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Hand Jobs and Car Alarms
by Richard Horgan |
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11/8/2007 at 5:26:09 PM |
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The beauty of a film festival is that it can sometimes lead to a double bill that is not only logistically impossible to otherwise pull off, but also of an artistic ilk that borders on the absurd.
Such was the case for me today at AFI Fest, where Tim Robbins in Noise preceded Marianne Faithful in Irina Palm and, as such, framed two of the oddest writer-director narrative concoctions of the year. In the former (not to be confused with the 2007 British film of the same name), Robbins stars as David Owen, a Manhattan resident who is sent over the edge by the city’s frequent and random bursts of car alarm noise; in the latter, singer turned actress Faithful plays Maggie, a grandmother who becomes a sex worker to cover the prospective expense of treating her seriously ill grandson.
For what it’s worth, the audience reception was warmer for Irina Palm than Noise, and that makes sense. Anchored by arguably the best performance Faithful has ever given on film, Irina Palm treads the same territory as The Full Monty, Calendar Girls and even Educating Rita. But the big difference is that the naughty bits aren’t saved for the climax; they’re all the way through the film, meaning that likely a small portion of the audience (there were three walkouts during the screening) will find the palm work of its protagonist a bit too much to stomach.
Readers of the German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost chose Belgian writer-director Sam Garbarski’s Palm as their favorite during this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, and it’s easy to see why. The film is a funny, touching and original coming-of-age tale with a big difference: the person coming of age is way past menopause rather than decades ahead of it.
Robbins’ film is a bit more problematic. While William Hurt has a grand old time preening as the Mayor of New York, and the two gals in Owen’s life (Bridget Moynahan, Margarita Levieva) are resplendent, the suspension-of-disbelief alarm goes off a number of times during the course of the movie. Though very slickly made, writer-director Henry Bean (The Believer, the screenplay for Basic Instinct 2) stumbles here after previously commingling Ryan Gosling with the far more important issue of anti-Semitism.
Strand Releasing snapped up U.S. distribution rights for Irina Palm at this year’s Cannes Film Festival but has yet to confirm a firm opening date. Noise meanwhile is tentatively slotted for February 2008, and I could swear that deep down, Robbins tried to approach this as a wink-wink parody of his activist self. And just to further connect this pair of film fest offerings, Noise has an out-of-nowhere threesome sex scene that is as bizarre and borderline as anything that goes down in Palm’s hole-in-the-wall (literally) Soho, London sex club.
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