Tribeca 2008: Critic's Notebook #1

Man, do critics love to bitch. Rounding the midway point of the seventh annual Tribeca Film Festival — beloved whipping post of many within the New York film biz: "It's grown too huge too quickly! It's too corporate sponsored and Hollywood glitzy! Tickets cost too much! Press embargos violate my journalistic rights!" — it seems that the typically heated detractors have been aiming their vitriol towards a far more bilious enemy: each other. Widely ignoring the fact that Tribeca's overall programming has suddenly and significantly improved this year, professionals, bloggers and professional bloggers (in no particular order, leave it alone!) have been too busy fighting amongst themselves this past week or two, bitterly and futilely creating junior-high cafeteria drama that barely masks their job security hysteria. Shouldn't we of this trade be more concerned with making ourselves useful and, uh... discussing and championing and debating films that have a limited chance to succeed without our critical support?

The haters might then go on to mutter something about Tribeca's decision to open last Wednesday with Baby Mama ("It's mediocre studio product starring an American Express spokeswoman!"), just one easy-to-overlook gala premiere in a variegated line-up of 120 features; docs, mock-docs, horror flicks, sports picks, under-the-radar imports, restored gems, Amerindie crowd-pleasers — and yes, Speed Racer — bump up against works so avant-garde and admirably non-commercial that only a festival like Tribeca would dare take a big-screen chance on them. Of the latter, I highly recommend John Gianvito's provocative and quietly mesmerizing Profit motive and the whispering wind, an experimental non-fiction elegy to forgotten American radicals and their progressive striking. Perfectly paced at just under an hour, Gianvito's chronological cine-essay documents through static shots (and supplemental, hand-sketched animation) the gravestones and other monuments of said crusaders, some famous (Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Medgar Evers) and others unmarked, untouched, now and forever unknown. The ambient outdoors provides most of the soundtrack, an enunciated tranquility that grants a haunting immediacy to the faded historical memories, labor-union massacres and causes marked on plaques and etched into cemetery stone: "Don't iron when the strike is hot," becomes an unexpected laugh line, the passion and irony of the postmortem message equally palpable. For all its beautiful austerity, Gianvito's vital memorial of memorials could and should be dissected at length shot by shot, a reminder that our collective amnesia for those who fight for socioeconomic justice is, sadly, as inevitable as both death and Wal-Mart.

Without any dialogue, Gianvito's film is patient but must-see viewing, as is Tunisian-born French auteur Abdellatif Kechiche's slow-burning but warmly magical third feature, The Secret of the Grain. At 151 minutes, Kechiche's ambitious follow-up to his woefully underseen Games of Love and Chance (L'Esquive) is in no rush to again draw a verité-like focus on an ensemble of mostly North African immigrants, here an extended family just getting by in an impoverished port town in southern France. After being let go from his shipyard job, stone-faced sexagenarian Slimane (Habib Boufares) invests his severance into a dilapidated boat in hopes of building an onboard restaurant to serve his ex-wife's fish couscous. Helped a bit by his kids and moreso by his landlord/lover's daughter Rym (Hafsia Herzi, the film's breakout talent and third-act scene stealer), Slimane jumps through burning bureaucratic hoops and subtly tries to shake off his deeply ingrained displacement (a recurring cultural theme, as is the casual racism of the white bourgeois elite) to establish a place of business that nobody believes will succeed. If a film with a rambling, naturalistic, half-hour dinner conversation shot almost entirely in close-up — as well as a loan application sequence almost as long — seems too tough a sell for casual filmgoers (and just ask IFC Films, who picked it up for distribution), then hope may indeed be lost for the art of cinema. Building to a tender Big Night-like feast where the gang's all here, suspense is as thick and exciting as communal joy, and a single sexy surprise proves one of the greatest moments in film this year, The Secret of the Grain is so far my favorite at Tribeca.

It's time to head back into downtown Manhattan for more fest screenings, but check back later this week for a look at Shane Meadows' Somers Town, Isild Le Besco's Charly, and more tasty Tribeca finds.