Seeingeighteen movies over five days is an intense experience, and it actually takesa great deal of stamina, physical as well as mental, not to mention some meticulousplanning and scheduling. My weekat the Provincetown Film Festival was a fun time yet again this year, and I meta bunch of interesting people, including YouTube sensation Chris “Leave Britneyalone!” Crocker, Jake Shears’ adorable boyfriend Chris Moukarbel (who directed the new HBOdocumentary about Chris Crocker), and Mr. Kirby Dick, who’s easily one of my favoritedocumentary filmmakers of all time. I enjoyed most of the films that I saw enough to write aboutthem, but I’ll focus here on a couple of documentaries and a couple ofnarrative features from this year’s festival.
DavidFrance’s documentary How to Survive aPlague, winner of the award for best directorial debut at this year's festival, is the film that I was most excited to see in the line-up, andit also turned out to be the film that made the greatest impression on me. I already knew about the ACT UPyears of the AIDS crisis, having come of age during that era, but I’dpreviously learned only a little about the intricate details and main figuresof the movement. The explorationprovided in the film is both particular and vast, presented in a way that’snarratively textured and at times profoundly moving. The film’s climactic moment, in whichmembers of ACT UP poured their lovedones’ ashes onto the lawn of the White House in response to the government’sinaction at the height of the epidemic, is an image that I will never forget.
Thebest aspect of the film, however, was how it introduced me to a number ofimportant activists whom I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, particularly thelate Bob Rafsky, whose final tirade in the film is incredibly powerful, and oneof the key survivors of the film’s title, Peter Staley. Staley was a young bond trader in New York when hewas diagnosed with HIV, and he bravely went head-to-head with many people inpositions of power, including conservative kingpin Pat Buchanan, in orderto save his own life and the lives of his HIV-positive friends. I found him to be the most eloquentspeaker in the film; he’s also my new hero. I was honored to meet him at a party at the film festival,and I gave him a big hug to thank him for his outspoken work on behalf of hisgeneration of gay men and my own.
Hard Times: Lost on Long Islandis an hour-long HBO documentary that I had been highly anticipating at the festival. I didn't expect it to be artfulfilmmaking, but I was correct in predicting that it would be the most timely moviethat I saw throughout the week. Thefilm’s only screening was also woefully under-attended; Ididn’t take a head-count, but there were no more than ten viewers in theaudience, including the projectionist. I have to be honest about just how shameful I found that turn-out tobe. Of course, people will always buy aticket to see a meaningless, escapist comedy rather than a film that focuses onour currently bleak socioeconomic realities. New England (particularly Cape Cod) is also a bubble ofaffluence, so it’s revealing that people would avoid learning more about whatthe majority of the rest of this country (myself included) is strugglingthrough right now.Thefilm follows a handful of upper middle-class interview subjects as they copewith the fallout from continued unemployment. While none of the film’s statistics or images weresurprising given the harsh economic climate, I was still shocked by severalpieces of information. Forexample, calls to suicide prevention hotlines have more than tripled since thefinancial crash of 2008. And manyemployers actually admit to nothiring people who are currently unemployed, preferring to give their openpositions to applicants who already have a job. The most chilling images in the film were of foreclosureagents boxing up people’s belongings in foreclosed homes and leaving them sitting abandoned out on the curbside. Ithought to myself, if you’re paid to do that for a living, then you’re nolonger a human being. Your cardhas been permanently revoked.
Interms of lighter fare, my favorite narrative feature at the festival was therunaway French hit The Intouchables,which is now playing in theaters and is also the highest-grossing boxoffice smash in any language other than English. That makes perfect sense, since I can’t imagine anyone not thoroughlyenjoying this film. From itsclever and sleekly stylized flash-forward opening sequence, which tricks theaudience into thinking that the movie will be a fast-paced thriller or actionflick, it’s clear that The Intouchableswon’t be your standard Odd Couple-stylebuddy comedy.
Themovie’s premise is simple. Philippe (François Cluzet, pitch-perfect), a wealthy tetraplegic who’sconfined to a motorized wheelchair, unexpectedly hires Driss (the extraordinaryOmar Sy), a wise-cracking Senegalese immigrant, to be his caretaker. Driss had only come to interview forthe job in order to have his unemployment paperwork authorized, but Philippeknows that he’ll have a much better time hanging out with the no-bullshitDriss, especially in comparison to the other uptight stiffs and slouches whointerview for the position. Thepair goes hang-gliding, street racing, and even dances to the fantastic Earth,Wind and Fire-laced soundtrack together. The film’s genuine hilarity is matched by its genuine emotion, the kindthat’s better to experience first-hand than simply have described for you in areview. It’s definitely thecan’t-miss comedy of the summer, if not the year, in spite of the fact that it’s a fairly formula-based affair overall. (Omar Sy even beat out The Artist’sJean Dujardin for Best Actor at the César Awards, the French equivalent of theOscars.)
Coincidentally,my second- favorite narrative feature of the festival was another film from France,but an animated one. Le Tableau (The Painting), directed byJean-François Laguionie, is a delightful, color-splashed confection of a movie,but a confection with some contemplative (if unpretentious) depth as well. Characters inside a painting in anartist’s studio come alive, tumble out of the painting, and venture into the newworlds of other paintings elsewhere in the studio. While the film works perfectly well for children and young people, it’sequally successful for adults, and its more covert themes are perhaps even bettersuited to mature mindsets.Somesubtextual implications arise in the naming of the two groups of paintedcharacters in the film: theAllduns and the Sketchies. Astheir names suggest, the Allduns are figures that the artist has alreadycompleted, whereas the Sketchies are half-done cartoons of figures that are yetto be painted. The Allduns areforever causing trouble and lording their superiority over the Sketchies. (Insert your preferred thematicinstance of social hegemony here: race, class, etc.).
Yetthe film’s overarching allegory is all about creation. The characters who escape theirpainting are longing to meet the person who painted them, and who left some of themhalf-done because, as it turns out, the woman he loved had betrayed and lefthim. In his frustration, he’d slashed and destroyed some of the canvases. A wonderfully complex dialogue with the artist’sself-portrait takes place; he even comments on the nude painting of a reclining womanacross the room, “Look at her ... she’s still in love with him.”Thisallegorical investigation of time and creation manifests, ultimately, as anallegory of our search for the Creator. Religion is never once invoked throughout the entire film — this is,after all, a children’s text on its surface — but by the final scene, it’sclear that we’ve been heading quietly in that direction all along. One character makes her way out intothe sprawling field behind the artist’s studio, at which point the movie blendslive action with animation. Shefinds the old, white-bearded painter working on a study of the landscape. Satisfied at having finally encounteredher creator, she ventures, “Now I just want to meet the person who painted you.”
Iwas sorry to miss Kirby Dick’s latest documentary The Invisible War, a treatise on the very tragic issue of rape inthe United States military, and winner of the audience award for bestdocumentary at the festival. Isimply couldn’t fit the film into my tight schedule, unfortunately, but I’mglad to know that I’ll have a chance to see it at the cinema when it’s releasedhere in Boston next month. Ilook forward to viewing the film, despite (and also because of) its rigoroussubject matter.
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