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FILM COMMENT
March/April 2003
SPLENDOR IN THE MARGINS: PART 2
above: Prey for Rock & Roll
By Amy Taubin
Showing out of competition, Masked and Anonymous (aka the Dylan movie), directed by Larry Charles and pseudonymously written by Charles and Bob Dylan, is set in the near future when the U.S. resembles a crumbling Banana Republic ÷ a concept given a certain credibility by the current administrationās loot ānā pollute policies. During the post-screening discussion, Charles mentioned that he wanted the movie to be like ćCassavetes doing Shakespeare,ä which explains, at least, why Jessica Lange impersonates Gena Rowlands throughout. Dylan does about a dozen songs with his tight juke-joint band, and itās worth sitting through the rest of the nonsense for both the music and for Jeff Bridges, in Fisher King mode as Dylanās nemesis (a journalist, what else?).
A highlight of the World section, Gurinder Chadhaās Bend It Like Beckham sees the talented British director returning to the mode of her ebullient feminist adventure, Bhaji on the Beach. At the risk of providing ad copy for Fox Searchlight, the film, which concerns a teenage girlās passion to play soccer, much to the dismay of her middle-class Indian family, plays like a combo of Love and Basketball and a much better My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The Beckham of the title is Britainās reigning soccer superstar (if you didnāt know that, you might overlook the movie), who makes a mere 20-second guest appearance. No matter, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is the only heartthrob needed.
A late entry that might have jazzed up the competition, Alex Steyermarkās Prey for Rock & Roll has Gina Gershon as a punk rocker turning 40 and wondering if itās time to bow out. Gershon is game, but she canāt rock. As her fellow band members, however, Drea de Matteo is a goddess of cool and Lori Petty breaks your heart. Steven Traskās music is as much a plus here as it is in Camp and The Station Agent. The best score, however, was Brian Enoās almost subliminal one for Nicolas Winding Refnās paranoid psychodrama Fear X.
Beyond the films themselves, the 2003 Sundance was notable for its continuing efforts to build an infrastructure for the production and exhibition of documentary film. House of Docs (sharing Main Street digs with the Filmmakers Lodge, where traffickers in fiction were welcome as well) was the hub of a festival within the festival, a place where American filmmakers could meet their counterparts from around the world and participate in panel discussions and presentations. There was Kim Longinotto from Britain, director of the impressively measured The Day Iāll Never Forget, which looks at the conflict over female genital mutilation within a Somali community in Kenya, sharing the microphone with Fouzia, the fragile, amazingly self-possessed pre-teen girl whose poem gave the film its title. Longinotto shows how the traditional culture is making its last stand around the control of womenās bodies and how women are as likely to be enforcers of the old order as men.
There were also Brazilian director José Padilha and coproducer Marcos Prado of Bus 174, which uses real-time network footage of a São Paulo bus hijacking in 2000 that had the entire country glued to their TVs for hours. The film intercuts the television coverage (the cameras were so close that you can see whatās happening inside the bus as if you were only a few feet from the windows) with interviews with surviving hostages and with relatives and social workers who had known the hijacker, himself a survivor of the infamous massacre of street kids by the police a few years before. Building an indictment of the media, the police, and the provincial governor for placing self-interest above saving lives, Bus 174 opens out from the people directly involved in the incident to an examination of institutionalized poverty and a prison system so dehumanizing that the hijacker would rather die than be returned to it.
After its first screening, Andrew Jareckiās Capturing the Friedmans, the Documentary Grand Prize winner, became as hot a ticket as any fiction film, the result of its sensational subject (a middle-class, Long Island, Jewish family is destroyed when the father and one of the sons are arrested, tried, and imprisoned for multiple counts of child sexual molestation). Thereās no doubt that the film delivers the emotional equivalent of a kidney punch, but thatās as much a result of the filmmakerās attitude÷better suited to entomological research÷and the tidy Rashomon structure he imposes on material as it is to the Friedmans themselves. By comparison, Jennifer Dworkinās Love and Diane ÷ an intimate, unruly portrait of a mother/daughter relationship and of three generations of a black Brooklyn family struggling with drug addiction; HIV; poverty; a byzantine, contradictory, often inane welfare system; and the self-destructive impulses that result from anger, shame, and abandonment÷seems even more admirable and involving than it did in its New York Film Festival screening last year. Dworkin videotaped Diane and her painfully alienated daughter, Love, for many years, and the trust that developed between the family and the filmmaker allows us unusual access to their everyday life. Dworkin doesnāt sentimentalize her subjects and therefore leaves us ample room to feel annoyed and angry with their behavior as well as with the system that repeatedly betrays them. But in the end, itās Dworkinās empathy that allows one to understand Diane and Loveās experience and to care about what happens to them, or at least to ask if perhaps passivity in the face of social and economic injustice makes us more like Love than we would like to think.
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Amy Taubin is a contributing editor to Film Comment.
© 2003 Amy Taubin.
