EDGE New York City :: Entertainment

New York Film Fest Has Mid-life Crisis
by Tony Phillips
EDGE Contributor
Saturday Sep 29, 2007

At 45, New York Film Festival is having its mid-life crisis. The question is: has its lost its edge? Even its top-ranked gay filmmakers - Ira Sachs, Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant - are telling heterosexual stories. But, according to Festival-goer Tony Phillips, you certainly can’t blame filmmakers for following the market where it may lead. Here’s his overview of the event, which continues through October 14.

"You can’t please everybody," the wildly incompetent publicitrix Jeanne Berney says, dismissing a journalist whose question impedes her steam-rolling charge down the Walter Reade aisle. Um, yeah, I suppose, but wouldn’t it help to at least affect the façade of trying to please some of the people some of the time? Berney’s fuck you attitude isn’t just a rogue PR flack acting out, but symptomatic of a larger disease, namely The New York Film Festival.

At 45-years of age, this festival seems so mired smack in the middle of its mid-life crisis that it threatens to drive off in a red convertible even while its violently uneven programming unspools on the big screen.

Looking Back

It wasn’t always that way. Festival darling Sylvia Miles, one of the few stand-outs in this year’s edition with an unqualified star turn in Abel Fererra’s raunchy Go Go Tales, can remember winging in from Cannes to premiere Andy Warhol’s Heat at the 1972 version. Although the suicide of Miles’ co-star Andrea Feldman less than two months prior may have dampened the event slightly, she recounts a glittering evening equal parts drag queen and socialite, bumped up a couple of notches by the glamorous presence of none other than Miles herself. "I had just been nominated for Midnight Cowboy," she remembers, "The next logical step was not to do this underground Warhol film, but I did what I wanted to do." And while that decision may have closed doors in Hollywood, it certainly brought Miles through the looking glass and into Wonderland.

Interview editor Bob Collacello remembers a dinner in honor of Candy Darling prior to Heat’s run at the festival. Remembering Miles in attendance, he also recounts a guest-list at Le Parc Perigord that featured such bolded names as D.D. Ryan, George Plimpton, Halston, Giorgio di Sant ’Angelo and Diane and Egon von Furstenberg. When a puzzled security guard outside the event asked a reveler what they were giving away inside, the a-lister promptly responded, "Would you believe a transvestite?" Compare that fabulousity to this year’s launch party for Wes Anderson’s opening night film The Darjeeling Limited, a candy colored bore that posits three brothers on a train ride across the Indian subcontinent. The ugly Americans are fleshed out by three of the most unattractive actors on the planet: Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman. Candy Darling? Adrien Brody? You do the math.

But if Miles equals New York Film Festival starter wife, still shacked up in the now shuttered Alice Tully Hall, reminiscing about Warhol and Heat, the festival itself has moved on to less vaunted heights. It’s got a bachelor apartment that seems miles from the Lincoln Center campus in the mallish Time Warner Center. It’s even installed a mistress: Asia Argento. The Italian wunderkind, daughter of genius Italian schlock-meister Dario Argento, heats up the screen as a skinny, tattooed stripper in Fererra’s aforementioned Go Go Tales, but also stars in French feminist Catherine Breillat’s 19th Century yarn The Last Mistress. Breillat made her acting debut in Last Tango in Paris and went on to pioneer penetrative sex in film while Shortbus director John Cameron Mitchell was still riding the school bus. She even worked with Italian porn hunk Rocco Siffredi, so she’s up for the challenge of directing a wild child like Argento, but she has her work cut out for her topping Go Go Tales in which Argento gamely makes out with a Rottweiller (pictured).

Ira Sachs on Married Life

The festival’s rumination on marriage, fidelity and other animal stunts that won’t sit well with PETA, continues with out director Ira Sachs’ Married Life. Sachs, coming off a very hot 2005 Sundance with his Grand Jury Prize winning Forty Shades of Blue, follows up with a period piece populated by a dream cast (including Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, the pictured Pierce Bronson and Rachel McAdams) stacked in interlocking love triangles. The film is placed in the late 1940s, looks like it was shot in the 1950s and contains a lot of the free love grappling of the late 1960s. Oh, and a dog is poisoned. Sorry, PETA. Sachs describes Clarkson (whom he’s known since she appeared in a 300-pound fat suit at Yale) and her character Pat in the film: "This is an incredibly vivacious, sexual, alive character and Patty’s like that too. And this was a really great chance to create a new image for Patricia Clarkson as an actress." A salty Clarkson demonstrates exactly what Sachs is talking about by saying, "When I got to the scene when I was lying on the couch with my lover, I couldn’t get to the phone fast enough to say I’m in." She even gets a laugh on the double-entredre.

Clarkson has the festival audience so worked, there’s even a question about her hair color in the film, virtually unheard of in this rarefied geek landscape. "It was a wig actually," Clarkson replies, "It wasn’t my real hair. It was fun. I had never been a short, deep, red-headed, lady-girl." Something tells me perhaps Sachs cannot say the same. Before he identifies as gay, he comes out as an unrepentant Crawford fan. "Joan Crawford and Bette Davis movies were the films I related to-both as entertainments and camp-yet at the end of the day, when I left something like Sudden Fear, an early Joan Crawford movie, I was struck by how much it resonated for me personally. I’ve thought about it a lot. It’s this Joan Crawford/Jack Palance drama, but it’s over the top, let’s face it. What they’re going through in this one scene: Joan thinks Jack is going to kill her and Jack doesn’t know that Joan knows and they play out this perfect metaphor of marriage. And it’s Joan in all her makeup where she should be 20 years younger, but somehow the metaphor of it is beautiful for me."

When pressed as to why a gay filmmaker would lens a pic about Betty Crocker-era married heterosexuals at this particular juncture, Sachs replies, "What is more outsider than being in bed with someone that you feel a certain distance from? That, for me, is something I know personally in my everyday life, in love and all kinds of human relationships, but I think that distance from oneself: It could be a fight over a cup of coffee, but the distance can be the same and how you find your way back or not is the challenge. There are many, many marriages and we’re looking at one. Marriage is a word-as a gay man, it’s not a legal term for me-which is significant. To me, marriage is two people who decide to spend a lot time together over years." So okay, Ira Sachs, outsider.

Todd Haynes and Bob Dylan

Another outsider in the festival, and one that shares a screenwriter with Sach’s film, is Todd Haynes, whose latest film is entitled I’m Not There. This film is Haynes’ Bob Dylan bio-pic, in as much as a film with six different Dylans, including British actor Ben Whishaw, Cate Blanchett (pictured) and 11-year-old black boy, can be a Dylan bio-pic. It reverses the guerilla style filmmaking Haynes pioneered with Superstar, his take on the Karen Carpenter story, told with Barbie dolls. "It still can’t be publicly shown due to the fact that I used the music without permission," Haynes says of that early film. He bumped into a similar problem with Bowie’s estate on Velvet Goldmine, and worked around it, but told himself there was no way he could make I’m Not There without Dylan’s permission. He lucked into securing music and life rights though Dylan’s eldest son, who is also a filmmaker, and coached Haynes to cut words like "living legend" and "voice of a generation" from his pitch.

Haynes is the first to admit that "heterosexual icon" is never an accolade that was in his pitch, but it’s one that haunts Dylan nonetheless, as Haynes feels it’s the way most people perceive the crooner. "He was bizarre," Haynes reminds us of the 1966 Dylan he chronicles in the film, "The unique weirdness of Dylan at that time has gotten to be so normal and so canonized. He would jump around the stage like a speedy marionette figure. It was such a complete immersion in this moment and it was androgynous. It was a different kind of androgyny than you would see later with people like Bowie. It was almost like channeling Patti Smith. It was unmanly and unmacho. His flamboyance and foppery during that time is really profound and it must have been a freaker for people. The theory of freedom is very tied into this idea of identity that the film posits and Dylan’s life is a living argument for, which is people tell you to find yourself and be yourself and that is a sort of freedom, but I think that his life and his work and the pressures he lived under kept forcing that into question. The ultimate freedom is being able to escape and continue to reinvent yourself."

Gus Van Sant and Generation iPod

The third gay filmmaker of note in the festival, Gus Van Sant, has had no trouble reinventing himself as the voice of the Generation iPod. He also doesn’t feel the need to make an explicitly gay film, but at least he lets his pervy gaze, lensed so beautifully by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, linger on the skateboarding teens that populate his Paranoid Park. The film plays out much like his Columbine epic Elephant, with lots of gorgeous walking scenes tracked in slow motion down desolate high school corridors. And like Elephant, Van Sant mixes non-actors, some of whom are perfectly cast, with professionals, including the indie answer to High School Musical’s Sharpay, Taylor Momsen, who’s also starring on CW’s Gossip Girl. The rest of the actors Van Sant found on MySpace. And while most people might find that very To Catch a Predator, Van Sant explains, "This is how all casting agencies should go about casting high schoolers, especially now that MySpace is so prevalent. We were just trying to figure out the best way to get the word out to non-professional people to cast in the film."

So, does a festival that gave New York its first look at queer films like Techine’s Wild Reeds, Pasolini’s Salo and Pierce’s Boys Don’t Cry feel a little punk by giving us a gay track this year that’s telling essentially heterosexual stories? Sure, but that’s more about the demise of new queer cinema down the drain of genre filmmaking. You certainly can’t blame filmmakers for following the market where it may lead. But if you’re really hard up for gay programming, check out the 11th Annual Views From The Avant-Garde. I gave up on that sidebar the year one of the films featured endless shots of a flying crucifix being splattered with jizz, but it’s usually good for at least a cock shot or two. And, really, isn’t sexual identity completely beside the point? As festival pet Almodovar said one year in a press conference: "I smoke pot. I’ve tried cocaine. And I am gay. Now does anybody want to talk about my movie?"

As For The Rest ...

There are some films I can’t wait to talk about, but they hadn’t screened by press time: the Coen Bros. adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s testosterone fueled, 1980s Texas psycho-killer opus No Country for Old Men; that perennially pajama-ed bear, Julian Schnabel, who brought us Before Night Falls, returning to the festival with real life stroke drama The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; and John Landis’ Don Rickles doc, sarcastically titled Mr. Warmth.

Then there are other films I haven’t been able to stop talking about: The Palme d’Or winning Romanian abortion drama 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days; the animated closing night film Persepolis that chronicles the rambunctious coming of age of an Iranian girl and features phenomenal voice talent like Catherine Deneuve; Sidney Lumet’s harrowing crime drama Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead with its bold, but kind of gross extended Philip Seymour Hoffman nude scene and the most fabulous drug dealer ever captured on-screen; and my hands down favorite film in the festival: Juan Antonio Bayora’s The Orphanage, a creepy, gothic thrill ride that was put forth by Spain as their best foreign film entry for the Academy Awards the day it screened.

But are these films, all but one of which secured distribution before playing the festival-meaning they’ll be in multiplexes any day now-worth paying upwards of $40 a pop to see a couple weeks early? And let’s not even mention the many films you couldn’t pay me to sit through again like Bela Tarr’s The Man From London. And I like Bela Tarr! Still, in thinking about the mid-life crisis this festival is mired in, I can’t help coming back to that tee-shirt agnes b. designed to commemorate this year’s 45th edition. I stopped stuffing myself into agnes b. when I turned 30. Isn’t it about time this festival started acting its age? Oh, and by the way, when are those Tribeca dates again? I’m thinking of stepping out with a younger model myself.

Tony Phillips covers the arts for The Village Voice, Frontiers and The Advocate. He’s also the proud parent of a new website: spookyelectricproductions.com.