Stephen Holt: 2010 Provincetown Film Festival Wrap-Up

Candy Darling & Joan Rivers Ignite P-Town
By Stephen Holt

Having just returned from the sunny Cape Cod shores of the Provincetown International Film Festival, I can safely say that two blonde divas divided the excitement at PIFF this year.

They were the late Andy Warhol Superstar Candy Darling and the very much alive, the liveliest wire of them all, Joan Rivers! Both incendiary blonde bombshells have their lives fabulously chronicled in top notch docs.

Docs were hot this year, as was the burgeoning Film Festival now in its’ 11th year on the very tip of scenic Cape Cod. Tilda Swinton (!) was there in person, also, co-incidentally now a blonde, too, to accept the Excellence in Acting Award, for her entire superb career, and robustious Kevin Smith got a similar career achievement award for Filmmaker On The Edge, and he was there, too, adding to the excitement.

Who was Candy Darling? Yes, Candy is THAT Candy of Lou Reed’s “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” and “Candy Sez” fame.

Candy Darling was also simply one of the most beautiful creatures, male or female, who ever lived. A major figure in the Underground film and theater scene of the ’60s & ’70s, her AMAAAAZING life story is now brought back to vivid, charming, roaring, sexy life by her best friend and keeper of the Darling flame, Jeremiah Newton, who is also heavily featured in “Beautiful Darling”. Newton is one of the producers of the film, too, and its‚Äô director and writer is James Rasin. I thought it was the best film at Provincetown.

Debuting at the Berlin Film Festival this winter, and then the New Directors series at MOMA this spring, I did not expect to like or appreciate this film, because I had known Candy Darling quite, quite well, but ‚ÄúBeautiful Darling‚Äù was so excellently done, I was able to put my personal feelings aside and enjoy something akin to the unique experience of having one‚Äôs own life flash before one without one being in it. But I loved this poignant, fascinating doc nevertheless. I did. I really did. It’s a ravishment and completely beguiling, magnificently rendered and totally evocative of a period that is now all but gone with the wind.

Candy starred “Flesh” and “Women in Revolt” for Warhol and ended by starring Off Broadway for Tennessee Williams in his play “Small Craft Warnings.” An unprecedented feat for a transgendered person coming from the streets and ending up a serious actress.

Born Jimmy Slattery, in Massapequa, Long Island in 1944, her Irish Catholic family was not able to accept her hermaphroditism. But Andy Warhol could and did. And thereby by hangs quite a tale, complete with the Hollywood tragic ending of an early death at the age of 29, that could have been caused by all the then VERY dicey female hormone shots and pills she took continually. “Beautiful Darling” is ultimately a tragedy and poignant beyond words.

‚ÄúJoan Rivers: A Piece of Work‚Äù OTOH is QUITE the comedy. Joan Rivers is hilariously quite alive, and kicking, and screaming ,and punching her way back into the spotlight with one of the two greatest docs I’ve ever seen on Show Business, the other being “Beautiful Darling”, natch.

“Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” finds our diva at the beginning of a “bad” year. But only by HER insanely busy standards. She’s not getting enough bookings, she feels. She’s losing dates to “that bitch Kathy Griffin.” (who actually turns out to be one of her friends.) This is only the ice-tip of the hat-trick that serious documentarians Ricki Stern and Annie Sundburg (‚ÄúThe Devil Came on Horseback‚Äù) perform, in taking a performer, who some might say is seriously over-exposed, and showing us, that well, no. She isn’t.

The filmmakers are doing Joan Rivers a great, great service (The same thing that Jeremiah Newton is doing for Candy Darling). They are recovering and re-discovering their subjects, revivifying them. “Piece of Work” is making the 77-year-old Joan Rivers relevant, timely and NEW.

Sundberg and Stern present her as cultured, complex, thoughtful, gracious, intelligent, caring, and yes, deep. Her life long affection for the theatre is kind of a shock. She doesn’t go out to dinner on the rare night off from her hectic schedule. She insists friends take her to the theatre! She started as an actress and sees herself as “an actress playing a comic.” And she doesn’t shy away from showing and talking about her many surgeries. The first shot is an intense close-up of her often-lifted eyelids! And “Piece of Work” stays as unflinching and unvarnished as that close-up, and of course, very, very funny all the way through.

“Piece of Work” was the most sought after ticket at this year’s Festival, needless to say.

The best of the narrative feature films at PIFF, and also one of the best films of the years was the Weinstein Co.’s “Nowhere Boy” about the childhood and adolescence of the late, assassinated Beatle John Lennon in 1950s Liverpool.

Troubled is hardly the word to describe the young John Lennon. A runaway dad and an unreliable, probably bi-polar mother Julia, (the magnificent Anne-Marie Duff) could have sunk many another budding young artist/musician‚Äôs fate, but Lennon was very fortunate to be caught in the tug of way between his wild mother and her VERY dependable, prim and proper sister, Mimi, played by Kristen Scott-Thomas, who is almost unrecognizable in dowdy house dresses, severe hair-style and no-glamour make-up. Duff and Scott-Thomas’ performances as the battling, totally contrasting sisters are definitely Oscar-bound. Dazzling acting turns by both these brilliant Brits’ at the top of their game make “Nowhere Boy” an unforgettable, gut-wrenching drama that evokes both Douglas Sirk’s lavish Hollywood sudsers and Britain’s kitchen-sink genres at the same time. And the Weinstein’s have moved the release date yet again to the Oscar-friendly October. Just the right time to score these ladies and their marvelous film a serious shot at reduplicating their BAFTA nominations from last year.

Some may quibble that the young actors portraying Lennon (Aaron Johnson) and Paul McCartney, don’t look at all like their famous originals, but the script, directing (Sam Taylor-Wood) and the excellent ensemble of performers surrounding them, make their lack of visual verisimilitude a moot point.

Also, blowing my socks off, literally, was the Montreal-based French Language film “I Killed My Mother” written, directed and STARRING Quebec’s new enfant terrible, the 21-year-old Xavier Dolan. The cuter-than-cute Dolan has monumental problems with his put-upon single Mom (Anne Dorval, in a compassionate, quiet turn). Dolan’s Hubert who screams the unscreamable at her until the poor woman at loss of what to do about this troubled teen, her only child, sends him off to a boarding school. The core of his rage is his difficulty telling her that he is gay.

Also, gay driven, (and how!) was “8:The Mormon Proposition” that is also full of rage at the stealing of the California vote against gay marriage by the Mormon church. The Mormons in a very organized, frightening manner, methodically begin to wage a war at the ballot box, to overturn the recently legal California gay marriage law. And they do. As we all know. This great doc made me very, very angry and the audience I saw it with at Provincetown, overwhelmingly GLBT, was enraged as well as they yelled their outrage at the screen.

(click to enlarge)

The heterosexuals got their cinematic golden moments, too, with the excellent, dreamy “Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky” a French film which takes up where “Coco Avant Chanel” leaves off. In “Coco and Igor” we see Chanel as the super- successful opportunist we all know. Not the innocent gamin trying to find herself in “Coco Avant Chanel.” We see her actually bemused by the riot that breaks out around her at the first performance of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” in 1913 in Paris. Everyone else is screaming and throwing chairs. Coco just smiles.

Seven years later Coco meets up again with the now-penniless Stravinsky after the Russian Revolution, and her obsession with him, grows to the point, where she moves both him and his consumptive wife and four children into her black and white villa/mansion in Garches. A passionate, doomed love affair of course ensues. Anna Mouglalis is captivating as the perverse enchantress/businesswoman that is Coco Chanel.

The Weinstein score another coup with ANOTHER excellent doc called “The Tillman Story” about the shocking government cover-up of death, well, murder, actually by “friendly fire” of the NFL hero-turned-soldier Pat Tillman in Afghanistan.

Docs really rocked at Provincetown this year. More than ever and three fiction features that entered the fest with mucho hype and Oscar anticipations left me more than cold. And very angry. “Cairo Time” is just dull, dull, dull as the divine Patricia Clarkson finally finds herself defeated by a role that requires she stare endlessly in the middle-distance, usually over the Nile. Cairo itself is more interesting than anything else in the film.

Poor Patricia Clarkson looked so weary of staring that she seemed to be getting heat stroke. I felt that too. And the theatre was air-conditioned.

“Howl” left me howling, for all the wrong reasons. Documentarian giants Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman tried to transition to a fiction film treatment here and fail miserably. Dedicated and respected for their classic gay docs “The Celluloid Closet” among many others, “Howl” was a terrible disappointment as the festival’s Opening Night film. The obscenity trial in San Francisco in 1957, trying to ban “Howl” (and that made Ginsberg famous) was a good choice for a film. But not the stilted way this one was done.

Having seen some of the best films of the year, and also, sadly, some of the worst, I look forward to wonderful Provincetown’s International Film Festival next year.