Sleazy Does It

The dark and dirty reign supreme at this year's New York Film Festival.

by Sam Adams

FAMILY PLAN: Brothers Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman conspire to rob their parents' jewelry store. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Although its screenings are held within yards of the Metropolitan Opera House, the New York Film Festival acquired a distinctly grungy cast this year. The NYFF may pride itself on its exclusivity, but this year's programming showed a distinct predilection for the company of lowlifes.

No filmmaker enjoys snuggling up to the seedy underbelly more than Abel Ferrara, whose Go Go Tales palpably aches for the grimy texture of pre-Giuliani Manhattan. Although he shot the film at Cinecittà, Ferrara perfectly evokes the exuberant scuzziness of a downtown titty bar, incarnated by Willem Dafoe's manic impresario, Ray Ruby. Ray's eponymous Paradise club has seen better days, and his irate landlord (a shambling Sylvia Miles) keeps threatening to sell out to Bed Bath & Beyond, shrieking the chain store's name as if it could cast out evil spirits. But Ray's perpetual grin never dims, even as the hare-brained scheme he's hatched to secure the club's future threatens to evaporate like a spilled drink.

In his post-screening press conference, Ferrara called the film "our first intentional comedy," although its constant barrage of colorful invective is sometimes more enervating than amusing. Ray Ruby starts to seem like the guy who won't let the night end, dragging out the party when everyone else wants to crash. But if Ferrara has made better movies — including 2005's Mary, which still (still!) remains unreleased in the U.S. — his homecoming was well earned. Tales marked Ferrara's first NYFF appearance in 17 years, since the notoriously hostile reception for King of New York damaged his credibility with the uptown crowd. But with the festival's programming in new (and, not coincidentally, younger) hands, Ferrara regained his rightful place in the city's filmic firmament.

Likewise on the comeback trail is Sidney Lumet, returning to the city and the subject of his greatest films. In its bare outlines, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is a heist movie, with tapped-out brothers Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke conspiring to knock off the family jewelry store to pay down their debts. But Lumet calls it a melodrama, and with good reason, since once the crime goes horribly wrong, a lifetime worth of familial resentments comes surging to the surface. Shot in digital video as dingy as the deeds it depicts, the movie takes its time tightening the noose, giving Hoffman in particular the space to craft a masterfully sloppy performance that seems not only unstudied but unwritten, as if his strung-out bookkeeper were unraveling before our eyes.

Finding bad behavior far from the big city, Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light is set in a Mexican Mennonite community whose members speak an idiosyncratic Dutch-German dialect. But its breathtaking opening and closing shots, which turn elegant pirouettes while watching the sun rise and set in real time, suggest a universe entirely apart from the world, one where the laws of physics, and even metaphysics, no longer apply. Less deliberately abrasive than Reygadas' Japón and Battle in Heaven, Silent Light marks its territory somewhere between the ascetic spiritualism of Carl Dreyer and the formalist alienation of Diane Arbus. The movie is as beautiful as its title demands (the stunning camera work is by Alexis Zabe), but Reygadas stands back from his characters' most anguished moments, less out of delicacy than because he likes to watch them twist. Without the hardcore sex and unanticipated violence of his previous films, Reygadas doesn't quite seem to know how to make them feel fully real.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Flight of the Red Balloon employs a more subdued style than previous movies like Millennium Mambo or The Flowers of Shanghai. The story still unfolds in his trademark long takes, but there are few of the elaborate tracking shots and glowing tableaux common to films set in his native Taiwan. Working outside of Asia for the first time, Hou begins with a gloss on the beloved French short film The Red Balloon. But Hou's red balloon shows up only sparingly, mostly as a witness to the relationship between a harried single mother (Juliette Binoche), her young son and his Chinese nanny. Allowing long sequences to pass with minimal dialogue, the movie luxuriates in the cluttered comfort of the family's apartment, where the balloon's sporadic appearance outside the window offers a respite from their many troubles. In some ways, Flight seems the least ambitious of Hou's recent movies, but its slightness is deceptive, and its loveliness profound.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)