“Beeswax” (Oct 30-Nov 5 at NWFF) is Andrew Bujalski’s third movie in seven years, and it is time the world stood up and took notice. If he is not the most important film-maker of his generation, he is the one truest to the cadences of modern life. With an apparently offhanded ease, he captures the ambiguity of relationships, the instability of gainful employment, and the way our sense of privacy threatens the possibility of a healthy social network.
Identical twins Tilly and Maggie Hatcher play room-mates in crisis. Tilly is Jeannie, co-owner of a clothing boutique who suspects her partner is planning a lawsuit against her, and Maggie is Lauren, a job to job drifter who is tiring of her insecure lifestyle. This is the their first movie, and both are excellent. In the hands of more conventional directors, they would be posed and frozen into appealing postures, but Bujalski includes the fleeting expressions that disrupt facial symmetry to show us the human beings within. In real life, Tilly has been a paraplegic since birth, so her performance as a paraplegic is no facile dramatization of a disability. In fact, she is so comfortable with her handicap that, at first, it looks like she is only pretending that she has no use of her legs. We are so used to seeing disabilities exaggerated to become pronounced character traits that when we see the real thing, it looks false.
Another things Bujalski captures is the generational flip on issues of gender power. From an opening scene in which Lauren tells her bedmate that she is not really into it and they should try breaking up, the women call the shots and the men are more than willing to accept their terms. Although such social dynamics are common among people under thirty, most movies continue to perpetuate dated notions of decisive males and acquiescent females.
Bukalski’s writing and directing seem so casual and lifelike that it feels we have walked into the middle of a story that has neither beginning nor end and, in a sense, that is just what we have done. But there is a dynamic structural strength hidden beneath the surface of these often banal exchanges that captivates our imagination much more than would a contrived plot line. When the movie ends, there is still so much more to the story but, as viewers, we are no longer a part of it. Whatever happens after the end titles, no matter how badly we want to participate, is none of our beeswax.
*
In the 1980’s, Abel Ferrara was one of those grimy New York directors who those outside of the grindhouse loop discovered with the advent of video stores. In addition to “Ms. 45,” the mother of the female vigilante genre, Ferrara gave us “Fear City” and “China Girl,” a Romeo and Juliet tailor made for late nights on Cinemax. He went wide in the 1990’s with the Christopher Walken vehicle “King of New York” and Harvey Keitel’s defining moment, “Bad Lieutenant,” which he followed with offbeat pictures such as “The Addiction,” a very un-supernatural look at the vampires of Columbia University. Then, with 1998’s disastrous “New Rose Hotel,” his career went tubes up, with a decade of flops that culminated with 2007’s straight to video “Go Go Tales” that was so bad that most video stores didn’t stock it.
So I am thrilled to find Ferrara is back in the game with “Chelsea on the Rocks,” (Oct 30- Nov 5)his funeral oration for the famous New York hotel that sets the documentary genre on its tail. There are almost as many entrances into this film as there are rooms at the Chelsea Hotel. Through interviews with its latter day residents and the photographing of ephemera, Ferrara tells the stories of the artists and the art that was made there and still hangs from the walls, the drugs and the drug addicts and the overdoses and suicides.
Among his bold strokes is the refusal to identify his interviewees. Many of these people were famous long ago and time has left them unrecognizable. By not labeling them as past celebrities, Ferrara forces us to look at them as who they really are in present tense, not as some label off the Warhol shelf. He stages a dramatic recreation of Nancy Spungen’s death, and eavesdrops on the close-lipped tales about the mysterious drug dealer who lives upstairs. Someone tells an anecdote of Marilyn Monroe sobbing in the foyer after Arthur Miller refused to let her come up to his room, and the doorman boasts of the days of drugs and orgies when he was the hotel’s unofficial manager.
Now, with the sale of the hotel to people who are out to maximize profits, the glory days are over, and a sad string of long time residents await their evictions. Ferrara says goodbye, not only to this singular piece of the city’s history, but to the world itself, the world as he used to know it, the twentieth century.
