Totally Tribeca

A report from the downtown
New York film festival

UNDERGROUND IMAGES: Blank City

by MARK SLUTSKY

I am officially pretty sure I saw Thomas Haden Church and Melissa Leo in the flesh. It was hard to tell in the stylish and extremely low-lit environs of the Thom Bar, where well-dressed types were swanning around, drinking vodka cocktails and ostensibly celebrating the Church- and Leo-starring Don McKay, premiering that day at the Tribeca Film Festival.

That’s about as glamorous as it got for me at Tribeca, unless you count the time I was one bathroom stall over from a guy in what looked like an Ice Capades-style oversized plastic Roman centurion uniform, there to promote I don’t know what. Still, probably unlike most, I wasn’t really there for the glitz but for the films.

Tribeca was founded after 9/11 by Robert DeNiro and producer Jane Rosenthal as part of an effort to revitalize lower Manhattan. Situated between Sundance and Cannes, it’s at an awkward date in the festival calendar, though this year there were rumblings of a possible move to October (which means it would probably compete with Toronto for premieres).

Previous programs have felt a bit like free-for-alls, but this year the fest has been trimmed down (with about a third less films) and is more tightly focused, as well as some strong premieres. Those included Woody Allen’s latest, Whatever Works, a much anticipated creative collaboration with Larry David, who stars. Of course, I couldn’t get in, though it will presumably come out here soon. The next-biggest film on the fest’s slate is Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, which stars porn performer Sasha Grey as an upscale call girl.

There always seems to be a place in the festival’s heart for films about downtown New York. I liked Blank City, Celine Danhier’s ode to underground NYC filmmakers in the ’70s and ’80s. Told through interviews with the likes of Jim Jarmusch, Nick Zedd, Amos Poe, Steve Buscemi and John Lurie, the doc excavates an interesting period in independent cinema and features a great soundtrack.

Mining similar ground is Con Artist, a doc by Michael Sládek about crazy ’80s art phenomenon Mark Kostabi, a post-Warhol wonder who proudly ran a sweatshop of assistants who created his paintings, mocked his buyers and more recently stars in a cable-access game show where contestants name his works. He’s undoubtedly a charlatan, and that’s obviously the whole point, but even if you’re tired of artists who are obsessed with mocking the art world, this is pretty fascinating viewing.

I was looking forward to Duncan Jones’s Moon, which seemed like a pretty cool sci-fi concept: Sam Rockwell plays a guy working all by himself on a mining base on the far side of the moon, who unexpectedly runs into a doppelganger of himself. Neat idea, but the execution didn’t really blow me away. Another interesting genre take was The Eclipse, starring the great Ciaran Hinds as a sad-sack widower and volunteer at a literary festival in Ireland who starts seeing ghosts.

But by far the most interesting film I saw at Tribeca this year was Yoav Shamir’s Defamation. A personal doc from this Israeli filmmaker, Defamation explores the idea of anti-Semitism and how fear of it is used as a political tool. Shamir looks at it from many angles, following both the Anti-Defamation League and outspoken critic of Israel Norman Finkelstein. He raises some hard questions and the film is very worth seeing and likely to make people on all sides angry; after the screening, he said, “If everybody hates me, I think I’ll be okay.”