Edmundo Bejarano, Melody of Love, 2023, color, sound, 85 minutes. Michael (Elijah Reid).
AT A SCREENING of the most exciting film that I saw at the 2023 Tribeca Festival, Edmundo Bejarano’s Melody of Love, one of the programmers explained to the audience that although the word “film” had been dropped from the title of the festival, movies remained its core. Well, yes and no. Somewhat like the Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca has gradually expanded its purview to include a VR program, this year titled “Games and Immersive Experience,” which, along with live music, is the festival’s biggest draw. “Games and Immersive Experience” took place in the spiffy Spring Studios on Varick Street, as did some of the music showcases. There were also music programs with films at the Apollo, the Beacon, the auditorium of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn. This is not exactly a new strategy—the festival has been extending its geographic reach for at least a decade. But for the first time, it felt as if the films were seriously slighted. Why would anyone want to go to such dank multiplexes as the AMC Nineteenth Street or the Village East by Angelika to see a movie you know nothing about when all the cool people are at Spring Studios listening to a conversation between Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher, who were guaranteed to be smart, witty, and informative? (They were.) And while it’s a plus that that the festival brought filmmakers from all over the world to introduce and do Q&As at their screenings, that’s what independent theaters like Metrograph, Film Forum, Anthology, and Film at Lincoln Center now use as a lure to pry viewers away from their home screens. What’s unique about Tribeca is that its programmers commit to movies whose directors haven’t been certified by the festival establishment. This year there were at least a half-dozen uncut gems. I wish they were given the settings they deserved.
Melody of Love, a gorgeous microbudget film that turns the tables on the usual migration narrative, reflects the experience of its director, Edmundo Bejarano, and Carlos Vargas, its cinematographer and producer. Bejarano and Vargas, who grew up respectively in Bolivia and Colombia, met in a German language class in Berlin about twenty years ago. In 2015, Bejarano made a fifty-minute portrait of the poet Julio Barriga which won the international critics’ prize at the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival. A few years later, during a trip to Addis Ababa, he fell in love with the city and the music of Mulatu Astatke, the Ethio-jazz master. His first feature is rapturous tribute to the city. The story is simple: Michael (Elijah Reid) has three days to say goodbye to a place where, for the first time in his life, he has felt at home. From snatches of dialogue, we learn that Michael is Ethiopian, that his family moved to Brussels when he was young, that he hated living in Europe, and that now his mother has asked that he give up his new life in Addis and return to Brussels to help support her and his sister. We see and, just as vividly, we hear Addis through Michael’s ears: Astatke’s music mixed with pelting rain, traffic, the whisperings of a couple in bed. Melody of Love is a richly sensuous film, but it is also a reflection of a divided consciousness. Edited from luridly colored static shots, most of them less than thirty seconds long, the film reveals Michael’s dilemma through their bifurcated compositions. Even in Addis, Michael feels as if he is in two places at once. Many of the films I saw in Tribeca had progressive “messages” embedded in cinematic language that was either banal or thoughtless. The program notes for Bejarano’s film describe it as “experimental” but it is no more or less so than Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria or Tsai Ming-Liang’s Good-bye Dragon Inn. It is a work of art. (It streams on “Tribeca at Home” through July 2.)
Bryian Keith Montgomery Jr., Cinnamon, 2023, color, sound, 92 minutes. Mama (Pam Grier).
If there was a more entertaining movie than Bryian Keith Montgomery Jr.’s first feature, Cinnamon, well, I missed it. The Grand Prize winner at the American Black Film Festival in Miami, Cinnamon grafts Blaxploitation tropes onto a Tarantino-like loop-de-loop time structure, but unlike recent Tarantino movies, Cinnamon packs its riotous action into ninety-one minutes. Hailey Kilgore as a gas station attendant looking forward to a singing career and a bit too cavalier about how she’s going to finance it and Pam Grier as towering figure of evil head an ensemble cast that works in perfect sync, even when their felonious schemes fail at every turn. But the fiction film at Tribeca that went home with four big prizes succeeded neither as art nor entertainment. A Covid-lockdown psychodrama set in Brazil, Guto Parente’s A Strange Path is also a sort of horror movie about displacement and the estrangement of a son from his father and his country. Emotionally honest but naive about form and overly dependent on a big reveal at the end, the film made me feel very bad to no particular end.
David Gutnik, Rule of Two Walls, 2023, color, sound, 76 minutes. Lyana Mytsko.
As usual, documentaries are better choices at Tribeca than fiction. Two of the best were Monica Villamizar and Jordan Bryon’s Transition and David Gutnik’s Rule of Two Walls. The latter film is set in Ukraine and is remarkable for its depiction of how people maintain their everyday lives knowing that at any moment they will be under attack. Rule of Two Walls is unhesitant in showing both pleasure and pain (the title refers to the safest space to be if you don’t have time to get to a designated underground air raid shelter). The cinematographers, Gutnik and Volodymyr Ivanov, photograph the destruction not only of buildings but of bodies, burnt and dismembered, and the most extraordinary thing about the film is that you understand how necessary it is for them to show us precisely what is happening in this war to ordinary people who might have been at their jobs or watching movies like we were at Tribeca. The central character in Transition is one of the directors. Bryon, an Australian television filmmaker, is a trans man who was on assignment in Afghanistan when he began to take hormone shots and planning for top surgery. With the Taliban takeover, this situation became increasing dangerous for him and his coworkers. And it also put him in the unethical position of hiding who he was from his subjects. If this sounds like a narcissistic adventure, it is not. Yes, Bryon has options while women in Afghanistan have none. But his loyalty to the project of documenting the transition to Taliban rule while in danger of literally losing his head is both absurd and courageous.
A word about Hideo Kojima: The reportedly revolutionary game creator (I’m not a gamer) appeared in person after the documentary Hideo Kojima: Connecting Worlds. Almost unforgivably hagiographic (and seemingly directed by Kojima’s company, as there were no other credits), it nevertheless had a useful moment when Kojima explained that his inspirations all came from movies. He namechecked David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick. The powers that be at Tribeca might do a service to future game makers by keeping movies as the festival’s core.
The 2023 Tribeca Festival ran from June 7 to June 18.
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