Three movies shine at Tribeca festival

NEW YORK — A film festival is a mosaic, and you have to have some distance before you can even begin to say what it “means.”

So I’m not even going to attempt to provide an overview of the ongoing Tribeca Film Festival, which really isn’t in (or at least not contained by) the Triangle Below Canal precinct of lower Manhattan anymore. I’m just going to talk about some of the movies I’ve seen- and some that I’m going to try my best to see.

So far, my favorite is the strangely uplifting Death of a Superhero, which is a German-New Zealand production filmed on location in Ireland with an Irish director and British actors in the principal roles. It’s based on a 2008 novel by New Zealand author Anthony McCarten, who’s also a film director (Via Satellite, Show of Hands).

At the heart of the story is a 15-year-old who’s dying of leukemia and knows it. Donald (Thomas Sangster, who had a juvenile role in Love, Actually and played Paul McCartney in Nowhere Boy) has been robbed of his hair by chemotherapy, but he retains the appetites and enthusiasms of a randy schoolboy.

A budding comic book artist, he roughs out a fantasy life as a taciturn, bald superhero stalked by a monstrous nemesis (“The Glove”) and tempted at every turn by the kind of buxom women who populate the pulp universe.

Donald’s shut out his well meaning parents, who fear - quite reasonably - that he may harm himself. He’s run through a series of therapists before they finally bring him to a thanatologist (wonderfully played by Andy Serkis) who they hope will make inroads on Donald’s alienation.

While any synopsis of the film is going to make it sound like a variation on the Steel Magnolias/My Girl formula, Death of a Superhero is remarkable in its refusal to allow easy sentimentality to creep in. It’s restrained and honest and - if you can believe it - not a bit depressing.

It’s also one of the films that the festival has made available for On Demand viewing on most cable and satellite systems. So you can see it if you’re inclined, though I’m holding out hope that there may be some sort of theatrical release in store. I’d like to write a full review.

Another film I liked a lot was the British director Lucy Mulloy’s naturalistic Una Noche, about a pair of Cuban teenagers plotting to defect to the United States. Mulloy shot the film on location in Havana, and it seems as much an anthropological document as multilayered drama.

(As I’m writing this, a stunning story has just arrived via our news service: Two of the film’s three leads, Cuban actors Javier Nunez Florian and Analin de la Rua de la Torre, who play a would-be defector and his twin sister, didn’t make it to the festival because during a layover in Miami, they disappeared. They’re believed to have defected. The third lead, Dariel Arrechada, made it to New York and is scheduled to return to Cuba after the festival.)

I also liked about 95 percent of the Spanish film As Luck Would Have It by Alex de la Iglesia. (The Spanish title, LaChispa de la Vida, which translates as “the spark of life,” is a better fit.)

It’s basically a contemporary (and unacknowledged) remake of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), with a Spanish press agent taking the role of Kirk Douglas’ newspaper reporter Jack Tatum. Instead of a doomed caver stuck in the ground we have poor Roberto (Jose Mota), an out-of-work advertising man who’s trying to revisit the place where he and his wife (Salma Hayek) spent their honeymoon. He finds a construction site where the old hotel used to be and, after an improbable chase, finds himself improbably impaled, a metal rod stuck deep within his head.

“The problem is it’s pressing against the sagittal sinus,” a doctor tells his wife. Roberto cannot be moved except at great peril, but the leering television cameras do present certain product placement opportunities.

Very black and absurd, the movie misses its chance for genuine originality but it’s shrewd enough to keep us guessing until almost the end. It’s not Network, but it’s smart.

On the other hand, I’m still disappointed by Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, which was the festival movie I was most looking forward to seeing. I’ll save my review for when it opens theatrically, as it almost surely will.

But I’ll say this: Unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t really relish sacking films like this (other critics seem to disagree. I understand Take This Waltz was well-received in Toronto where, maybe not coincidentally, it was set) but it will be hard for me to receive anyone involved in this smug, overweening project with the same generosity I previously harbored.

Michele Williams, you have been warned.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com blooddirtangels.com