Reelin'

The Newport International Film Festival: Features

by Bill Rodriguez

It hit the ground running in 1998, so there's no surprise that the 4th Annual Newport International Film Festival, taking place June 5-10, is still picking up momentum. From 11 countries are 20 feature films, half of which are in competition, plus 10 feature-length documentaries, and two dozen short films. A record five are world premieres, including Daddy and Them, directed by Billy Bob Thornton. Another three are U.S. premieres, and an East Coast premiere is the opening night film: Francis Veber's Le Placard (The Closet), with Gerard Depardieu.

Here's a taste of three feature films worth recommending.

The Anniversary Party

There are so many ways this film could have gone off the track that it's amazing the result isn't a train wreck of a movie. It might have been dismissed as The Big Chill meets Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with plenty of recognizable faces watching the mess with us in dreadful fascination. For two problems, it is the directing debut of both screenwriters, Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh; for another, they co-star, as a director and his actress wife. If all that weren't enough to pull the project apart, the story contains numerous characters vying for attention and time to intrigue us, but they get to try only in fits and starts and glimpses. All intelligent quips and conversation, all like making art out of channel-surfing PBS stations.

Yet the result is fascinating. The occasion for the eponymous party is the sixth anniversary of a Hollywood couple who have recently come back together after a year-long break-up. Joe Therrian (Cumming) is a novelist who has been green-lighted to direct a film based on his novel about their troubled marriage. Sally (Leigh) is a soulful actress known for wrenching roles such as drug addicts. (Remind you of anyone?)

Gwyneth Paltrow plays a hot young star, in the box office sense, who is oblivious to the fact that being chosen to play Sally in Joe's film was a gut punch to the actress she worships. Kevin Kline, accompanied by real-life wife Phoebe Cates and their two real-life kids, is currently filming a movie with Sally, who has been sobbing in scenes meant to be funny. Jennifer Beals is a photographer and close friend of Joe's from way back, too close for Sally. Of course, no low-budget, big-name independent film can be made, under SAG rules, without Parker Posey, who plays the Therrians' business manager.

What makes this film work is not star turns by the supporting cast, especially since the performances are brief and fragmented. Wisely, the subplots are there to illuminate and clarify the central couple. By the end, the Therrians have fallen into better focus as a couple poised for change. Not all the loose ends of the many relationships are neatly tied up, and while that comes across in some instances as weakness rather than verisimilitude, the storytelling of the film as a whole is strong enough to smooth over those bumps.

One of the things that makes Hollywood so silly is the fact that Jennifer Jason Leigh has gone without an Oscar nomination despite spot-on performances as diverse as acerbic writer Dorothy Parker in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and the spirited prostitute Tralala in Last Exit to Brooklyn. Cummings won a Tony for re-inventing the role of the MC in Cabaret, which everybody thought Joel Grey had trademarked. Leigh played Sally Bowles in that revival, thus this collaboration. The Anniversary Party demonstrates how the theater ethos of subsuming egos into collective efforts can succeed even in an industry more comfortable with two-dimensions.

The Anniversary, the closing night film, will be shown on Saturday, June 9 at 6 p.m. at the Jane Pickens Theater.

Jump Tomorrow

This quiet little film is as drolly hilarious as watching, eves averted, a spat in a public place by a couple you are sure are going to get all lovey-dovey by the end. George (Tunde Adebimpe) is a Nigerian-American heading to his wedding, but it might as well be someone else's, for all his lack of excitement. The odd couple isn't he and his fiancé, though, but rather he and an odd-ball Frenchman he comes across at an airport. Gerard (Hippolyte Girardot) has just asked his girlfriend to marry him and has been turned down, probably because he is about three clicks more tightly wound than a pocket watch about to burst into springs and gears. After George lets Gerard, a perfect stranger, cry on his shoulder -- literally -- in the men's room, Gerard insists upon driving him to Niagara Falls for the wedding three days hence.

The comedy as a whole is as understated as Adebimpe himself, who says of his thick, black Buddy Holly glasses, "My face wouldn't make sense without them." That's the clever method of this film in a nutshell: bump an ordinarily passive man -- not one especially meek, just soft-spoken -- into life-grabbers until the sparks that are struck ignite him. When he saves the impetuous Gerard from the ultimate impetuosity, suicide, he has a puppy dog friend for life, like it or not. George's newfound spontaneity starts small -- he is attracted to the pretty Alicia (Natalie Verbeke), who chats him up in the airport and invites him to a party that night, and since Gerard has appeared with a car, they go.

Girardot is as flamboyantly marvelous as Adebimpe is subtly so. But the Frenchman's overwhelming romanticism (his plates read "Amour 1") is grounded in such sincere, if high-RPM, fellow-feeling that we can't dismiss him as pathetic. When he presses George to pursue and woo Alicia, Gerard is a formidable Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rolled into one. Alicia ends up being not only Spanish, for further passionate contrast to George's accustomed sedateness, but no slouch as a flamenco dancer to boot.

Director Joel Hopkins handles this with an off-handed whimsy that reminds us of Bill Forsyth's early films Gregory's Girl and Local Hero. Paralleling George's new perspective, Hopkins hits us with occasional absurd, disorienting images that quickly fall into understanding: a line of yellow-hooded heads, Alicia's uncle whacking himself as if in a self-administered Heimlich maneuver. Jump Tomorrow is a confident feature debut that makes us look forward to more from him.

Jump Tomorrow will be shown on Wednesday, June 6 at 2 p.m. and on Saturday, June 9 at 8 p.m. at the Opera House 2.

Everybody Famous! (Iedereen Beroemd)

There's something morbidly magnetic about listening to somebody sing badly. Witness the karaoke craze, or films like Little Voice and Georgie. The lighthearted Belgian film Everybody Famous! tries a variation on the theme and succeeds pretty well. Sulky, pudgy teenager Marva (Eva van der Gucht) has a sweet voice; it's her personality that puts listeners off. She'd rather cover Madonna hits than give the staid burghers judging talent contests the familiar Flemish ditties they'd like to hear. Her father Jean (Josse De Pauw) is the one pushing her slouching toward the celebrity he fantasizes. Some day, he imagines, one of the pop tunes he excitedly hums into a tape recorder will make his daughter a star.

Suddenly, luck comes along like a lottery win, in the form of a bicyclist who stops to help fix his car that has broken down. She is none other than Belgian pop idol Debbie (Thekla Reuten). What's a fast-thinking dreamer to do but kidnap her? With the worry-wart help of fellow laid-off factory worker Willy (Werner De Smedt), they pull off the caper, and with the cagey help of the singer's sly manager (Victor Low), who knows a free publicity opportunity when he sees one, everybody ends up coming out ahead. Jean doesn't want money, see, he just wants his daughter and his latest song to get famous. That's the ticket. The feel-good outcome for every character may be too pat and happy for some, but after all the daffy dreams and yearnings that have been on display, it's no time for sour notes.

Everybody Famous! will be shown on Wednesday, June 6 at 5 p.m. and on Saturday, June 9 at 3 p.m. at the Opera House 2.

Go to www.newportfilmfestival.com for complete details on the Fest.