LAFF 2011: TOMBOY

Laure (Zoé Héran) in Tomboy.

Gender bend-her

By Don Simpson

Upon returning from a summer retreat, Laure (Zoé Héran) joins her parents (Sophie Cattani and Mathieu Demy) and six-year-old sister, Jeanne (Malonn Lévana), at their new home. The new neighborhood means many things to Laure, including new friends, a new school, and a new identity.

From first glance, Laure’s gender is inconclusive. With her prepubescent, 10-year-old frame and short haircut, Laure can easily pass for a boy. From what we can gather, Laure has been a tomboy for quite a while. Laure prefers to dress like a boy and play with boys and her parents seem too distracted to notice -- Laure’s father is away at work for most of the film and her mother is practically bedridden by pregnancy.

Laure’s first friend in her new neighborhood is a girl named Lisa (Jeanne Disson). Laure introduces herself to Lisa as a boy -- Mikael -- totally naive to the fact that this charade cannot last forever. Lisa in turn introduces Mikael to the local kids and Mikael instantly blends right in with the other boys. We watch how Mikael learns by observing the other boys, co-opting their gender by mimicry. Soon, Mikael is playing soccer with her shirt off, getting into fisticuffs with other boys and kissing a girl. Mikael’s greatest hurdle is when she is invited to go swimming with the other kids because her makeshift pink swimsuit accentuates the fact that she does not have a penis. Luckily that is something a little green modeling clay can fix. As school registration approaches, it becomes increasingly obvious that Laure will not be able to maintain the facade of Mikael for much longer. The question remains: How badly is this going to end for Laure?

With Tomboy, writer-director Céline Sciamma delves much deeper into the taboo (at least on this side of the Atlantic) theme of childhood sexuality that she discussed all-so-eloquently in her 2007 feature-length debut, Water Lilies. Laure is five years younger than Water Lilies’ Marie (Pauline Acquart), Anne (Louise Blachère) and Floriane (Adèle Haenel); thus Laure is also significantly more innocent. The root of Laure’s deception is not about sexual attraction to girls -- though she does kiss a girl -- it is about wanting to play like a boy.

Tomboy thoughtfully discusses the prevailing pressure from society to conform to specific gender stereotypes -- even in acting like a boy, Laure abides by society’s predetermined definition of what a boy is. What is wrong with a 10-year old girl wanting to dress like a boy and play with boys? Why is that considered weird or abnormal? Is genitalia really the sole defining criteria for gender?

LAFF 2011: SPOTLIGHT ON CUBA

A scene from Ticket to Paradise.

The revolution shall be screened

By Ed Rampell

The Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) is currently taking place (mostly) in Downtown Los Angeles through June 26, and this year’s multitude of movies includes the program, International Spotlight: Cuba.

Featuring four features and documentaries, complementing, but actually separate from this year’s spotlight on Cuban cinema, is the world premiere of Unfinished Spaces, which is actually in the Documentary Competition and made by Yanqui filmmakers Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray.

Unfinished Spaces is the amazing true story of the ongoing struggle to build the Cuban National Arts Schools. According to the documentary, the idea for the schools emerged shortly after the revolution, when Commandantes Fidel Castro and Che Guevara showed up unannounced at Havana’s poshest country club to play a round of golf, a sport of the idle rich. While on the manicured links a light bulb was illuminated above Castro’s head, and full of revolutionary zeal, he decided that instead of being an aristocratic preserve for the high and mighty, the country club should be transformed into not one, but five schools for the arts – theatre, dance, painting, music, etc. – that would train a new generation of artists to give shape to and express the revolution. “Cuba will count as having the most beautiful academy of arts in the world,” Castro declared in 1961. 

Half a century later, that school dreamt up by Castro remains to be completed, and its trial and tribulations have been tied to the ebbs and flows of the Cuban Revolution. The three architects -- the Cuban Ricardo Porro and the Italian transplants Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi -- envisioned avante garde forms in order to literally give shape to Castro’s commission and to the Revolution itself. However, this emphasis on style fell out of favor as “formalism” was eschewed and Cuba grew increasingly allied with the Soviet Union, in favor of Stalinist style architecture that emphasized function instead of aesthetics. Of course, economics played a role, and during periods of hardship funding was cut for the schools. Most recently, hurricanes halted construction and restoration efforts.

Nevertheless, throughout its ups and downs the schools have trained generations of Cuban artists, even as the jungle threatened to reclaim the campuses and turn the site into something similar to ancient ruins. Castro’s personal role in the development of the schools is intriguing and late in the film Castro surprisingly reappears.

Unfinished Spaces examines the role of the revolutionary artist in the Revolution. It is something of a cautionary tale: In the heady early days of revolutions, flush with Promethean victory, anything seems possible. Toward the beginning of the documentary we see Castro, Guevara and the guerrillas triumphantly enter Havana, and there’s the sense that a new millennium will be ushered in. But revolutions, alas, have their Thermidors, their setbacks and even reversals. The saga of the schools and of the architects who designed them reflects this process.

At the world premiere of Unfinished Spaces in the Regal Cinemas at L.A. LIVE the three companeros were reunited, and after seeing the finished film for the first time the architects participated in a Q&A session in the packed theater. Although they are now senior citizens, they called to mind the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s saying: “There’s no grey hair in my soul." 

As part of its International Spotlight series, LAFF is also screening a feature about (and made on location in) Cuba, co-writer/director Fina Torres’ sexy comedy with liberal doses of magical realism, Habana Eva. The Venezuela-born Torres is quite an accomplished filmmaker, who previously made the 2000 Penelope Cruz pic, Woman on Top, 1995’s Celestial Clockwork and 1985’s Oriana. 

Screened during last year's Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, Habana Eva is the tale of Eva (Prakriti Maduro), a Cuban seamstress who has her designs on becoming a haute couture fashion designer, but her entrepreneurial flair and initiative is stifled by a factory bureaucrat in this parable of the dilemmas facing contemporary Cuba under Raul, not Fidel, Castro. Eva is wooed by two lovers – one of them representing Cuban socialism, the other, a Cuban born photographer who lives in Venezuela, symbolizing bourgeois values. Eva’s amusing choice is a prophecy of Cuba’s current move away from socialist economic orthodoxy and a far cry from the revolutionary zeal of Humberto Solas’ famed 1968 Cuban feminist film, Lucia.

Like Polynesian vahines (women), Cuban muchachas were famed for their beauty and sensuality, and Cuban women epitomized the silver screen stereotypes of those “hot Latin lovers.” In Habana Eva Torres seems to be toying with these torrid tropical tropes. But, ideology aside, the problem with this movie is that Eva’s friend, Teresa (Yuliet Cruz), outshines her in all of the scenes they appear in together. Teresa is simply sexier, prettier, funnier and more likable and vivacious than Eva (even when she’s dead and becomes a Fellini-esque Yuliet of the spirits!). Cruz simply steals every scene she graces. When she’s offscreen viewers may make that Shakespearian pleading: “Wherefore art thou Yuliet?” To top matters off, Yuliet is actually Cuban, while Prakriti Maduro is Venezuelan. The comparison between the two is similar to comparing Natalie Wood as Maria and Rita Moreno as Anita in West Side Story. But this is a quibble; Habana Eva is a rollicking sex farce with great location shooting in Cuba, charmingly sprinkled with magical realist (not socialist realist!) motion picture pixie dust.

The other films in the series spotlighting Cuba are the documentary Operation Peter Pan: Flying Back To Cuba; the 2003 film, Suite Habana, and the feature, Ticket To Paradise, set during Cuba’s “special period” following the collapse the Soviet Union.

For more information on LAFF 2011's International Spotlight on Cuba: Cuba Spotlight.

LAFF 2011: PROJECT NIM

Nim Chimpsky in Project Nim.

Chimp off the old blocks

By Don Chimpson

Project Nim commenced in 1973 when Columbia University psychology professor Herbert Terrace launched a study to determine if chimpanzees raised by human beings could learn to communicate with sign language. Nim Chimpsky was taken from his mother, Carolyn (an 18-year-old female), when he was two weeks old to be raised by human surrogate parents in an attempt to refute Noam Chomsky’s thesis that language is inherent only in humans because animals lack the “language acquisition device."

Terrace chooses a former lover, Stephanie LaFarge, with little to no experience with chimps or sign language to raise Nim Chimpsky (get it?) in her family’s Manhattan brownstone. LaFarge nurtures Nim Chimpsky as she would her very own offspring (she even breastfeeds him), raising him like a human baby/pet hybrid…and Nim Chimpsky matures into a possible romantic interest for LaFarge. Yeah, you read that correctly. 

Once Terrace becomes skeptical of LaFarge’s hippie-dippie parenting techniques, he whisks Nim Chimpsky away to a prim and proper 21-room mansion -- the Delafield estate in Riverdale -- where Nim Chimpsky is cared for by a series of teachers with various (and sometimes unrelated) skill sets. Several of the caretakers form deep and possibly dangerous bonds with Nim Chimpsky, who grows bigger, stronger, faster and sneakier by the day. Terrace’s next sexual conquest, Laura-Ann Petitto, becomes Nim Chimpsy's second surrogate mother. When Petitto leaves Project Nim, Joyce Butler steps in as Nim Chimpsky’s third mother-figure.

It is not much longer after that when Terrace finds himself in a position where he must pull the plug on Project Nim, fearing that Nim Chimpsky has grown too powerful and dangerous to control. So Nim Chimpsky ends up stuck in a cramped cage as a hepatitis test subject at New York University’s Laboratory of Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates. That is until Henry Herrmann, a Boston attorney, steps in and represents Nim Chimpsky in a court of law -- arguing that the usual standards for laboratory animals do not apply to Nim because of his unusual upbringing. Terrace probably never realized it, but by raising Nim Chimpsky as a surrogate human (and arguably teaching him to communicate with humans), he may have opened people’s minds to the possibility that animals should have rights, including the right to legal protection from research.

Project Nim addresses the ethics of raising animals as humans and/or using them as research subjects, but director James Marsh, in this follow-up to his Oscar-winning Man on Wire, purposefully stops short of giving any hard-fast answers. Marsh's documentary is not here to talk science or ethics; he merely wants to provide the audience with an intriguing and beguiling story. Which he does in spades! Nonetheless, Project Nim is a life-changing experience that will certainly alter many viewers’ perspectives on animal rights as well as what qualifies as scientific research.


Project Nim screens for free at the Los Angeles Film Festival June 25, 3:45 p.m., Regal Cinemas L.A. Live. For more information: Project Nim.

LAFF 2011: RENÉE

Dr. Renée Richards in Renée.

Out of bounds

By Miranda Inganni

Born in 1934, Richard Raskind grew up with a domineering mother, patient father and protective older sister in New York. Following in his parent's footsteps, he went on to become a doctor, in his case, of ophthalmology. As a child and young man, Raskind excelled at sports, especially tennis and baseball -- he was even scouted by the New York Yankees.

After establishing himself in the medical and tennis world in New York, Raskind married and fathered a son, Nicholas. Shortly thereafter, he had a sex change operation, abandoned his family and friends and moved out to California -- as a woman. Fittingly choosing the name Renée (French for reborn), Dr. Richard Raskind became Dr. Renée Richards, continuing with her medical profession and passion for tennis.

Director Eric Drath's documentary examines Richard's remarkable story, how as a woman she fled New York to try and find herself in Californian anonymity, but instead found controversy and notoriety as a transsexual vanguard when she entered the world of women's professional tennis. Consisting of archival footage, plus interviews with Renée's friends, tennis players, sports commentators, former girlfriends and her unhappy son, the documentary, for the most part, pays loving homage to a truly remarkable human.

LAFF 2011: SEX CRIMES UNIT

Natasha Alexenko in Sex Crimes Unit.

Victimized and victorious 

By John Esther

Two days and one day before the HBO premiere on June 20, the Los Angeles Film Film Festival screens Sex Crimes Unit, an insightful yet flawed look at a group of dedicated city employees working to bring rapists and other sexually violent perpetrators to justice. 

Before the Sex Crimes Protection Unit was formed in 1974 by Manhattan District Attorney and father of five daughters, Robert M. Morgenthau, victims of rape had very little legal recourse. Marital rape was not considered a crime (and good luck with prosecuting acquaintance rape or date rape cases). It was subject to statues of limitations. And more importantly, it was, and still is to a considerable degree, a victim-precipitated crime. In other words, a woman had it coming to her -- even if she was married, at home, sober, in bed asleep and the assailant broke into the house and sexually violated her. (Some of the reasoning behind this latter part, especially when it came to women holding this point of view, are some of the more interesting moments in the documentary.)

Today, sexually-violent crimes still persist but now there are 53 people handling sex crimes in Manhattan. Not only do they go after fresh cases, thanks to the removal of the statue of limitations on rape, they go after cold cases such as Natasha Alexenko. 

On the eve of her first anniversary in her New York apartment, Alexenko was raped at gunpoint in her apartment hallway by Victor Rondon (a particularly cowardly young man who has no idea what it takes to be a man in any legitimate or dignified sense.)

As Sex Crimes Unit follows new cases, as well as Alexenko's, we get a sense of not only the challenges incurred getting justice but also the victimization and victories between the time of the assault and actual sentencing. 

However, on a couple of occasions, the documentary takes a bit of an ironic tone, as it feeds right into those who are prone to be dismissive of women crying rape. The Zambrano case discussed early in the film is one example. Based on the information provided in documentary, it seems any decent defendant attorney should have been able to fight that one. In another scene a DA has a talk with a group of medical examiners that borderlines on coaching a witness -- albeit before the fact(s). 

And what about those times when the DA fails to prosecute a guilty defendant? The documentary leaves the impression that the accused, at least those who are arraigned (40 percent of rapes go unreported), will be sent to prison for a very long time. 

Yet despite these editorial/directorial flaws, Sex Crime Unit is an inspirational piece of filmmaking about a group of individuals addressing a prevalent problem in American society.

LAFF 2011: POSITION AMONG THE STARS

A scene from Position Among the Stars.

Wrinkles beneath the twinkles

By Miranda Inganni

The third part of filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich's trilogy about the Shamsuddin family -- which chronicles 12 years of their lives beginning with Eye of the Day (2001) and followed by Shape of the Moon (2004) -- eventually culminated in the award -winning documentary, Position Among the Stars.

Set in the tightly packed slums of Jakarta, Indonesia, Bakti Shamsuddin and his wife, Sriwyati, are trying to raise their niece, Tari. Eventually requiring assistance, Bakti brings in his mother, Rumidjah, from her quiet, almost desolate village to help out with Tari during her final year of high school.

Jockeying for position in her teenaged world, Tari seems to want to spend more time with her girlfriends -- hanging out at the mall, watching boys do bike tricks, texting on her cellphone -- than she does applying herself to school. This simply will not do. Since Tari could be the first family member to attend university, the whole family is involved in her academic career with her grandmother going so far as to pawn her house to finance Tari's future.

Full of conflict and tension, Position Among the Stars could rival the best reality television show, except that it far surpasses any of them with it's beauty and charm. Using technology that allows him and his crew to shoot in confined spaces and extreme close-ups, Retel Helmrich's cinema verité style conveys the family's saga through Tari's transition. 

As we watch her come of age, Christian family members argue with their Muslim counterparts, husband and wife fight about money, holy water and Siamese fighting fish (to the grim end) while Bakti takes advantage of the same government which employs him and an aging grandmother tries to adjust to modern life in a big city where no one can see the stars.

FILM REVIEW: BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN

Daniel Goldstein in Battle for Brooklyn.

The way the ball bounces

By Don Simpson

Since 2003, real estate developer and then majority owner of the New Jersey Nets, Bruce Ratner, has been planning to relocate his Nets to a "blighted" area of Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood. Ratner’s Barclays Center is just one part of a larger $3.5 billion development project called Atlantic Yards, which is also slated to include 16 skyscrapers for business and residential use. Ratner's Forest City Ratner Enterprises, a real estate development company with powerful allies in the state and local governments, began a long and arduous process of clearing the local businesses and residents from their desired site; for those who will not oblige, the city threatens the use of eminent domain to expedite the eviction process.

Daniel Goldstein is one of several Prospect Heights residents who refuse to oblige -- he cannot wrap his head around the fact that the city intends to utilize the power of eminent domain to condemn his relatively new apartment for the financial benefit of Forest City Ratner. Goldstein and several of his neighbors attempt to rally against Ratner in a modern day retelling of David’s struggle against Goliath. Goldstein and his comrades form the group “Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn” in a feeble attempt to derail Ratner’s proposal, but “Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn” loses momentum as residents living in the Atlantic Yards footprint sell off their homes to Forest City Ratner. Suddenly, Goldstein discovers that he is truly the last man standing.

Shot over the course of seven years and compiled from approximately 500 hours of footage, Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley's documentary showcases just how quickly individual rights can be eradicated in the interest of capitalist concerns and political tomfoolery. Battle for Brooklyn lends some screen time to the supporters of the Atlantic Yards project -- including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz -- but Galinsky and Hawley leave absolutely no doubt as to whose side they are on, as they reveal Forest City Ratner’s highly questionable tactics of ignoring community input and aggressively seizing people's homes and businesses.

Those of you who have been following this saga in the news headlines already know how this story ends. The Nets -- whom Ratner has since sold a majority ownership share to Russian tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov -- are scheduled to begin playing basketball in the Barclays Center in time for the 2012-2013 NBA season. In other words, the corporate interests of Goliath trounced David.