Every documentary filmmaker has to be at least slightly in love with their subject. You don't have to subscribe to Albert Maysles' "love is all you need" approach to filmmaking, but some kind of love - ranging from universal human empathy to the kind of obsession it sometimes takes to get a film made - is pretty much a requirement.
In The Pied Piper of Hützovina (which I watched via the excellent new on-line rental service Jaman), director Pavla Fleischer takes that to 11. The film is about Eugene Hütz, frontman of the band Gogol Bordello. He's a Ukrainian-born, New York-based punk rocker obsessed with understanding his Roma heritage and reviving Gypsy music. He's also impossibly charismatic - the kind of guy women flutter to like moths to a flame.
Fleischer is one of those moths. She meets Hütz by chance on a car ride in Eastern Europe, falls head over heels, and decides that making a film about him would be a good way to get close to him. This we learn in her somewhat rueful narration over shaky video of that fateful car ride. Young Pavla looks so in love, we just know her fall is going to be harsh.
A year later, Fleischer has gotten Hütz to agree to the film project - a road trip through Ukraine and Russia to explore his roots and meet his musical heroes. But when she and her camera crew meet up with him to start the journey, it quickly becomes clear that Hütz has his own agenda and wants no part of her romantic plan.
To Fleischer's credit, she perseveres, and the film she ends up with isn't bad at all, if a little thin. Hütz delivers on the charisma part, jamming with Roma musicians in the Carpathian mountains, speaking seriously and emotionally about his passion for their music and culture, and arranging visits with various official keepers of the Gypsy music flame, not all of which go the way he expects. But there isn't much of an arc here; he's a guy with a guitar, on a quickie trip, with no goal and little at stake. So the story becomes as much Fleischer's as Hütz's: her disappointment, her attempts to stay connected and rescue her film. She doesn't protect herself or soft-pedal any of it, and her charm and honesty help us forgive the self-indulgence of using filmmaking as a seduction strategy.
I'm sure Fleischer learned a lot in the course of making this film: don't let your personal feelings cloud your judgment as a filmmaker; when you're directing in the field, don't dance until you're finished shooting; think through your structure and scenes before you shoot, or you'll end up having to put yourself in the film to recue it; etc.
She rescued her film pretty well. But on her next project, I bet she'll go easier on the love.
Sometimes you watch a film and wonder why nobody stopped the filmmaker from releasing it. Wild Blue Yonder is one of those films. It's stunning to me that a film this undisciplined and self-indulgent, with so little to say, has made it into any serious festival at all, much less IDFA, where it premiered, and now Hot Docs. There could be only one reason for this: director Celia Maysles is the daughter of the late David Maysles, and the only remotely interesting part of the film is her dispute with Uncle Albert, the revered octogenarian Albert Maysles, patron saint of cinema vérité filmmakers everywhere. The documentary community, like any other, has a prurient interest in films that air the dirty laundry of its icons.
David Maysles died in 1987, when Celia was seven years old, from a deadly combination of a powerful anti-depressant and an over-the-counter cold medication. Subsequently, there was a nasty lawsuit between David's widow and Albert over David's share of Maysles Films, the company the two brothers founded together. For 17 years, Celia says, no one ever talked to her about her dad. And so, at the age of 24, she decides she needs to try to deal with the emptiness, find out who her father was, and make a film about it. So she turns her camcorder on herself, and goes around talking to people about David. Her greatest desire is to see Blue Yonder, David's unfinished autobiographical film, and use it in her own film. But Albert, who owns the material, says that he's working on his autobiographical project and that he wants to use some of the footage himself. He flatly refuses to let Celia even look at it.
Meanwhile, Celia has long, rambling conversations with her mother, with a woman who was in Grey Gardens (one of the Maysles Brothers' triptych of masterpieces, which was released three years before Celia's birth), with Christo and Jeanne-Claude (the subjects of several of the Maysles' films), etc. Almost all of these conversations go on entirely too long and add nothing to the story. The scenes have no focus and no payoff. It seems the young Ms. Maysles didn't prepare for her filmmaking journey by studying what actually made her father's films work - most of these scenes don't even come close to having a "decisive moment." (The "climax" of one scene with the slightly batty Grey Gardens lady is Celia eating a cracker with cheese.)
Celia also videotapes her own therapy sessions, which provide no additional insight. She reveals in passing that she was hospitalized at 16 for either anorexia or depression. And in the biggest visual cliché in the film, she is shown submerging herself under water in a bathtub. This is on par with the average navel-gazing film-school project; it most certainly is not a festival film.
There is one unintentionally revealing moment: during one of her conversations with Albert, she asks him to take her camera and film her. And suddenly, the shot is beautiful, properly exposed, and somehow interesting. You see immediately what Albert means when he talks about the documentarian's gaze. It's as if the crafty old fox is saying, "Don't forget - whatever this young woman is going to say about me, I'm the real filmmaker here."
In the end, it's not like there isn't a real film to be made here. David Maysles was clearly a fascinating character with a wounded soul, and he left behind an amazing array of material, including audiotapes of his own psychoanalysis sessions. And the lawsuit between David's widow and Albert raises all kinds of interesting issues. David was married to Judy, but he also had a professional marriage with Albert. The dispute is like two widows of a bigamist fighting over who was the #1 wife and rightful heir.
A more mature and skilled filmmaker could have done a lot with this. It calls for a nuanced, carefully written essay film by an adult who is capable of parsing adult emotions and actions. But instead we are subjected to the confused musings of a young woman trying to heal herself - something she really should do in private. My prediction is that ten or fifteen years from now, Celia Maysles will be deeply embarrassed that she ever released this film.
I went back to the stack of eBay DVDs tonight. The film I pulled out was Tell Them Who You Are, Mark Wexler's film about his famous father, cinematographer Haskell Wexler.
I had no idea what to expect - family films can be tricky (though they're often very popular - Mme Holiday says they're the surest way to get a sympathetic audience), and a son turning a camera on his cameraman father... well, the opportunities for disaster are endless. Especially given the fact that Haskell is infamous for fighting with his directors.
And sure enough, the car wreck starts right off the top. Mark: "Dad, can you tell us where we are right now?" Haskell: "If you don't know where the fuck we are right now, just look around. You're making a goddamn documentary." Who's the director here? And how uncomfortable is watching this film going to get?
Well, it gets more uncomfortable. Haskell wants to tell Mark something on camera, and has set up the shot he wants before calling him over. Mark doesn't like the shot. They argue about this for so long, Haskell never gets to say what he wants to say. About a third of the way into the film, you feel these two emotional cripples deserve each other. Mark, who is well over 40, comes across as a boy desperate for his father's approval, which he's emphatically not getting. Haskell? Well, it's soon clear why Milos Forman fired him from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - he's completely insufferable.
And yet, the more uncomfortable the film got, the more I found myself sympathizing with both of them: Mark, who was allowing himself to look like an ass, and Haskell, who had to be more aware than most documentary subjects of the vulnerable position he was putting himself in, given his difficult relationship with his son. Clearly, this process had taken a lot of guts on both their parts.
And sure enough, it does become clear that the film is a process. There's never any big emotional revelation, but by the end of the film Mark and Haskell are working together (though Haskell still won't sign a release). The clearest psychological insight comes from Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, both of whom clearly had father issues of their own. And you finally get a sense that Mark is a lot more clever than he's let on. He's not the fuck-up he sets himself up as - messing up the audio when shooting his dad's birthday party, being schooled in filmmaking 101 on camera. He knows enough to leave his camera rolling when Haskell, off camera, forgets he's wearing a radio mic and tells his friends what he's really thinking. And Mark and editor Robert DeMaio structure the film beautifully, the revelations coming slowly, our sympathy and understanding building towards a lovely finish.
The real emotional climax of the film, though, happens in the DVD extras. Watch the film, then watch Haskell watch the film. It's worth the price of the DVD.
