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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, September 7th, 2006 - Comments Off on Film Forum Plays With 'Paper Dolls' at Wednesday Premiere
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Film Forum Plays With 'Paper Dolls' at Wednesday Premiere

You know how it goes: You read a film synopsis and say to yourself, “What the fuck is that?” To wit, the premise of Tomer Heymann’s charming, absorbing documentary Paper Dolls, which kicked off its New York run Wednesday night at Film Forum: A group of transgendered Filipinos, shunned in their native communities, settle in Tel Aviv as caretakers of elderly, mostly Orthodox Jewish men. At night. as the drag troupe Paper Dolls, they build a club audience even as their adopted culture turns against foreign workers and threatens both the ragtag family and professional stability they have established in Israel.

As one of director Tomer Heymann’s Paper Dolls, Sally Comatoy (right) gets a diction lesson from Chaim Amir (Photo: Strand Releasing)
And even that much, despite its seeming convolution, probably oversimplifies. The five years Heymann spent chronicling his subjects yields an omnipresence, depth and emotional texture revealing the Dolls’ limbo between gender, sexuality, religion, work and law. As their confidant both on- and off-camera, Heymann personalizes his story without condescending or overindulging himself; his classical tendency to symbolize his viewer–curious, unwavering, sympathetic–softens Paper Dolls‘ DIY edges as well as affirms its thoughtful, thought-provoking humanity.
“It’s really, really special being here,” Heymann said Wednesday, introducing his film. “This movie was already in Berlin and already in Los Angeles, but tonight, it’s the new print, so it’s really the real movie for me. So tonight I can look at the screen and say ‘bye-bye’ and ‘shalom’ to this movie. I especially need to say thank you to my amazing, beautiful characters–the Paper Dolls. I’m sorry they’re not here; right now they’re in London and Manila and they don’t have the choice or the freedom of the possibility to come here tonight. And they couldn’t go to Berlin, and they couldn’t go to Tel Aviv because–it’s crazy–they just don’t have the possibility. So when you watch this film, I’d ask that you send them your love.”
While you are at it, send Strand Releasing your love for picking this one up; it is a brave, rewarding, good film–the type you do not soon forget and, for weeks afterward, in the hype and furor of another bloated autumn, are grateful to have seen.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon