Film: Fight the Power!
From contemporary Iran to rural Georgia, authority figures don’t fare very well in the current crop of new releases. Maybe it’s all that rampant, headline-grabbing activism currently dominating the news cycle. It may not have been intentional, but three of the titles making their way to local theaters this week couldn’t have been more perfectly tailored for the Occupy Wall Street crowd.
Question is, are they any good?
Let’s begin with Circumstance, the coming-of-age lesbian romance that won the Dramatic Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. An indignant, issue-driven call for tolerance masquerading as a sensuous tale of forbidden love, the debut feature by Iranian American filmmaker Maryam Keshavarz gives viewers an intimate glimpse of a bourgeois Tehran household.
The Hakimis appear to have their act together. Their comfortable, impeccably decorated home harks back to their country’s more prosperous, Western-influenced past. If only they could control their black sheep. No, not prodigal son Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai), who claims to have kicked his crack addiction and, to the mild consternation of his parents, has found Allah. It’s rebellious baby sis Atafeh (perky-nosed newcomer Nikohl Boosheri) who’s giving Mom (Nasrin Pakkho) and Dad (playwright Soheil Parsa) throbbing, Bachmann-sized migraines. They look the other way when they see their daughter get all chummy with middle-class schoolmate Shireen (Sarah Kazemy), even though it’s obvious they can’t keep their hands off each other. The girls daydream of a life away from their fundamentalist government’s iron grip and, in a fantasy sequence during which Keshavarz indulges in some clichéd softcore imagery, they envision having steamy, worry-free sex as free citizens in Dubai.
Not that there’s anything wrong with some Skinemax action beneath the sheets. Circumstance is actually as its most engaging whenever it conveys the heady rush of first love. Keshavarz’s tactile visuals take viewers into the girls’ intense bond with a vivacity that marks the New York-raised director as a talent to watch. An empowering scene showing Atafeh and Shireen going into the water at a secluded beach in their undies is a lyrical case in point. Alas, Keshavarz is also intent in delivering a message movie. In what spells trouble for both the characters and the film, Atafeh and Shireen start hanging out with nonconformist friend Joey (Keon Mohajeri) and his openly gay American cousin Hossein (Sina Amedson), who wants to stick it to the man the best way he knows how: by attempting to (gasp!) dub Gus Van Sant’s Harvey Milk biopic in Persian. “I want to create serious dialogue,” Hossein proclaims, and Keshavarz runs with that statement. The morality police gets wind of the budding activists’ plan, and Circumstance takes a detour into social problem cinema that pushes the love story at the film’s core to the back burner, even after Mehran uses his pull as a devout (male) Muslim to make a play for Shireen’s affections. It appears the young man’s newfound faith has one hell of a dark side. Can you say ticking time bomb?
It all builds up to a climactic choice for Atafeh that takes Circumstance into Persepolis territory. The difference between both films is that graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi ensured her characters came before the politics. Even though Keshavarz refuses to turn Mehran into a one-dimensional antagonist, by the time Circumstance arrives at its sobering closing shot, the film’s human rights agenda has gained the upper hand, and a promising romance gets washed away in a tidal wave of consciousness-raising. This is still a worthwhile endeavor.
Hustle & Flow auteur Craig Brewer attempts a similar balancing act in his pleasantly diverting remake of Footloose (aka Kevin Bacon’s 1984 ticket to stardom), and what should by all means feel like a generic studio product refereed by an overqualified hired gun instead comes across as an energetic, disarmingly goofy dance-a-thon with a dash of Sunday-sermon pathos.
The latter element is provided by well-intentioned but hopelessly-behind-the-times Presbyterian pastor Shaw Moore (Dennis Quaid, putting on the suit previously worn by John Lithgow). His close-knit community of Bomont, Ga. has been rocked by a head-on collision. No, not the Tea Party movement. In a startling scene right out of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, a truck slams into a car and claims the lives of all high school students riding inside…including Moore’s only son. Extreme acts call for extreme measures, and so the conservative members of the town council vote unanimously to ban rock and roll and suggestive, non-school sanctioned dancing.
Fast forward five years. City slicker Ren McCormack (You Got Served hoofer Kenny Wormald) moves in with his uncle after his mom loses her battle with leukemia. The Boston transplant butts heads with law enforcement from the get-go: He gives attitude to a local cop who pulls him over for blasting the devil’s music too damn loud. Word moves fast across town about this new arrival with the toothy grin and James Dean’s hairdo. At school, Ren befriends Willard (Rabbit Hole‘s Miles Teller), an easygoing – and none too bright – country hick who becomes the film’s less-than-inspired comic relief (Git-R-Done, anyone?). He also catches the eye of Moore’s daughter Ariel (former Dancing with the Stars showstopper Julianne Hough), who has responded to her brother’s untimely death by never missing an opportunity to piss off her father. Moore, however, is too busy keeping tabs on Ren, whom he regards as a menace to the welfare of Bomont’s cheerfully neutered teenage population.
As the new Footloose follows the narrative thread of its predecessor with very few minor changes, it’s clear Brewer is not seeking to reinvent the wheel. Ren gets to show off his anger-channeling moves à la Jennifer Beals in Flashdance and also confronts the powers that be by quoting biblical passages. What the Black Snake Moan director does contribute is a more racially inclusive vibe that incorporates urban dances like krumping (the subject of the documentary Rize). He also doesn’t shy away from displaying a fixation with women’s butts akin to Tarantino’s foot fetish, a very unusual trait for such a high-profile studio release. His robust visual style doesn’t quite compensate for the flimsy source material, which basically argues for impressionable teens’ right to party like it’s 1955, but it does make the wholesome antics that much easier to digest.
Moviegoers seeking a sleazier party atmosphere could do far worse than checking out Limelight, the new documentary from Miami-based production company Rakontur. Cocaine Cowboys director Billy Corben employs his trademark style – a mix of archival footage, endearingly cheesy graphics, and artfully shot talking-head interviews – to chronicle the rise and fall of New York City’s rave culture as seen from the point of view of Canadian businessman Peter Gatien. The Cornwall, Ontario native arrived in New York in the late eighties and proceeded to transform its nightlife by opening a series of clubs like Tunnel, Palladium and the title venue. Propelled by first-person accounts from Gatien, his associates, and even celebrity revelers like Moby, this New York Post headline of a movie brings those endless, ecstasy-fueled nights to vivid life. Corben also makes judicious use of the digital photo effects used in the Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture that gives still images the illusion of movement.
When Limelight morphs into an exposé of Rudy Giuliani’s self-righteous attempts to phase out this thriving subculture, it showcases Corben’s skill at immersing viewers into the most minute details of true crime scenarios. What gets lost in the director’s obsessive attention to (il)legal matters is a portrait of Gatien himself. The eyepatch-wearing entrepreneur preferred to lurk in the background and pull the strings of his empire from behind the scenes, but other than a brief anecdote about being coaxed into making personal appearances at his establishments more often, you don’t get a sense of Gatien’s emotional journey during this tumultuous period. Corben is so wrapped up in the lurid details of this real-life ordeal that he neglects to peek behind the curtain to explore the enigmatic wizard running the show.
Limelight starts Thursday exclusively at O Cinema (o-cinema.org). Director Billy Corben and producer Alfred Spellman are scheduled to attend select screenings throughout the weekend. Craig Brewer’s Footloose shimmies its way to South Florida theaters on Friday. That same day, Circumstance embarks on its crusade championing freedom of expression at the Coral Gables Art Cinema (gablescinema.com) and the Gateway Theatre in Fort Lauderdale (thegatewaytheatre.com).
