10 Films To Watch at the ‘09 Tribeca Fest

A scene from Simone Bitton's "Rachel." Image courtesy of the Tribeca Film Festival.

In Romance languages, the word for “foreign” is a relative of the English term for “strange”: extranjero, etranger, straniero.

Foreign-language features, with looser scripts, less conventional form, and more penetrating character development, are more often than not “strange” by the standards of both Hollywood and American indie films. And the strongest documentaries, be they from here or abroad, offer the viewer effective critical distance from the subject matter—what academics call etrangement.

Here are Tribeca’s 10 best from these two categories, arranged alphabetically. One Tribeca topper told the Times last week that this year’s selection is “deliberately light” on account of the economic crisis. Now that IS “strange”—and inaccurate. The directors of the films below refuse to whitewash. Their work is, like much of life itself, dark, refreshingly dark.

Foreign Language Fiction

About Elly A group of relatives and pals rents a seaside villa in this beautifully choreographed Iranian film by Asghar Farhadi. At first the camera trails the excited characters as they move around the house and one another. Suddenly, it is thought that a child and a guest may have drowned.  The search, both above and below the water, is filmmaking at its most glorious and suspenseful. The accidents are a catalyst for suppressed tensions to surface, and the film’s tone becomes abruptly somber.

Fear Me Not Among Danish director Kristian Levring’s considerable assets in this rich psychological thriller is the great actor Ulrich Thomsen. Ingenuously withholding energy, he portrays Mikael, a bourgeois whose psyche begins to unravel, possibly from new antidepressants, and who lives, ironically, in an open glass house. He is a descendant of James Mason’s character in Nicolas Ray’s mid-‘50s Bigger Than Life, who OD’ed on cortisone and nearly sacrificed his son. Mikael’s unpredictable actions, especially against his wife and daughter, defy codes of civilized behavior. This is classic return of the repressed, the product of some childhood trauma.

Here and There An excellent tale of two cities, New York and Belgrade. The American protagonist, a quiet, debt-ridden downtown musician named Robert, flies to Belgrade in exchange for cash from the Serb, Branko, a high-energy survivor who lives in New York. Working illegally, Branko is unable to return home to retrieve his fiancee; the plan is for Robert to marry her, then bring her over. Serbian filmmaker Darko Lungulov has lived in both urban locales and, without romanticizing, beautifully captures their textures, intercutting the footage so gracefully that the cities almost meld into one. He’s also right on with the oddballs he films in both places. The more affecting love affair turns out to be Robert’s, a slowly simmering one with Branko’s lonely middle-aged mother.

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My Dear Enemy South Korean director Lee Yoon-ki’s fine film is combo chamber play and road movie. A resentful young woman drives her ex-boyfriend all over Seoul to collect from his pals, relatives, and assorted girlfriends money he never paid back. She is serious, uptight, a little plain; he is a handsome, playful manipulator. The Seoul of the movie is one of overpasses, tall buildings, fast-food chains, all nicely rendered—OKAY, architectonic!—which often register for just as long as it takes to whiz past. During the brief encounters we meet some unforgettable residents, ranging from a needy older female executive to a biker cousin to a wealthy prostitute.   (1 of 2)  Next Page › posted on April 21, 2009 |Share