sunset with bittersweet tenderness. As the warm orange sun splashes on the children’s laughing faces, Mariana and the audience know what the twilight will bring.
Mariana keeps the family from going under, five cents at a time, by collecting cans and bottles on the streets for deposit money. Although she and her children were discarded by her husband, she keeps them afloat with these jettisoned containers, picking up what was left behind, to then be redeemed. With the help of new allies she and her precocious son collect along the way, exceeding survival and thriving may be a possibility.
The film is remarkably well executed visually and delivers strong performances by a smartly assembled cast. Thankfully Entre Nos does not unfold like a Horatio Alger story in naïveté nor broadness. It’s not necessarily a “feel good” movie by any means. But Entre Nos should elicit from you a wide spectrum of emotions including intense compassion – and if that’s the case, filmmakers Mendoza and La Morte will have done their job well.
Final festival screenings: Saturday at 3:45 p.m. and Sunday at 11 a.m.
About Elly (2009) – North American Premiere
On rare occasions there are films that impact you nothing less than profoundly. You walk out of the theater dazed, trying to process what you just saw, overwhelmed by the task. Those films stick with you. Days later, you’re still attempting to piece together what happened – as if you were witness to some uncanny event. Or maybe the film challenges your perception of how people should behave or even think. These questions are neither comfortable nor easy. What they do indicate is incredible, complex writing and flawless filmmaking. Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has achieved such with his absolutely brilliant film About Elly.
The film starts out innocent enough: a group of middle-class friends from college are taking their annual vacation up north by the Caspian Sea. Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani,) is attempting to do a little matchmaking by setting up her friend visiting from his home in Germany with Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti,) her child’s nursery school teacher. The film is light and effervescent in portraying the familiar and affable relationships these old friends share.
At the beginning of the second act however, a disturbing accident occurs that drastically changes the tone and steers the film into a nebulous moral territory. The incident brings to light a series of minor lies and innocent everyday deceptions that become huge under magnification of the horrible accident.
I don’t want to give away too much of the particulars. I’m not adverse to “spoiling” parts of a film (don’t want to know what happens in a film, don’t read the review.) The appropriate reason is because much of what the film is about is the impact of unexpected tragedy and how it drastically and harshly alters your psychic stability and perception. Going in knowing as little as possible is for the best and what director Farhadi I’m sure has in mind.
What Farhadi does so well is take conventional narrative moralities and turns them on their ear. His film has no good versus evil, but instead good versus good. It’s a modern tragedy where all the characters are saying the right things, but you don’t know who to entrust your sympathy with. The morals of some characters are eventually fractured (and plenty of fractured imagery in the film to match,) but nothing so egregious that the audience is given the convenience of easily identifying who is “wrong” and vilify them.
Farhadi creates palpable suspense and plays with his audience not unlike Hitchcock. Where Hitchcock toyed with his audience by putting his characters in grave physical peril and prolonging the resolution, Farhadi’s suspense is achieved on an ethical and emotional level. At one point, a crucial conversation takes place on the beach between two of the characters. The scene would likely provide answers to some of the moral ambiguities the viewer has been witnessing. But much of the film is about perception and Farhadi chooses the crash of the sea’s waves to drown out the dialogue, leaving us to our own subjective ideas of what is taking place.
The film as a whole is executed perfectly. The cast is fantastic and in particular Farahani’s emotional transformation is incredible to watch. Visually Farhadi is pragmatic when necessary, and his use of the camera in the long “accident” scene is staggering and powerful. As a piece of filmmaking, it is as close to perfection as I’ve ever seen.
The only other praise I can heap on About Elly is that not only was it the best film I saw at Tribeca this year (and I saw plenty), but easily the best film I’ve seen so far this year.
Final festival screenings: Saturday at 3:15 p.m. and Sunday at 10:15 a.m.
Cropsey (2009) – World Premiere
As a kid I remember hearing about a guy driving around my neighborhood in a black van and offering kids candy. He may have dressed up like a clown or something to that effect. Sound familiar? Every neighborhood has a local boogeyman. In filmmakers Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio’s documentary Cropsey, their native Staten Island boogeyman “Cropsey” may have been the real deal.
In 1987 the disappearance of Jennifer Schweiger, a 13-year-old girl with Down syndrome, touched off a frantic search on Staten Island. The likely predator responsible for her disappearance was linked to four other missing children, all from the same area of Staten Island. An arrest was eventually made of a creepy homeless man named Andre Rand. While Rand fit the profile and certainly looked the part, none of the children’s bodies were ever found. Though convicted, Rand professes his innocence to this day.
Rand was a drifter who used to work in the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island (where apparently the base used by Boogeyman “Cropsey” to snatch up children.) Willowbrook was the subject of a 1972 expose by a young reporter named Geraldo Rivera who exposed the institution (for severely retarded children) as a horribly abusive, overcrowded and neglectful environment. The filmmakers explore the metaphor of Staten Island as a dumping ground for all sorts of things: the mentally retarded, the sick in a TB ward built there, a landfill, bodies the mob wanted to disappear and perhaps these missing children. It’s an unnerving point that perhaps this killer was somehow contributing to the aggregate.
The film becomes especially eerie as Rand begins to correspond with the filmmakers from jail. At first it may seem like a jackpot for their documentary. Later it appears Rand is actually playing Zeman and Brancaccio for attention and the thrill of manipulation.
Zeman and Brancaccio nicely move back and forth in the film from present day to old footage and other aids to convey the metamorphosis from myth to perhaps reality. Though the likely killer, Rand’s conviction certainly wasn’t a prosecutorial slam dunk. With literally no physical evidence and very shaky witness testimony there was nothing close to a Perry Mason moment in Rand’s two trials.
There is undeniable emotional power in the film’s interviews with people connected to the case in one form or another. From detectives and police who worked the case in the ’80s, to people who initially volunteered to look for Jennifer Schweiger when she was first reported missing. Some still search for the bodies of the five children in the woods by Willowbrook to this day. They hope finding their remains will somehow ease the suffering their families endure. What these people all have in common is their anxiety of the unknown surrounding the cases. They are haunted by these murders.
But one thing we certainly do as humans is create our own monsters. It’s our coping mechanism for things we don’t understand or fear too greatly. Toward the end of the film, one of Rand’s old acquaintances is interviewed and holds Rand’s picture up to the camera. He says that if you showed it to a person who had never seen him and said, “This guy’s a child murderer” they would agree and say he looks like a killer. But if you held up the same picture and said “This guy just risked his life saving five people from a burning building” people would gush about how nice a guy and brave he looked. He has a point. We are more susceptible and subjective than we’d care to admit when it comes to most of our perceptions.
What is real and truthful in the words of Zeman, “is a range of possibilities.” The filmmakers adroitly present the viewer with all the “range of possibilities,” (which is what a well crafted documentary should do,) about the Staten Island child murders with, and without, Rand’s likely involvement. What makes Cropsey so special, is the directors compellingly convey the knowledge that all these real “possibilities” are perhaps more frightening than any Boogeyman our minds could possibly conjure up.
Final festival screening: Saturday at 8:30 p.m.
Picture credits: (All provided by Tribeca Film Festival)
Entre Nos; photos courtesy of the film
About Elly; photo courtesy of the film
Cropsey; Will the unlucky 7 ever turn up? Freeze frame from film
April 30, 2009 12:28 PM in Cheap Stuff, Downtown, Sightsology
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