By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Screening Gotham: July 28-30, 2006
A few of this weekend’s worthwile cinematic happenings around New York:
—Like I said before, Gela Babluani is going to be around for a while, and you might as well find out why: His feature debut 13 Tzameti, which broke through at Sundance and is getting the American remake treatment this fall, recounts the Hitchcockian/Polanskian/insert-austere-Euro-thriller-director-here-ian tale of an impoverished young man embroiled in one of modern cinema’s more insidious get-rich-quick schemes.
Despite a serviceable lead performance by George Babluani and a brilliant, enervated turn by Aurélien Recoing (Time Out), Babluani’s script has nothing on his style: 13 Tzameti flourishes in its silence and space, more accomplished in all it leaves unspoken than any of its pedestrian plot trickery. Which, I guess, is what frightens me about the American version: Consider this my earnest prayer for more show, less tell.
–The Film Society of Lincoln Center continues the 2006 Scanners video festival this weekend, showcasing Diane Nerwen’s abstinence-ed satire The Sexorcist: Revirginize as part of Saturday’s Mediated Media program. Nerwen combines images from The Exorcist and the Britney Spears masterpiece Crossroads with a million or so sound clips culled from elsewhere around cinema; the result features a young woman (Spears) who swears off sex only to vie with her mother (Ellen Burstyn) and, naturally, her libido in the fight for her soul. Alternately campy, idiotic and borderline unwatchable, the film nevertheless symbolizes the type of creative, organic political rebuke that American culture so sorely lacks. OK, fine–I’ll give you the 11 o’clock hour on Comedy Central, if only to give you the exception that proves the rule.
–Celebrate Russian motherhood with tonight’s bouncy Sokurov/Tarkovsky double feature at Anthology. Mother and Son fires up at 7 p.m., with Tarkovsky’s The Mirror following at 8:30.