As the cinetrix wrestled with her movie malaise over the last little stretch, she took in two flicks shot in antediluvian New Orleans. Neither was, in the end, all that good, but each one got at the haunted quality the city has always had.
The first, By Invitation Only,* screened at Full Frame back in April, but not as part of the festival's sidebar on Katrina. First-time filmmaker Rebecca Snedeker's look at New Orleans' old line Carnival society from the insider bowed in the program about class, which was appropriate, given that it's a sort of bayou Born Rich.
Snedeker comes from the white ruling class of New Orleans. Descended from a long line of Mardi Gras queens, she decided to ditch the debutante scene, in part because of the krewes' practice of racial exclusivity. Troubled by the knowledge that some of her oldest and dearest friends would not welcome her African American boyfriend into their world of "by invitation only" luncheons and balls, she turns an inquisitive camera on the members of the Crescent City's ruling class at play. As you might imagine, her Episcopal school upbringing and tennis club pedigree allow her all sorts of access. [However, those unwilling to be a part of the film have their faces blurred.]
But an expose it ain't. The narrative takes shape around the experiences of a family friend, Emily, as she commences her debut season and undergoes the rigorous and top-secret preparations to become a Mardi Gras queen [for Rex, I think]. How rigorous and top secret? Not even Emily's closest friends or extended family will know she has been extended this honor by old, rich, white-guy friends of her dad until she is unveiled at the ball like a prize pig clad in dazzling white. Leading up to the big day, Emily hits parties and teas and the races while a dressmaker labors [120 hours in all] on her queen's gown and uses code to leave messages about fittings on her answering machine. A scepter and curtsy coach--no, really--is brought in to secretly train her in the age-old gestures. And so on.
To place Emily's story in context, Snedeker presents a lot of archival material, in the form of family scrapbooks and masks as well as the gown and invitation holdings in Louisiana museums. [There's also great footage from 1909 of black krewe Zulu mocking the rituals of Rex.] She and we learn about how the oldest krewe, Comus, morphed into its present-day faux-royalty form, which romanticized the antebellum Southern white way of life after Reconstruction left its cotton and sugar magnate members, all former slaveholders, in reduced circumstances. We peer over her shoulder at the public library as she looks at footage of hearings from the early 1990s when the city government challenged the krewes' exclusionary policies, each side predicting catastrophic economic loss to the city if black folks were admitted/parade permits and police details were withheld. Ultimately, 23 krewes said yes to openness; three--Comus, Momus, and Proteus--stopped parading but continued throwing their private balls, at which the only people of color were either waitstaff or in the band.
It's fascinating stuff at times, this inside look at the swamp aristocracy, but the end falls flat. Emily is unveiled as queen and manages to acquit herself reasonably well with that scepter. And Rebecca makes her movie. But her well-intentioned cinematic rebellion seems half-hearted. Oh, I'm not going to be a Mardi Gras queen because it's racist, but I will exploit my social standing to capture but not really interrogate this insular, elitist culture I grew up in.
In a way, the hurricane supplies the ending Snedeker couldn't, throwing into stark relief how the negligence of these privileged "people who control what goes on" behind the scenes, as a Times-Picayune society photographer explains it, helped destroy the other New Orleans, the city of the public high school marching bands paid to play behind their parade floats during Mardi Gras. Money to buy uniforms and instruments is well and good, but given the hindsight of history, Snedeker's set may as well have said "Let them eat beignets."
Oh, yeah, the second film. Director Michael Almereyda is always up to something interesting: Twister [the other one] was a video store fave; Hamlet is great, really slept on; and Nadja is hilarious. [C'mon, Peter Fonda using his mirrored sunglasses to detect vampires? Comedy gold.]
Sad to say, his New Orleans film Happy Here and Now, shot in 2001 and given a limited release in the past year is, well, slight. Liane Balaban plays Amelia, a frail and etheral college student who comes to the Big Easy in search of her missing sister Muriel [Shalom Harlow]. Muriel has simply vanished, leaving only a wiped-clean laptop behind. Well, not entirely clean. Clarence Williams III's Bill discovers this program that allows you to engage in conversations with other people online, carefully hidden behind morphing avatars. Liane is wired up and goes online to meet Muriel's e-pal Eddie Mars [nyuk nyuk], a history-buff exterminator played by David Arquette, who may know something about her disappearance.
Amelia's quest takes her to all of NOLA's Nighttown hot spots. Hipsters living in decrepit homes spin old R&B vinyl. There are trips to Ernie K. Doe's Mother-in-Law lounge. Eddie Mars enlists local legend Quintron and his friend Isabel to act in an amateur porn movie about Nicolai Tesla--alongside an actual Tesla coil [my second this week]. Meanwhile, Eddie's soulful firefighter brother Tom [easy-on-the-eyes Almereyda regular Karl Geary] wrestles with the death of his coworker in a fire and the grief of the guy's widow [Gloria Ruben]. Ally Sheedy plays den mother to the proceedings, hosting Amelia while she searches for Muriel. And, in her film debut, radiant young FOC Josie Martin plays her daughter. How are they all connected to the missing Muriel? The film suggests sinister forces are at work, but the truth of the matter is that New Orleans lends itself to apophenia--it's not hard to develop connections to all sorts of people after a while.
Almereyda gets the locations and the local legends in various roles just right, but even though the action is unfolding in the city that care forgot, the film feels a little too langorous and elliptical. There may be tantalizing bits of Pattern Recognition and dreamlover swimming around in its DNA, but the nearly five years of lag time between shooting and release renders the Internet technology at Happy's core comically obsolete. That said, it's still worth watching for the amazing sequence in the film's final act, when a distraught Amelia, struggling against sleeping pills, falls asleep while attached to the computer. On the monitor we see a gorgeous black-and-white dream version of the story we've just watched, one in which the leaps in logic and fractured chronology make far more sense than they did under the strictures of traditional continuity editing. That's the movie I'd hoped I'd see all along.
*By Invitation Only makes its Louisiana premiere on September 26, 2006, at 6 p.m. at the Landmark Canal Place.
