The Flute Player
Director: Jocelyn Glatzer

Ripping off a line from the Lets Go! Guide To Southeast Asia, “the story of Cambodia is one of the darkest in modern history. ” Screwed over first by Henry Kissinger, the Cambodian countryside was ravaged by a U.S. bombing campaign which destroyed fertile crops and wrecked havoc on local villages. The political instability that followed ushered in a fanatical communist government and by the end of the decade more than 1.7 million citizens were brutally murdered in a genocidal wave of extremism which sought to purify the country of “disloyal” subjects. Cambodia has never really recovered. Its capital, Phnom Penh, is a mere shell of its former beauty; most of its inhabitants live in miserable poverty.

With the exception of The Killing Fields, there has been virtually no cinematic exploration of the Khmer Rouge regime and its devastating impact on the Cambodian people. It’s an important story that needs to be retold as often as possible. That’s why The Flute Player is something of a letdown. Director Jocelyn Glatzer squanders what should otherwise be the powerful story of Arn Chorn Pond, a refugee who has been living in the United States for the past 20 years. Pond managed to escape Cambodia and was eventually adopted by an American family, but one could hardly call him lucky. Several members of his family were murdered by the Khmer Rouge and Pond himself was forced to participate in the slaughters. Glatzer follows Pond as he returns to his native country in an effort to revive Cambodian culture through the Master Musicians Program, an organization he founded to record and support indigenous music in Cambodia.

With subject matter this ripe, The Flute Player ought to be a failsafe topic, but this documentary never adequately conveys the horrors of the past, so it doesn’t work that well as a story about the triumph of the human spirit. For instance, musician Master Kung Nai is interviewed at one point in the film and he confesses his fear of playing satirical political songs. The Khmer Rouge would have frowned on such music and even to this day Kung Nai is still afraid. The power of the film lies in moments like this, moments where the Cambodian people are given a voice, but as Glatzer seems only to want a touchy-feely human rights story that revolves around Pond, revelations like these are too few and far between. Glatzer also relies on old news footage from war-torn Cambodia in the 1970s. It deceptively seems as if we are watching personal moments from Pond’s childhood, but we're not, and filmmakers have an obligation to be honest in their use of stock footage. Without any accurate sense of the past, The Flute Player sadly lacks a depth and meaning the Cambodian people so richly deserve.

If one judges films solely by titles, Rebel Without A Pause at first glance seems a little trite. But in this particular instance, the title is an entirely appropriate for this 72-minute, one-woman stand-up comedy routine. Shot in a dark club somewhere in the Bowery district of New York City, director Nancy Savoca and producer Richard Guay create an intimate night out with the singularly named comedian Reno. For quite some time Reno has been performing stand-up in and around New York, but her recent shtick revolves around the September 11 attacks. Living within eyeshot of the World Trade Center, the first half of her routine is a firsthand account of mayhem, confusion, and horror. She possesses a keen sense of wit, and it feels good to hear someone with a comedic touch relive the moment and allow us to laugh out loud about something we never imagined could be so humorous. 

Regrettably it’s an uneven performance. Reno seldom pauses to let her audience laugh or absorb her message, she just plows straight through her material. Still, her insightful commentary is riveting, particularly when she describes the helplessness and hysteria of feeling trapped on Manhattan Island that fateful day. But her act loses steam during the second half of the film when she moves away from her own personal experience and descends into a generic political rant. Still, in this aptly titled film, Reno reminds us that, at a time when our civil liberties are being chiseled away, humor may be our best defense.

Do we really need another documentary about 1960s radicalism? It seems the counterculture has been done to death in one form or another, and I initially cringed at the thought of having to sit through yet another effort to glorify the golden era of baby-boomers and their hormones. But finally… a documentary about youth movements of yore that’s both insightful and entertaining. The Weather Underground  demythologizes the hippie contingent of the 1960s and provides an even-handed account of a movement gone haywire. In fact, this is historical documentary filmmaking done right. Director Sam Green chronicles the complete story of the Weathermen—where they came from, their subsequent evolution to extreme radicalism, and their eventual demise. In the beginning, this group of activists sprang up within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the largest youth movements of its time. Frustrated with what they regarded as the ineffective strategies of passive resistance and peaceful protest, they decided to amp up their actions in order to affect change.

The film works because director Sam Green takes the time to explore the political and social conflicts which gave immediacy to the group’s tactics, including the escalating war in Vietnam and reactionary methods of the FBI, and their efforts to subvert various contemporary social movements. Feeling the world around them disintegrating, the Weathermen escalated their activities. Despite their lack of vision, we are able to understand the imperative behind their increasingly violent behavior. Yet Green never gets too sentimental about the Weathermen. Through interviews that are both critical and complimentary, he traces the legitimate shortcomings of the group and why they eventually disbanded. Heavy on philosophy but short on practicality, the Weathermen were doomed to failure. Wary of nostalgia, Green doesn’t seem to have any pat conclusions about what it all means; he just lets the audience draw its own conclusions. This unbiased effort to make sense of it all without waxing nostalgia makes The Weather Underground a ’60s flashback worth taking.

Most of the dancers in American Dancer are shallow and unfortunately this film is equally lacking in depth. For three years, director Adam Ballachey followed the lives of four male strippers in Tampa, Florida, the result of which is an uneven, facile exploration of the skin industry. Not surprisingly, their lives are remarkably similar to the experience of most female strippers: sex for money with club goers after hours, ambitions of stardom and fame by way of taking off one’s clothes, and of course bodily abuse. In the case of male strippers, this means steroid injections instead of anorexia. None of these revelations are terribly insightful and viewers are never given any incentive to care. Two of the dancers, Baby Jay and Johnnie Styles, come across as nothing more than life-size Ken dolls. Dancer Al Tarantino is only somewhat likable. With his heavy metal haircut and dreams of making it big in the world of fake pro-wrestling, he’s obviously a good person who loves his family, but he doesn’t have two brain cells knocking around his big head, and he comes across mostly as a pitiful joke. The only dancer with any personality or depth is Robbie Wild, and not surprisingly, he quits the business to become a real estate agent.

Sadly the dancers aren’t the only thing that is skin deep. On a technical level, the film disappoints with jerky camera movements and poor audio quality. When the camera follows its subjects down hallways or into clubs, it’s impossible to make out what was being said, but when the dancers start to perform, audience members are shaken out of their seats from the loud sound explosion of music coming through the speakers. The subject matter may be about sex, but that doesn’t mean it has to look and feel like a cheap, run of the mill porn production!

Sex: Female
Directors: Louis Alvarez, Andrew Kolker
Official Site

Last year directors Andrew Kolker and Louis Alvarez brought their PBS special, People Like Us: Social Class In America to the film festival. Their latest film may seem like a radical break from the previous topic of one’s social position in America, but in fact it’s remarkably similar in technique and style. Focusing this time around on how women feel about sex, the directors once again interviewed a variety of women, people like us, every mindful to ensure race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation were equally represented. About 50 women were interviewed—black, white, Latino, young and old, thin and large, sexy and plain, urban, suburban and rural, married and single, lesbian and hetero, and so on. The subjects are then queried about their experiences with sex: their ignorance; their periods; hard-ons, first encounters with; adultery; vibrators; orgasms; oral sex; dick size; who initiates it; etc, etc. You get the idea.

The results are choppy. Some of the segments are poignant and some are hilariously funny. But some of the interviews are just a retread of Kinsey Report material that’s been explored a thousand times before. On its opening night, Sex: Female played to a sold-out crowd at the South by Southwest film festival, and the audience vibe was overwhelmingly positive. But I can’t help wondering if the experience would have been somewhat different if one were watching this on a late night cable channel. In the privacy of one’s own home, maybe watching this film would be a completely different experience. This film has a voyeuristic feel to it, and at home the subject of sex is less…well, sexy.

“I am invisible,” stutters illegal immigrant Dolores after she is fired from her job exactly because of her undocumented status. Taking this invisibility to heart, director Nancy Savoca beautifully explores the lives of illegal working class immigrants living in America. Savoca creates an evocative visual and narrative experience. Using wide-angle lenses, she captures Dolores as a tiny speck in the gigantic immaculate houses she cleans every day. But we are able to see Dolores for much more than the incidental maid in the background. We follow her not only at the houses she cleans, but as she returns home every day to her son and husband. There, Dolores stashes her cash away in a jar and discusses plans to complete a dream house back in her native country of El Salvador.

There are so many wonderfully nuanced themes in Dirt. One such instance involves a tragic accident which forces Dolores and her son to return to their native country. In one of the most touching cinematic scenes I’ve ever seen, Dolores reclines in a hammock, smoking a cigarette in the late summer hour. She listens to the hushed voices of other women in her family as they talk about how much America has changed her. She is an illegal immigrant abroad but she no longer fits in where she was born. But more directly, Savoca brings to the fore the people who are seemingly hidden in our society. Dolores’s world is so much more than mopping and dusting and Dirt is a truly a polished gem.

girlhood
Director: Liz Garbus

girlhood is yet another exploration of Americans and incarceration. It’s a subject director Liz Garbus is very familiar with. Her early works include The Farm: Angola, USA and Juvies. The number of girls committing violent crimes has doubled in the past few years. Intrigued by this statistic, Garbus followed the lives of two young girls, Shanae and Megan, during their stay in a correctional facility near Baltimore, Maryland. Shanae stabbed a classmate to death when she was 12, and Megan has committed assault and run away from more than 11 foster homes.

Garbus describes her film as a story about the power of redemption and complicated mother-daughter bonds that exist between her subjects, but the potency of the film is really about “girlhood.” Shanae and Megan are not yet women, but their childhood innocence is also long gone. Their personalities and emotions are somewhere between the immaturity we would expect from girls their age, and yet they possess sadness and wisdom well beyond their stated ages. At one point in the film Megan tells the camera, “I feel like an old woman trapped in a young girl’s body,” and you know that she means it. One of the understated themes in this film is that locked up, behind bars these girls have a chance to be just that, girls. They hate the correctional facility but they also are playful and giggling. Once free, they wear heavy make-up and tons of jewelry while dealing with the stresses of the real world. It seems to add years to their faces. One can’t help wondering if life behind bars in this instance actually protects “girlhood.” Because Megan and Shanae are so atypical, girlhood becomes more than just a film title; it captures a sad, yet all too fleeting moment in the lives of its subjects.

Only In America
Director: Ron Frank
Official Site

Ron Frank is a man with a vision. I suspect that in his youth, this director watched a lot of “Leave It To Beaver” and genuinely believes America is a great pluralistic society filled with tolerance and acceptance. Is it? I don’t know, but this is a man with a vision, and out of this utopian-like dream comes this PBS-esque political documentary on Joseph Lieberman, the first practicing Orthodox Jew to ever be nominated as a vice presidential candidate. Frank’s documentary follows in chronological fashion the story of Lieberman in the 2000 campaign, from the days before his nomination to his eventual defeat by December of that year. Going for the feel-good images of rippling flags, the Capitol building, and the Statue of Liberty, he suggests Lieberman’s loss was not an anti-Semitic backlash but a “pro-Semitic front lash.”

But this film is all about being a Jewish politician and nothing more. What sort of policies did Lieberman embrace before his nomination as a U.S. Senator? I couldn’t tell you. How did Lieberman feel about being hosed by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision? You won’t get any ideas about that here. Frank is concerned about one thing and one thing only: Lieberman’s Jewish faith and how special it was that Gore selected him as a vice presidential candidate. In fact the very title of the film is supposed to reinforce this rosy idea. “Only in America” is repeated multiple times in mantra-like fashion about how wonderful this country is and how anything’s possible. To this end, I suspect Frank accomplishes his goal. The only problem is, with such a narrow scope, the film isn’t very interesting and veers dangerously close to political propaganda, and I’m a Democrat, for God’s sake.

—Nancy Semin