Somehow I got derailed before writing up some films I very much enjoyed at the Independent Film Festival of Boston back in April. For posterity, and because I think you should seek 'em out, some capsule reviews.
- NY Export Opus Jazz played on PBS, but man am I glad I saw the tensile strength of the New York City Ballet corps dancing in the secret corners of the city on a big screen. [Seriously, the locations look like the sites of unearthed Sesame Street interstitial shorts from the 1970s.] This film version of Jerome Robbins' 1958 "ballet in sneakers" is is all lush cinematography -- overhead shots of dancers' long shadows cast in the McCarren Park pool -- and deft sound design -- the squeak of shoes on an indoor basketball court accompanies charmingly chaste pelvic thrusts in a mating dance. See it.
- The dancing got political in the antic 1955 Mockba-set Hipsters, where boogieing to be-bop clad in skinny ties, DAs, and stockings constitutes the worst kind of teen rebellion against drab Soviet homogeneity. A Technicolor spit-take on earnest post-war juvenile delinquent pictures, the film follows young Mels in his transformation from apparatchik to hepcat. To win the heart of good time gal Polly, Mels gets pudgy Bob [actually Boris] to teach him to dance in a scene that'll make you think fondly of Chris Penn. Our hero also takes up the saxophone, an instrument "only one small step away from a switchblade" in the eyes of the state, the same as a concealed weapon. Ideology proves no match for teen lust; in a comic sequence Mels and his dreamgirl finally go at it like figures from some Cyrillic Kama Sutra. But teen lust is no match for incipient adulthood, and their giddy idyll -- like the Cold War -- cannot last.
- Rounding out a day of music/performance on screen, I saw Strange Powers, the well-edited and paced Magnetic Fields doc. There was something aptly awkward watching it at the Brattle, in Harvard Square where the band pretty much began, in a house packed with rapturous fans and Claudia Gonson's extended family and former neighbors. We see and hear about her fractious platonic partnership with Stephin Merritt, which dates back to high school and manifests itself in misunderstandings and pouts that play like a parody of old-married-couple dynamics. We see performances. We learn about Stephin's uprooted childhood and his stints proofreading and writing reviews for Time Out New York. Merritt smokes and quips morosely throughout. He expresses misgivings about appearing in the film, averring, "I'm not sure this is gonna fit with the expressionless Bresson character I'm playing." Probably not. My main misgiving is that the film trades access for critical distance, but in my experience, Fields fanatics won't even notice.
