Less is more, they say, and that was certainly the case at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. Pared down from the bloat of previous years, the fest showed fewer than 100 features this year, and there was a much higher percentage of worthy films, most of which will hopefully be making their way to Charlotte in some medium or other eventually.
While the hit ratio was higher, it’s easy enough to settle on a few standouts. Moon and In the Loop were favorites, but they’ve already come and gone. The four titles I’ll discuss here are also worthy of a broader audience, though only three of them have been picked up for distribution to date.
Ti West’s smart, slow-burn of a horror film, The House of the Devil will be getting an odd
release from Magnet. It will be available on demand on October 1, and then it gets a theatrical release the day before Halloween.
West’s 1980s-set chiller captures the era quite well, both in terms of style and content, without playing the nostalgia for easy laughs. Well, mumblecore stalwart Greta Gerwig with feathered hair is kind of an easy laugh, but still. The film, shot on 16mm, pays homage to its forebears (awesome freeze-frame-laden opening credit sequence and cool poster) while bringing enough of a modern sensibility to the material that it all feels fresh. Jocelin Donahue brings a wonderfully naturalistic charisma to her role as Samantha, a college student who finds herself in desperate financial straits (one timely aspect of the film), and, on the night of an eclipse, takes an ill-advised job babysitting for the Ulmans. They live out in the middle of nowhere, and Samantha quickly learns that the couple doesn’t even have a child, but she’s persuaded by their “generosity” to spend the night at their house and watch…someone. It’s always great to see Tom Noonan play a well-modulated creep. And Mary Woronov matches him as his equally creepy spouse.
I found West’s previous film, Trigger Man, difficult to sit through. The House of the Devil is a much more successful amalgam of genre tropes with West’s unobtrusive and observational style. And the pace seemed a lot better, though maybe that’s just because I find watching a young woman dance around a creepy old house to the strains of The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads to Another” more interesting than watching a couple of over-their-heads city boys stumble around in the woods while being hunted by an unseen killer. Much of the film’s running time is devoted to a growing sense of dread, but I didn’t mind the delayed “gratification” of the horrific final moments. In fact, I got to know Samantha well enough that I really didn’t want anything bad to happen to her, which always makes for effective horror.
Naturalistic performances are also one of the many charms of Guy and Madeline on a 
Park Bench, Damien Chazelle’s insouciant feature debut. Like West’s film, Chazelle’s was shot on 16mm, this time in gloriously grainy black-and-white. Guy and Madeline is a bubbly but low-key urban romantic musical. As it opens, Guy (Jason Palmer) and Madeline (Desiree Garcia) have just ended their brief but intense romance. Guy, a jazz trumpeter, takes up with the sexy Elena (a very persuasive performances by Sandha Khin) after an erotically charged encounter on the T. Madeline, a grad student, struggles to find work, before picking up stakes and moving to New York. She pines for him, and he eventually begins to realize what he’s missing. It’s a simple story, elevated by the gorgeously gritty cinematography (by Chazelle), the wonderful jazz score (by Justin Hurwitz), and a few exuberantly well-executed musical numbers (featuring the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra) that play against the low-key improvisational naturalism of the rest of the film. Guy and Madeline themselves are not the most lovable characters you’d ever want to meet, but they’re genuine, and there’s a sweet sincerity to the film that easily won me over. Sadly, the film has not been picked up for distribution.
The festival’s Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature winner, About Elly, which also 
won the Silver Bear in Berlin, was picked up by Here! Films in June. It’s a fascinatingly knotty Iranian drama about a middle class brood from Tehran who go on vacation to the Caspian Sea for a few days. The well-intentioned Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani, who defected to France after co-starring in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies) invites along a shy, pretty acquaintance, Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti, who starred in the director’s previous film, Fireworks Wednesday), hoping to fix her up with the recently divorced Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini). Things turn out to be much more complicated than they appear. I went into the film cold, and I’d recommend anyone planning to see it do the same. It’s a wonderfully complex and multilayered drama. An important aspect of its effectiveness lies in the way writer/director Asghar Farhadi dispenses with exposition, gradually letting the characters and the nature of their relationships come to light through their vividly authentic dialogue and interaction. Some characters conceal more than others. Then, when tragedy strikes, we learn that some of our assumptions about them were incorrect. About Elly is a uniquely thoughtful and compelling drama. After an odd opening shot that foreshadows both the darkness and deceptiveness of Farhadi’s narrative, the film starts straightforwardly and gets increasingly thorny.
Thornier still is Yoav Shamir’s Defamation. Shamir is an Israeli documentarian whose 
earlier film, Checkpoint, was shown at New Directors/New Films in 2004. While that film was clearly very personal for Shamir, whose military service was partly spent manning a checkpoint, it was shot in the classic cinema verité style with no narration. In Defamation, the filmmaker plays a pivotal on-camera role. It’s more of a Michael Moore/Nick Broomfield approach, as Shamir also narrates, snarkily commenting on what he shows us. He starts by stating that as an Israeli, he’s never experienced anti-Semitism first-hand, and that the film represents his attempt to come to grips with the phenomenon.
For Shamir, anti-Semitism is not as significant an issue for Jews as is its use as a tool to manipulate unquestioning support for the state of Israel. Much of Defamation focuses on his exploration of the work of Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who gave Shamir surprising access to his world. Foxman’s worldview is shown in opposition to that of controversial academic Norman Finkelstein, son of Holocaust survivors and author of The Holocaust Industry.
While Shamir’s sly, flip approach has undeniable entertainment value, his thesis turns out to be fairly weighty, and convincingly expressed. While Tribeca offered many pleasures, great and small, this year, Defamation was that rare film that actually forced me to re-examine my own worldview. First Run Features is releasing the film in November.