Tribeca Wraps Up, With A Few Gems In Its Wake

By Katey Rich

As the Tribeca Film Festival prepares to wrap up this weekend, leaving some of us to obsess over summer movie releases and the rest to trot off to Cannes, I can't help but breathe a sigh of relief. Even with a film festival not particularly known for standout films, there's immense pressure to go and see and do. You're a film writer! You're supposed to go nuts when there's so many out there to see, even if all you want to do is go home and catch up with last week's episode of "The Office," which you missed because you were watching some glum drama about life in the heartland.

The films I've seen have been a jumble of earnest indies hoping for a distributor, big studio projects brought in for the glamour factor, studio orphans that might get a bit more attention here than they will when they're unceremoniously dropped into theatres, and a handful of high-profile foreign efforts making their attempts to land on these shores with aplomb. Tribeca is known for its variety in programming, but either through my own bad luck or the curse of indies, most of the movies I've seen have been distinctly depressing, plumbing the lower reaches of humanity and coming up with not much positive to say.

As a result, probably, the films I've liked the best have been the ones with a sense of humor. The standout by far was Bart Got a Room, which I promise I liked a lot before I chatted with director Brian Hecker the other day. As I mentioned in that article, it's a rare teen comedy that actually has something to say, and thanks to Hecker's insistence on helping teens realize that there's more to life than prom dates, it goes in a good number of surprising directions with its classic story. Bart went into the festival without a distributor, but given that it's one of the unqualified hits of Tribeca, it will doubtlessly be returning to theatres quite soon.

Another movie that dared to have a sense of humor was Man on Wire, a lively documentary set for release from Magnolia Pictures later this year. Documenting Frenchman Philippe Petit's daring walk on a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers in 1974, it's a bold choice for a festival that was founded immediately after those two towers collapsed. But mild discomfort at seeing the towers again quickly turns into delight, as director James Marsh tells the story of how Petit got up there to begin with as if it were a zippy heist film. It doesn't hurt that Marsh got amazing access to Petit and his fellow collaborators-- or should we say accomplices?-- including intimate archival footage and extensive interviews with all the participants. Stylized black-and-white re-enactments of the event risk cheesiness, but Marsh plays them for comedy, illustrating the lively story told by Petit and his friends. Culminating with photographs of Petit on his walk, set to Erik Satie's piano, the film is inspiring, not to mention vertigo-inducing.

Two foreign dramas explore the perils of romance, though in completely different contexts with very different endings. Eden, an Irish drama based on a play by Eugene O'Brien, meets a couple in their tenth year of marriage and probably fourth year of unhappiness. With two children and a nice, neat house, Breda and Billy should be happy, but his boredom and her resentment only build up as they approach their anniversary. Though it feels a bit claustrophobic thanks to its theatrical roots, Eden benefits from two stellar lead performances and clear-eyed direction from Declan Recks, who never lets the film be too overly sentimental. The same goes for Simon Brand, who dramatizes the perils of immigration in Paraiso Travel, about two Colombian lovers who make the dangerous trek to New York City. Marlon is separated from his girlfriend Reina almost as soon as they arrive in Queens, but over the course of his search for her he manages to make a home for himself among fellow immigrants. Through flashbacks to Marlon's journey across the border, though, Brand is frank about the sacrifices involved in securing a life in America that, given immigration policies and the stark reality of poverty, is not so secure after all. Paraiso ends on a moment of hope for its characters, and manages to address the most chilling aspects of immigration within the framework of a traditional Hollywood drama.

And finally there's Katyn, the latest film from the Polish master Andrzej Wajda, which was nominated for this year's Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. The movie dramatizes a near-forgotten event during World War II, when Soviet soldiers invaded Poland and took nearly 150,000 soldiers captive, many of them among Poland's best and brightest thanks to the country's draft. The Soviets eventually executed as many as 22,000 of the prisoners, and though nearly everyone in Poland was affected by the massacre, the Soviets refused to acknowledge the killings for decades. Katyn follows a series of people affected by the massacre, including the wife of an army officer and his friends, the sister of a man slaughtered in the massacre, and the family of a professor killed for daring to question the status quo. Though Katyn is occasionally stilted in its storytelling, and the interlocking storylines lack some of the power they might have had on their own, Wajda is bravely tackling a difficult story from his own country, and reminding us of just how many stories there are left to tell from World War II.

As for stories left to tell from Tribeca, there aren't too many of those. But I hear there's a couple of superheroes with a tale or two to tell...