New York Stories: Beautiful Darling, Hanna and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

I recently took a 10-day trip to New York City. A mixture of miscalculation and sheer lack of planification concurred to make me miss the Tribeca Film Festival, which had just come to an end when I arrived to NY. I therefore don't have any interviews or film festival commentary to offer this time, but maybe it's better that way. A friend who lives in Manhattan repeatedly told me how annoying it can be that special form of arrogance New Yorkers have transformed into an art of their own, name-dropping, so I won't indulge in that exercise myself, not least because, with the Tribeca fest wrapped up, there are really no names to drop. Well, rumours had it that the kids of Glee were all around Manhattan that week shooting the season finale, but I somehow managed to miss them and, although the tax relief system applied to film productions in downtown Manhattan practically guarantees that you'll see a movie in the making, I was unfortunate enough to catch only the shooting of the third instalment of Men in Black. There will be many sailors and girls in retro dresses and, in case you wondered, Will Smith too. New York is a fascinating city in every sense and the possibilities it offers are almost limitless, but I still managed to see a couple of films in the regular circuit. After all, even going to the movies is a unique experience in New York.

The first film adventure in the city took me to the IFC Center in Greenwich Village, located on the former site of the Waverly Theater, of Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight fame, where I caught a screening of Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol's superstar (clip below). As the self-explanatory title indicates, James Rasin's documentary is a maybe too conscious attempt at straightforwardness and explicitation of the (sadly short) life and (intriguing) times of Candy Darling, nee James Lawrence Slattery. This restrictive approach inevitably weighs down the aspirations of the film, which succeeds at sketching a more or less accurate portrait of the actress-superstar, but fails to unveil many of the mysteries of the boy (her closest friends in the film insist on Candy never having gone through girlhood) and the woman behind. As it is often the case with documentaries, the merits of the film lie largely in the interest of its subject. In this case, a suburb boy who dreamt of becoming a female film star of a bygone era and who, against all odds, almost managed to succeed at it. (After her first two films with Warhol, Candy Darling was to appear in Klute, opposite Jane Fonda, and in the play Small Craft Warnings by Tennesee Williams, who personally cast her for the role). In fact, the most striking feature of Darling's personality, as revealed on the account of many of the people that surrounded her, is that, although accidentally embedded in the epicentre of New York's counterculture of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, her dream of becoming a star of the studio system remained intact until her early death from leukemia at the age of 29. The picture of her that photographer Peter Hujar took on her deathbed (recently used by Antony and the Johnsons for the cover of their album I Am a Bird Now) immortalized her charisma as an actress and her legacy as a modern icon. In one of the latest extracts from her journals and letters (read by actress Chloe Sevigny in a showy but weird voice casting decision) she says (I quote from memory): 'I decided to always remain true to myself, for I firmly believe sincerity is the highest form of morality'. The statement could well be greeted with scorn as an ultimate expression of philosophical kitsch, but it might also be a simple but honest summary of the life of a person who clung to a dream and died too young to stop believing in it.

The second film experience in NY led me to more mainstream territory. As I had already said here in a previous entry, I had been looking forward to seeing Joe Wrigth's latest film, Hanna, starring Saoirse Ronan in the title role, for a long time. I wouldn't say the end result of this strange thriller was worth the wait, but I don't regret having seen it either. In fact, the film's virtues lie more in what it's not than in what it is. The story of girl raised and trained by her father to become the perfect assassin could well have ended up with Wright revisiting Nikita through the inevitable prism of the Bourne trilogy legacy. Instead, Hanna proves to be Wright's more personal, if not best, film to date, a frantic revenge thriller orchestrated around the deafening sound of an ubiquitous Chemichal Brothers soundtrack, with more plot holes than a Swiss cheese, but engaging if enjoyed as sheer entertainment. Saiorse Ronan's central performance proved me once more that I shouldn't be ashamed to admit that a 17-year-old is one of my favourite actresses alive, while Cate Blanchett brilliantly gives one of her worst performances ever.

My last film incursion in America came courtesy of Morgan Spurlock, that guy that some years ago put his own health in danger by limiting himself to an all-McDonalds diet in the hugely successful documentary Super Size Me, a film that made half the world look at a Big Mac with disgust. His new film Pom Wondeful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is an attempt at constructing a film sustained solely in its own publicity. This remarkably funny documentary is in fact a series of ads patched together with the hilarious scenes (the documentary proper) of the filmmaker trying to secure the contracts for the ads. Pom Wonderful, the pomegranate juice that prominently appears in the title of the film, gets the special billing treatment in exchange of the juiciest commercial contract for Spurlock and his film. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is a derisive and shrewd look at the world of advertisement and transforms that most deceptive form of publicity, product placement, into an art of its own. Sardonic and approachable, Spurlock proves once again he is to the run-of-the-mill consumer what Michael Moore is to the political iniciate.

By the way, in case you wondered, that's yours truly in Coney Island in the pic above. It's my ritual trip down memory lane every time I visit New York and my personal tribute to Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life, the film this journal owes its name to, whose beginning is set there.