FICM 2013—STEVE SEID SURVEYS THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF BURT LANCASTER IN MEXICO (1913-1994)

We're mid-month into the centennial celebration of Burt Lancaster's birthday. At Turner Classic Movies (TCM), Wednesday nights have been devoted to Lancaster, inarguably one of Hollywood's most popular leading men. Robert Osborne has written a profile for TCM, as has Roger Fristoe. At Fandor's Keyframe Daily, David Hudson has detailed various retrospectives of Lancaster's films, which have—in effect—been celebrated all year long. The Film Society at Lincoln Center mounted their "Man of Steel" retrospective in May, the Harvard Film Archive showcased Lancaster's films from July through September, Eastman House continued the celebration into October, Cornell offered a tryptich in early November, and the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) dedicated their "Imaginary Mexico" sidebar to Lancaster with 35mm screenings of Veracruz (1954), The Unforgiven (1960), and The Professionals (1966).

Steve Seid of Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive contributed an essay to FICM's catalog to accompany the "Imaginary Mexico" retrospective, and The Evening Class is grateful to Seid and FICM for granting permission to republish same for a North American audience.

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Burt Lancaster can be a tough hombre, a tough hombre with a grin the size of Texas. And it's not just one grin, but multitudes, called into action to be wry, or welcoming, or devilishly threatening. Put that smirky smile on an actor trained as an acrobat and you have a pliable mug perched atop some great athleticism.

When first pinched for the pictures, Lancaster didn't have that signature smile. His mid-1940s debut roles in The Killers (1946) and Brute Force (1947) were too hang-tough even for a sneer, but in time his bravado emerged. By the early 1950s, that grin came flooding forth in the swashbuckler send-up, The Crimson Pirate (1952), showing off his physical daring, a characteristic he would trump in Trapeze (1956), that soaring tribute to the Big Top. Lancaster could be the unctuous dreamer of The Rainmaker (1956), his deluded smile more an ooze, or he could raze careers with a few caustic curls of the lip as J.J. Hunsecker, the newspaper columnist of Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Lancaster could be barely contained, reveling in roles like the handsome huckster of Elmer Gantry (1960), or a model of restraint, resigned to the reserve of that famed Birdman of Alcatraz (1962).

By the time his youthful acrobatics had waned, Lancaster had stretched his more mature manners as an actor, limber now in gesture not gymnastics. Who can forget the vertiginous emotions of Ned Merrill, the long-drowning suburbanite in The Swimmer (1968), the world-weary wisdom of McIntosh, the reluctant Indian scout of Ulzana's Raid (1972), or Lou, the aging mobster, hit by antique desires in Atlantic City (1980)?

With over seventy lead roles, Burt Lancaster nimbly inhabited just about every conceivable film genre, receiving recognition in the form of an Oscar® and three additional nominations, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild. Of his multitude of films, a half-dozen might constitute his Mexican sojourn, beginning with Vera Cruz in 1954 and ending with Valdez Is Coming (1971), where the-then 58 year–old actor plays a worn-out Mexican-American constable determined to exact justice for an innocent man's death. A pair of westerns, The Scalphunters (1968) and Lawman (1971), both produced in Durango, share the same stretch of broken earth, but only the former film conjures Mexico as an elusive safe haven for the fleeing bounty hunters.

But the sojourn, indeed, begins with Robert Aldrich's energetic Vera Cruz, a hybrid western with dashes of ever-twisting intrigue. When Ben Trane (a stiff but stately Gary Cooper) moseys into town, a dusty way station in 1860s Mexico, his horse is lame from the hard track. We know at once times are tough for this former Confederate officer, now a mercenary looking for a cause with a credit line. He teams up with Joe Erin (Lancaster), a mayhem-mongering gunslinger with a chilling smile. Dragging along a gang of greasy desperadoes (Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, and Charles Bronson), they head for the Gulf Coast as the guardians of Emperor Maximillian's gold. Or so they think. Played for high mischief, Lancaster's amoral merc squeals with delight at the prospect of double-dealing and derring-do, a feral force amongst the tumbleweed.

Aldrich's second western, Vera Cruz was shot throughout the Valley of Mexico. One grand scene, an opulent gathering with the soon-to-be deposed Emperor, is staged at Max's Castle high atop the Chapultepec promontory. In another, the caravan carrying the Emperor's treasure passes close by Teotihuacan, suggesting in its stony grandeur that Mexico's true soul shall remain while the dalliances of the invaders shall pass.

Director John Huston also knew the landscape of Mexico. His great The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) was produced here—a decade later he returned to Durango to make The Unforgiven (1960), an eccentric tale about racial intolerance in the Texas panhandle. Written by Alan Le May whose earlier novel was the basis for The Searchers, this curiosity stars Burt Lancaster as Ben Zachary, the eldest son of a frontier family whose only daughter is an adopted Kiowa child played by Audrey Hepburn. When a stranger arrives declaring that she is "no Zachary," the community turns against this "red-skinned" foundling. An unusually restrained Lancaster plays the defender of his family's honor which riles even those within his own circle, especially his rancidly racist brother Cash, played by Audie Murphy. Eventually, the local Kiowa tribe try to buy pert Hepburn back, the denial of which escalates into an armed skirmish. If you look closely at the warring braves you might espy Emilio Fernández. Huston had hired Fernandez to supervise some of the action sequences, but it was rumored that "El Indio" would also play the part of a "bloodthirsty Kiowa."

Some would say Lancaster's greatest role was in Elmer Gantry (1960), directed by Richard Brooks. Six years later, director and actor reunited for a big rollicking western, The Professionals, that set the stage for Sam Peckinpah's more violently poetical The Wild Bunch. Here, the Mexican Revolution is waning when a wealthy rancher's wife (Claudia Cardinale) is kidnapped by Jesus Raza (Jack Palance), a former revolutionary leader turned bandit. Four men, all veteran fighters, are hired to retrieve the abducted wife: Rico (Lee Marvin), a weapons specialist; Hans (Robert Ryan), a horse wrangler; Jake (Woody Strode), a skilled tracker; and Bill (Burt Lancaster), an explosives expert, in keeping with Lancaster's incendiary personality.

Across the border and into a heartless terrain of desert scrub and treacherous ravines ride the "professionals" as they close in on Raza's encampment. Raza, who notably speaks Spanish for half of his screen time, is the disillusioned revolutionary, now turning the chaos of war toward his own ends. "The Revolución is like a great love affair. In the beginning she is a goddess…. In time, we see her as she is," he says to Lancaster during a lethal stand-off.

And Lancaster's Bill, the demolition man? A short-fused adventurer, he turned an adolescent urge for artful creation into its explosive opposite. This was the perfect role for Burt Lancaster who himself possessed a barely containable inner energy that threatened detonation at any moment. His great actor's art was keeping that energy enclosed within the nuanced bounds of his body. Expect ignition.

FCN 2013—2 AUTUMNS, 3 WINTERS (2 AUTOMNES, 3 HIVERS, 2013)

As noted by Michael Hawley in his anticipatory overview of the 2013 edition of the San Francisco Film Society's French Cinema Now (FCN), the series—though abbreviated this year—is strikingly auteurial, no less in its opening night feature 2 Autumns, 3 Winters (2 Automnes, 3 Hivers, 2013) [IMDb], which typifies the fresh face of Gallic filmmaking. Sébastien Betbeder—whose debut Nights with Theodore was the winner of the FIPRESCI prize earlier this spring at the San Francisco International—has confirmed his ascendancy with this sophomore effort. "As for soon-to-break-out-talents," writes Gavin Smith at Film Comment, "I am betting on Betbeder." Smith describes 2 Autumns, 3 Winters as a "quintessential example of mélancomédie, the micro-genre of choice among a certain strain of up-and-coming French filmmaker" and he lays out the importance of the film's debut at ACID, an offshoot of the Cannes Film Festival (programmed by actual filmmakers): "Now entering its 21st year, the Association du Cinéma Indépendant pour sa Diffusion is a Paris-based organization of modest means dedicated to promoting the circulation of below-the-radar micro-budget indie work without distribution and made at the very edges if not completely outside of the French film industry."

A little context helps to underscore the importance (and prescience) of FCN's selection of 2 Autumns, 3 Winters as their opening night entry. Though some U.S. critics have sought to appropriate Betbeder's effort under the "mumblecore" aegis ("which is a stretch", Hawley chides), it is more appropriately an example of the current Jeune Cinema trend in French Cinema. "The trend," writes Adam Batty at Hope Lies At 24 Frames Per Second, "has been trumpeted in the French media fairly heavily, with Cahiers du Cinéma dedicating an issue to the work of young filmmakers like Guillaume Brac, Justine Triet, Antonin Peretjatko and Betbeder himself, who alongside Vincent Macaigne, the enigmatic star of 2 Autumns, 3 Winters, stand at the forefront of a major upheaval in contemporary French cinema." A synopsis of Cahiers du Cinéma's April 2013 dossier on the trend is available at David Davidson's site Toronto Film Review.

Hailed as "the new Gérard Depardieu", Vincent Macaigne has become in many ways the public face of the movement and one, Batty adds, "whose talents outline the intentions of this current wave of young French filmmakers." At The Observer, Kim Wilsher profiles Macaigne's rising star. "No fewer than three 'state of the nation'-style films featuring Macaigne were presented at this year's Cannes film festival," Wilsher points out, including Justine Triet's La Bataille de Solférino, Antonin Peretjatko's La Fille du 14 Juillet, and Betbeder's 2 Autumns, 3 Winters.

"A cine-literate streak runs through the collective," Batty continues, "with relationships within Betbeder's film defined and shaped around movies, and plotting derived from a perception of text, much in the same way that the earlier French wave digested and recontextualized existing works of the silver screen to tell a further tale." Batty finds 2 Autumns, 3 Winters reminiscent of Eric Rohmer's The Bakery Girl of Monceau "with its 'the cut as memory' approach to form and romance and omnipresent narrative voice apparent in Betbeder's text, while the pop-culturally driven, multi-faceted employment of technology recalls ... Godard."

At BFI, Jonathan Romney likewise detects the film's "irreverent cinephilia" with its short snippets of animation and nods to Bresson (Four Nights of a Dreamer), Eugène Green (The Living World), George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), and Alain Tanner (The Salamander), which the Denver Film Society considers the film's "most germane citation", sharing not only the alpine location of Tanner's films, "but also their free structure and spirit." At Cinevue, Craig Williams qualifies that—while the references come thick and fast—"it's not empty posing; even when a sequence from Alain Tanner's The Salamander is shown, it's done with such unassuming laissez-faire that it's obviously just second nature to Betbeder and his cast. The picture is concerned with people who have absorbed so much cinema that it's become a part of them. These are lives consumed by popular culture; a generation who see things through the prism of the arts and unconsciously use them as means to an end. In one terrific sequence, we even get the history of new wave and post-punk told through a young man's failed suicide attempts."

Romney states that this "fresh, no-frills feature" is "comic and tender in equal measure" while giving "the nouvelle vague an idiosyncratic 21st-century spin." Its "fractured, self-conscious style" suggests "a hip young Parisian novel making itself up, complete with chapter headings, as it goes along. Inarguably a guys'-eye view of life and love but also winning, literate and very distinctive." Dozens of short chapters alternate between moments of crisis and the comically inconsequential.

Yet even as one generation of filmmakers resuscitates the craft of their predecessors, the passage of time remains common to all, and is the most honest narrative assertion made by 2 Autumns, 3 Winters, which—as SFFS synopsizes—"applies indie charm to the vagaries of life." Given time, nearly all tragedy turns to comedy. It likewise addresses "the transformative power of calamity", whereas—as synopsized at the New Zealand International Film Festival—"much of this film's arresting emotional intelligence resides in its matter-of-fact grasp of the random impact of ill health and urban crime on ordinary lives."

"It should be added," continues the New Zealand International Film Festival, "that each of the three principals recount their highs and lows—often as they undergo them—to camera and with a fetching mix of impulsive disclosure and sheer bemusement." Before computer-generated backgrounds, this stylistic direct address and breaking of the fourth wall would, in most instances, achieve an ironizing distance, yet in 2 Autumns, 3 Winters it effects the obverse, drawing the viewer into the forthright ruminations of the film's characters and forging an intimate relationship. "While these direct-to-camera addresses occasionally take the form of an impromptu address from a rolling scene, ala Woody Allen or Jean-Luc Godard," offers Adam Batty, "more often than not Betbeder chooses to place these commentaries in their own section of the movie, quarantined and out of time with the concurrent structure of the movie in general. While comparable to the production methods of a reality television programme, this breakdown and restructuring of the filmic elements and styles of form is actually very cinematic. Sarkozy and the Chilean miners are cut next to animated sojourns in to the netherworld and video essay breakdowns of Judd Apatow movies to create a pop culture collage, with the final work encapsulating Macaigne's earlier (and unrelated) declaration that his world is 'more Hip Hop than New Wave'."

Not everyone agrees, however. At The Hollywood Reporter, Jordan Mintzer finds "a tad too many winks to the camera" in a film that "gets by more on style and sass than on its storytelling skills." As for the film's division into dozens of brief chapters, Mintzer complains that this often gives "the impression of watching a string of short films instead of an actual feature." He concludes: "Filled with oodles of visual flourishes, including a mix of grainy 16mm and HD cinematography (by Sylvain Verdet) and nonstop moody music by French singer-songwriter Bertrand Betsch, 2 Autumns often lets its cute and eccentric stylings get in the way of the story itself, which, once you strip away all the accouterments, feels rather underdeveloped."

Picked up by Film Movement for its North American distribution, Betbeder justifies his choices in the distributor's PDF press kit: "I wanted the narrative to be dense, to alternate between serious, critical moments in the lives of these young people, and more incidental moments that have no real impact. ...The chapter structure, the direct camera address, and the parentheses in the story turned out to be idyllic directorial decisions. An intimate and special relationship then emerges between the audience and the characters. Something magical and unique happens when the person on the screen looks at you and talks to you directly. I wanted to make this film in order to share something of what the society in which I live is like; to bear witness—modestly—to an era that is coming to an end, to the changing way people relate to each other. We love differently in 2013, we have a different approach to death. We are increasingly less carefree." Kristin McCracken solicits further commentary from Betbeder in her brief Q&A for the Hamptons International Film Festival. Festival Cinemania concludes: "Director Sébastien Betbeder succeeds admirably in recreating the languid rhythms of daily life of these French 'slackers' and their newly-defined sense of humor."

FCN 2013—MICHAEL HAWLEY ANTICIPATES THE LINEUP

The San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) brings us the sixth edition of its French Cinema Now (FCN) series, beginning this Thursday, November 7 at Landmark's Clay Theatre. While it's tough seeing 2013's event scaled back from seven days to four, the good news is that the quantity of films has remained the same (albeit with fewer screenings). Two things crossed my mind while perusing the program. The first was an absence of anything lightweight or overtly commercial on the roster. The second was an impressive dedication to a loose coterie of directors by the SFFS programming team, with eight of ten FCN films this year coming from filmmakers whose works have been previously exhibited by the SF Film Society.

The SFFS alumni party gets going on opening night with Sébastien Betbeder's drôle and affecting 2 Autumns, 3 Winters, which is also the only FCN entry I've previewed in advance. Betbeder was the surprise FIPRESCI winner at this year's SF International Film Festival. His 67-minute, made-for-TV movie Nights with Théodore, set an enigmatic, paranormal-shaded romance almost entirely within Paris' Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Betbeder's follow-up retains the Paris backdrop, this time concerning itself with the ups and downs of two ex-art student bros in their early thirties. It's been labeled the first French mumblecore film, which is a stretch. While the film does feature floundering young adults and lengthy monologues, it's more stylized than its American counterpart, with an episodic structure, a lot of fourth wall-breaking and a diverse look obtained from shooting both 16mm and digital. Comic, bittersweet and smart, 2 Autumns should work perfectly as an opening night film.

2 Autumns, 3 Winters is just one of six FCN selections that had world premieres at this year's Cannes Film Festival. The FCN film I'm most anticipating is Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake, which competed in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. It was perhaps the best-reviewed film of the entire festival, leaving some critics wondering why it wasn't in the main competition. It ultimately won the sidebar's Best Director award as well as the fest's Queer Palm. Set entirely around a placid lake that doubles as a notorious cruising spot, the film has been described as a (very) sexually-explicit thriller that takes on the complexities of gay male desire. One much-discussed scene has had critics making comparisons to Hitchcock and Chabrol at their most unbearably suspenseful. A lot of fuss has also been made of the film's lush wide-screen photography and layered sound design. Unsurprisingly, the good folks at Strand Releasing have picked this up for U.S. distribution. Director Guiraudie is no stranger to FCN, having personally accompanied The King of Escape, his yarn about a gay, middle-aged tractor salesman on the lam with a teenage girl, to the Bay Area in 2009.

Also showing up in Cannes' Un Certain Regard was Claire Denis' Bastards, a downbeat and menacing familial tale of money, sex and power set in contemporary Paris. Although the film drew mixed reviews—critics complained about its obtuseness and confusingly fragmented narrative—it fared much better at the Toronto and New York film festivals. Critic Robert Koehler proclaimed it Denis' best film since L'intrus and Manola Dargis found Bastards "grimly beautiful and somewhat unhinged." (And then there's Ryan Lattanzio's ominous warning at Indiewire that after Bastards "you may never eat corn-on-the-cob again.") Once more Denis enlists the immense talents of cinematographer Agnès Godard (her first digital shoot for Denis) and musician Stuart Staples of the Tindersticks. The promising cast includes Denis regulars Grégoire Colin and Michel Subor, as well as Denis newbies Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni and Lola Créton. I wasn't crazy about Denis' last film, 2009's White Material, but these L'intrus comparisons have me hopeful that I'll be loving me some Bastards.

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's autobiographical A Castle in Italy initially drew attention at Cannes because it was the only female-directed film in the main competition. Then came the almost unanimously horrible reviews, with The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw leading the pile-on ("smug, precious, carelessly constructed, emotionally negligible, tiresome, insufferably self-regarding and above all, fantastically annoying"). Tedeschi plays a retired actress with a ticking biological clock whose family is divided over whether to sell the titular family castle—in other words, she's got an acute case of RWPP (Rich White People Problems). As in real life, her character has a younger actor boyfriend (played by her actual ex, actor Louis Garrel) and a brother who's dying of AIDS (Tedeschi's brother died of the disease in 2006 and is played here by Filippo Timi, the Italian actor best known for portraying Mussolini in Vincere). This is Tedeschi's third outing as director / writer / actress, and all three films were co-written by actress / director Noémie Lvovsky (who attended last year's FCN with the opening night film, Camille Rewinds). I remember enjoying Tedeschi's Actresses when it played the inaugural FCN in 2008, so I'm willing to take a chance on this—in no small part thanks to the presence of Euro-hunks Garrel and Timi. Omar Sharif of all people is said to have a movie-stealing cameo near the end.

Speaking of Euro-hunks, Danish superstar Mads Mikkelsen plays the titular role in FCN's other film from Cannes 2013's main competition, Arnaud des Pallières' Michael Kohlhaas. Based on an 1811 novella that's a staple of German literature classes, the film features a French-speaking Mikkelsen as a 16th century horse merchant seeking justice after two prized steeds are seized and then abused by a ruthless nobleman. Reviews of both the film and Mikkelsen's performance were mixed, with the Hollywood Reporter's Jordan Mintzer opining, "Michael Kohlhaas provides a few quick thrills and some beautifully photographed landscapes, but never really convinces as an intellectual's swords-and-horses period piece." The critics were unanimous in their praise of Jeanne Lapoire's cinematography (she also shot A Castle in Italy), as well as the film's exquisite period detail. Being mad-for-Mads means I wouldn't dream of missing this, especially when the Great Dane is joined by an impressive supporting cast that includes Amira Casar, Jacques Nolot, Bruno Ganz, Sergi López and Denis Lavant.

My favorite film at FCN 2010 was Katell Quillévéré's Love Like Poison, an impressive, Prix Jean Vigo-winning directorial debut about a young Bretagne teen grappling with issues of flesh vs. spirit. Three years later Quillévéré returns with Suzanne, which opened the Critics Week sidebar at this year's Cannes. The film encompasses 25 years in the life of its protagonist, a young woman who lives with her widowed father and sister, gets pregnant in high school and eventually takes up with a small-time gangster. Although reviews were generally favorable, many critics felt the huge time gaps in the narrative gave the film a choppy feel. Variety's Boyd van Hoeij likened Suzanne to an "extended trailer for an entire season of a French working-class daytime drama." Critics were unanimous, however, in their resounding praise for Sara Forestier in the title role. This is the acclaimed actress who burst on the scene in 2003, winning a Most Promising Actress César for her fiery performance in Abdellatif Kechiche's Games of Love and Chance (aka L'esquive), and then winning the Best Actress César in 2011 for Michel Leclerc's The Names of Love. Perhaps a third César is not out of the question.

Just as Quillévéré's first movie was my FCN favorite of 2010, so it was a year earlier with The Wolberg Family, the passionate and quirky 2009 debut of critic-turned-director Axelle Ropert. She's finally made a second film, Miss and the Doctors, which is about two pediatrician brothers both falling in love with a barmaid whose diabetic daughter is in their care. The brothers are played by director / actor Cédric Kahn (Red Lights) and Laurent Stocker, the latter a Comédie Françasie actor whose work I'm unfamiliar with. As with The Wolberg Family, Ropert's latest is also a Bozon family affair, with actor / director Serge Bozon (La France) once more taking on a supporting acting role and his sister Céline Bozon delivering the cinematography. Because Miss and the Doctors didn't have a festival rollout and only opened in French cinemas two months ago, there are very few reviews in English. An exception is Jordan Mintzer's favorable write-up in the Hollywood Reporter, where he calls the film a "bluesy swan song for brotherly love" and compares it to "the sort of earnestly made, cleverly scripted adult dramas of Truffaut's late period." The film's original French title (Tirez la langue, mademoiselle) translates as "Stick out your tongue, Miss," which sounds less lame than its English counterpart.

Yet another directorial second feature in the FCN 2013 line-up is Anna Novion's Rendezvous in Kiruna. Like the filmmaker's 2008 debut Grown Ups, it stars Novion's off-screen partner, renowned character actor Jean-Pierre Darroussin (who's mostly known to me from the films of Robert Guédiguian). Here he plays a gruff French architect who must travel to Swedish Lapland to identify the body of a dead son he has never met, picking up a young hitchhiker on route. Rendezvous in Kiruna won the prize for Best Film at the 2012 Cairo International Film Festival, and in her review for the Hollywood Reporter, Sheri Linden appreciates how the movie escapes inherent road movie clichés and promises that "the story's quiet observations build into low-charge detonations that resonate for days afterward." The film's cinematographer, Pierre Novion, is expected to attend the FCN screening. Kiruna, by the way, is Sweden's northernmost city and the unofficial capital of Swedish Lapland.

The lone documentary in this year's FCN is House of Radio from Nicholas Philibert. It's the first film by the master French non-fiction filmmaker since Nénette, his fascinating 2010 study of a 40-year-old, zoo-imprisoned Parisian orangutan. This time Philibert takes on the massive entity that is Radio France, which is loosely the French version of NPR. The film is given an illusory 24-hours-in-the-life-of structure, although it was actually shot over the course of six months. Reviews for House of Radio have been generally positive—it premiered at this year's Berlin Film Festival and had a brief NYC theatrical release back in September—with the main criticism being that unless you are already familiar with Radio France, the film is a bit daunting. There is no voiceover narration or on-screen information imparted, so unless you know what screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and author Umberto Eco look like, you won't realize they are among the radio's on-air interviewees until the end credits roll.

After Stranger by the Lake, the FCN film I'm most dying to see is Vic + Flo Saw a Bear from French-Canadian director Denis Côté. This is the first time a Quebeçois film has been included in FCN's line-up and I hope it won't be the last. The SF Film Society did sponsor a Quebec Film Week back in 2008, but since then many important French-Canadian works have bypassed the Bay Area, including Côté's disturbing 2012 documentary about taxidermy and safari park animals, Bestiare (fortunately available for streaming on Netflix). Vic + Flo Saw a Bear tells the offbeat and ultimately harrowing story of a 61-year-old lesbian ex-con who retreats to the rural home of a paralyzed uncle, and is joined in short order by her former lover / ex-cellmate and her gay parole officer. The film premiered in Berlin, where it walked off with the prestigious Alfred Bauer Award, given each year to a film that "opens new perspectives on cinematic art." (Past recipients include Léos Carax, Tsai Ming-liang, Park Chan-wook, Fernando Eimbcke and last year's winner, Miguel Gomes' Tabu). Critics have been generous with praise, with Boyd van Hoeij calling it Côté's most accomplished work yet, and Screen Daily's Lee Marshall summing up the film's vibe thusly: "A rich, humane, surprising film, Vic + Flo Saw A Bear manages to mix the drollery of Wes Anderson, the genre swagger of Tarantino or the Coen Brothers and the opaque narrative of a Bruno Dumont in one intriguing package."

Cross published at film-415.

FICM 2013: PARAÍSO (PARADISE, 2013)

Situated in FICM’s Mexican Feature competition, Mariana Chenillo’s Paraíso (Paradise, 2013) cooks up a delectably sentimental offering, albeit from a slim premise. Carmen (Daniela Rincón) and Alfredo (Andrés Almeida) have been childhood sweethearts since secondary school, living sequestered and happy lives in a small town, oblivious to their mutual obesity. But once Alfredo achieves a work promotion that relocates them to Mexico City—and after attending their first office party where Carmen inadvertently hears Alfredo’s workmates refer to them as “Boteros” (which, distraught, she looks up on the internet)—Carmen succumbs to the pressures of fitting into a body-conscious society. She insists they both go on a diet and join a weight loss group and—though at first Alfredo is resistant—he acquiesces, commits himself to the program, and begins to lose weight (whereas Carmen does not). As their body image shifts, so does the image of their relationship, which suffers as a result.

Paraíso is a romantic comedy, plain and simple, and its adherence to formulaic fantasy all but assures that audiences will leave the film feeling satisfied. Though it touches upon serious issues regarding the tension between self-image and social conformity, it skirts these issues effortlessly by offering the panacea we all want to hear: love conquers everything. In this formulaic fantasy, being overweight simply means there’s more to love, as cliche as that might be. One certainly can’t begrudge Chenillo for that, and audiences won’t, judging from the chuckling response from FICM’s audience.

Chenillo’s pairing of newcomer Daniela Rincón with veteran Andrés Almeida is an astute casting choice. Rincón’s naifish and sweet vulnerability makes it easy for Almeida (and audiences) to love her and Almeida’s big puppy dog eyes express his love devotedly. Almedia’s transition from a “pumpkin” to a slimmed-down bank executive is both believable and inspiring. Amusing comic support—most notably by Luis Gerardo Méndez as a slightly effeminate fitness coach, and a clutch of middle-aged women with whom Carmen takes a Mediterranean cooking class (rather than attend yoga)—allows Chenillo her light handling of the subject of Mexico’s rising obesity. An aquarium blowfish that Carmen finds beautiful for reminding her of a bird provides an interstitial metaphor throughout, balancing weight with levity. There’s all kinds of fish in the sea, after all. Chenillo raises awareness by poking fun at the issue of obesity, without actually asking for much resolution, though the film commendably—if backhandedly—celebrates culinary creativity. Carmen joins the ranks of loveable characters like Tracy Turnblad of the Hairspray vehicles, though she lacks the meaningful self-agency achieved by Ana Garcia (America Ferrara) in Real Women Have Curves. Paraíso achieves light entertainment for the guiltily overweight.

DETROIT UNLEADED (2012)—The Evening Class Interview With Rola Nashef

I met Rola Nashef in Panama City during the 2013 Panama International Film Festival. We fortuitously sat beside each other on the transit shuttle from the festival's Midnight Mojitos Boat Party to the after-party in Casco Viejo. Within minutes, she had me laughing and our ride to the discotheque afforded the opportunity to ask her about her film at the festival, the Lebanese American romantic comedy Detroit Unleaded (2012) [Facebook], which had premiered at the 2012 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, winning the inaugural Grolsch Film Works Discovery Award. Though it had not been on my original itinerary, I made sure to catch it and—as is often the case in such instances—lucked out by doing so.

Detroit Unleaded was also one of 12 films chosen for the inaugural edition of the 2013 San Francisco International Film Festival A2E initiative. And its festival run continues October 19, 2013, at the Los Angeles Arab Film Festival.

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Michael Guillén: First of all, I have to go on record to say that I completely admire your ability to carry a drink to three different locations without spilling a drop!

Rola Nashef: Thank you very much.

Guillén: We talked a lot on the bus last night and you laid out for me the trajectory of your film Detroit Unleaded, but we'll need to reiterate a bit.

Nashef: Yeah, sure.

Guillén: Can you tell me about your background in filmmaking?

Nashef: It's really diverse, actually. I did all kinds of stuff during my college years. I had six or seven different majors and kept switching, switching, switching, but nothing clicked. I went to four or five different colleges and universities, but nothing clicked. I was learning, but I was still lost. I dropped out of school at Michigan State, moved to Detroit, and was studying to be a paralegal. I had never taken an art class before. I had never been introduced to my creative, right brain, and a poet friend of mine told me, "I don't know what you're supposed to be doing but it's not this. You're not supposed to be a paralegal." I argued, "But it has benefits." She insisted, "I don't know what it is, but it's not this."

At the same time, I became lost in my career path. I had always been a leader. I had always been that person to bring people together, whether it was through the Arab student organization in college or my church group. I had always been the kind of person who would pull elements together to do events and, at the same time, I was a storyteller. I always told great stories and made people laugh. At 25, I started working at the Arab Community Center for Family Services in their cultural arts department and it was the first time in my life where I met creative people....

Guillén: And aren't they a crazy bunch?!

Nashef: I thought, "Who are these crazy people?" I related to them, without even knowing that I was really relating to them. It was more like I admired them and was liking what they were saying. I asked myself, "What is this?" At the community center I was giving tours on Arab culture and I felt there was a better way to translate the information instead of simply talking to groups of people visiting the center. Then I met my first filmmaker. He was a Lebanese American filmmaker, which is so rare anyway and the fact that I met him felt like fate. I was like, "Film school is so cool. Only cool people go to film school." Then it hit me. I wanted to make a documentary about Arab women, or something like that, and I approached him about it and he didn't give a shit about my little idea.

Then I found out about producing and I thought to myself, "I think I'm a producer. I think I've been doing this my whole life. Pulling all these elements together and making them line up." So—even though he wasn't into my idea—all of a sudden that very year when I was really lost there was a new film school that opened up in Detroit. Me and my friend were driving and I spotted an ad in the paper and the ad literally said, "Hey YOU, go to film school!" I started screaming, "Oh my God! This is it!" As soon as I saw that ad, at that moment, I said to my friend, "I'm going to film school." I used her cell phone to call right away, applied the next day, got in, and my very first day at that school I knew this was what I was supposed to be doing. The very first time I went on a set, all the things that made me weird or odd or anal or just different all had a place on the set. It was the first time in my life when something hit me that solid, that hard, and I never turned back and never questioned it.

Guillén: You wrote the script for Detroit Unleaded?

Nashef: Yes.

Guillén: So you're a director-writer. Do you consider yourself a director-producer as well? You also produced Detroit Unleaded, right?

Nashef: Yes.

Guillén: So you're actually a director-writer-producer, which is somewhat rare.

Nashef: Right. I would definitely like to drop the producing part, however. I would like to have multiple projects going on at the same time and I'd like to be able to write more, and focus solely on the creativity. Producing can be creative, but I don't want to be that person anymore. I just can't.

Guillén: Producing can be creative, but it's more the left brain. It's more of a business sense.

Nashef: Exactly. I'm so glad I did it because I think it makes me a better director and writer. I know it was the right path, the right thing to do at the time, even though it was torturous.

Guillén: Let's talk about the script for Detroit Unleaded. You've received much acclaim for it, including the Grolsch Film Works Discovery Award at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. I have to believe that accolade was the direct result of the storytelling.

Nashef: Right.

Guillén: When I first started watching Detroit Unleaded, I wasn't quite sure if I was going to be able to relate to the story. I was concerned that it might be too subcultural for me; but, then the story started to morph and you achieved and communicated—through humor—the story you were seeking to tell. Can you talk about why this was the story you wanted to tell? Why did you set your romance in a gas station?

Nashef: I came to the gas station in a couple of different ways. I had grown up outside of Detroit about an hour and 15 minutes away in a smaller community, not such a concentrated Arab community, and one that was actually pretty mixed: White, Black, Latino. When I moved to Detroit, it was the first time I lived amongst such a high concentration of Arab Americans. I was like, "Yeah! My people! This is great. I've never been around so many Arabs before. Everyone gets me. No one asks me where I'm from. No one asks me, 'Do you speak Spanish?' They know I'm Arabic." My identity crisis came to some closure. I was meeting all these great people and making new best friends and was hearing so many great stories and listening to wonderful dialogue and felt, "This should be in a film."

As for the gas station itself, every time I walked into a gas station there was some young Arab guy behind this glass. Of course, they were all gorgeous and I kept thinking, "What is this image? Why does it keep repeating in my head? Why are all these young Arab men here trapped in this little glass cage? What's their story?" It always looked like they had a story. Then I began to question the glass divider itself. What was this tangible barrier? It seemed bizarre to me. I kept thinking that it had to change your perspective as a clerk. It had to change your perspective on how you viewed the world. Sitting in a gas station hours on end? It has to do something to you because, to me, that glass divider criminalizes people and it's there to protect you from the other. Whoever walks in is a dangerous threat to you, no matter what the circumstances are. I wanted to explore that perspective.

Within the gas station itself, I found so many hilarious interactions. I also found it to be a place where a lot of camaraderie was built between Detroit's Arab and Black communities. It seemed to have a neighborhood feel to it. Detroit can be economically and racially segregated. Everyone lives in their own little neighborhood. But as a gas station, that doesn't hold true because it's a driving city. You always have to go to a gas station. So often times you'll see that people are really mixed within the setting of a gas station. I thought that was an interesting metaphor that embraced many themes that I wanted to explore and that worked out beautifully in this central place, this turnstile, where people come in and out of each others' lives.

Guillén: And that was not only visually represented, but also revealed in the musicality of language. You offered not only your own Arabic language, but many other languages, including slang from the Black community, or the weird way that Roger—the White guy who took care of the parking lot—spoke whenever he came to the window. It was interesting to hear this community of distinct voices. This is, for me, what became the value of your portrait of this ensemble of races and how, surprisingly, they got along. You have an ear for dialogue that you have translated visually. Can you talk about that? About the musicality of language? And why you decided not to do just a Lebanese American narrative?

Nashef: I think that had a lot to do with my own personal upbringing. Because I did not grow up in such a concentrated Arab Lebanese community and grew up, instead, in a mixed community. That was my first nature: to always be in relation to other types of people. That element of the script came from my personal way of relating to others. And, as I said, the gas station itself was such a mix of people, which I basically found more interesting.

I knew that the romantic couple were going to be Arab American; but, one of my pet peeves about Arab characters in film, especially romantic films, is that Arab characters always hook up with non-Arabs. At least that's what I've always found in films. I knew that I wanted a young, hot Arab American couple; but, I wanted to surround them with this bouquet of people who represented, first, people in Detroit and, second, the kind of people they were trying to steer clear from. They wanted to date in private, but here were all these people coming in and out of their lives that bust up the romantic scenes or interrupt the drama or interrupt the comedy going on behind the glass.

Guillén: There's also a musicality to the editing. The sound of the door opening and closing was like a percussive lietmotif, and it drew attention to the film's pace and rhythm, by way of the editing. Editing, I understand, is something difficult to talk about, being largely intuitive, but why was that percussive punctuation important to you?

Nashef: Every single ding was written into the script. I come from a musical background. I grew up playing piano. My brother's a professional musician. Within our family, we call it the Nashef ear. We can hear a pin drop three flights up. My little nephew has it too. We don't know exactly what it is, but it's very sharp hearing. We feel lucky. So the musicality you're talking about was inside me the whole time. When I was writing the dialogue it was, as you said, musical. I always felt it needed a ding, a note. It was like that in the script from the beginning and I loved that, I loved how it sounded, and I constantly worked it in every time I had a new scene, either intentionally or naturally. The script for Detroit Unleaded is where I developed my style. Because I worked the script for so long, the editing followed the script.

Guillén: When you say you "worked" the script, how do you mean that? In workshop?

Nashef: I worked the feature script for two years and it was a torturous process. It was the first time I had ever written a script. It was a huge learning curve for me. I had a problem with structure. That was my biggest issue and I brought two writers on board towards the final draft to help me structure the script; but, what kept me going, was the joy of the dialogue and writing the dialogue. It was musical for me. It felt like composing. The characters were often born from the dialogue. I would hear a line of dialogue in my mind and think, "That's hilarious. Now I have to write a character that goes with this dialogue." Dialogue, for me, is first nature. I could write dialogue all day long.

Guillén: The interruptions that you described earlier—these moments of quite brilliant humor—how did you develop and incorporate them into the script's structure?

Nashef: Thank you. You mean the customers?

Guillén: Yeah.

Nashef: That element of the comic interruptions came from witnessing it or being on the phone with a couple of dear friends of mine who I would call to chat and be constantly interrupted by customers. It made me think about these Arab guys in the glass cages and how frustrated they must be. They're there for twelve hours of their lives but still have to conduct a life, still have to have relationships, but those relationships are constantly interrupted by customers. The characters were inspired by many different things.

Guillén: Where did that weird character Roger come from? Was he mentally challenged?

Nashef: He's just a character who was in my head and, yeah, he was just off. I always saw him living in another dimension that we don't live in; but, you still like him. I never specifically labeled him. Sometimes you meet people like him and you don't know what their story is. You don't know what their capacities are. You just know that maybe they live in another dimension than you and that's cool. I'm all about time traveling and all of that; go for it! Often times I would see homeless people who "worked" in the parking lots of gas stations. His name came to me first. Roger, he's the guy who works in the parking lot. To me he represented real freedom that Sami, the protagonist, the Arab guy in the glass cage, never had. But he lived in the parking lot and kind of lived in outer space. He thought gun shots were fireworks. What an interesting way to look at life. "You're missing the fireworks show." Which, in a way, represented what Sami was missing. He had something Sami didn't have. Roger started off as a character in the parking lot and he turned into this thing that interjected some magic into Sami's life. You didn't always get it or understand it, but you knew there was something about him that acted for something else.

Guillén: Since you bring up Sami, let's talk about him and Naj (EJ Assi and Nada Shouhayib, respectively); what a beautiful couple.

Nashef: Gorgeous, right?

Guillén: Truly. Sami's story touched me for being complicated. He's under so many subcultural pressures as a young man. I was disturbed by the scene where Fadi (Steven Soro), Naj's brother, forcibly takes her away from Sami. Does that really happen between brothers and sisters in Lebanese American culture, where the brother dominates the sister? Further, I couldn't quite get my bearings with her. I was a bit confused at film's end when Sami asks Naj on the phone, "Where are you?" and she says, "I can't tell you" and then you discover that he does know where she is. Can you explain to me what you were trying to communicate in that sequence?

Nashef: Sure. First of all, I like Fadi. I have known people like him. I didn't want to criminalize or demonize him. I didn't want to make him into the bad guy because there really are no heroes in the film.

Guillén: With regard to your earlier statement, it strikes me that Fadi is the guy who would have ended up with a girlfriend who wasn't Arab American.

Nashef: Oh yeah, for sure, he's a total player. You hear him on the phone complaining about having a headache from having gone out to the club the night before, whereas when Naj goes to the club, she has to run away when she sees her brother. Of course you will find that double-standard, but I think you would find it in a lot of other cultures as well, not just Lebanese American.

Guillén: You seem to want us to read affection into his behavior. As you say, he wasn't really a bad guy; he was just obnoxious and mean?

Nashef: Exactly. And has a temper.

Guillén: So I guess my curiosity is that—if you're trying to present an image of Lebanese American life, and you're presenting these qualities of that life—you're not really critical of these qualities?

Nashef: No, I don't want to judge them. I don't want to judge Fadi. If you're like that in your life, that's really your business and it's up to Naj—the victim of his obnoxiousness—to break free of that. It's not up to me to say that she should do this, this or this.

Guillén: Are you trying to say that she always knew her own direction?

Nashef: Yes, exactly.

Guillén: And that's what we, as the audience, have to accept. She's not really a victim; she's just temporarily in a victimized situation.

Nashef: Exactly. If you notice, she always knew that she was leaving. She had a plan. She had no intention of running his empire forever, no way, and sometimes—you know what?—you need someone like that to push you. If she didn't have a brother like that, would she have wanted to leave? Would she have wanted to go in another direction? I don't think that when people like Fadi are in your life that they are necessarily monsters who are going to destroy you; they're antagonists. They can push you in directions that aren't always so horrible. I've encountered many people like that—maybe not necessarily in the Arab community—who have pushed me and made me suffer; but, looking back on it, I think, "Wow. If that person hadn't made me suffer, I wouldn't be where I am today."

Guillén: I was intrigued by Fadi's use of the term "up do" girl. Is that Lebanese American slang? I've never heard that term before.

Nashef: I made it up.

Guillén: Ah, well, notwithstanding, the girls in the car were hilarious.

Nashef: Right?

Guillén: You should do a sequel that focuses just on those girls.

Nashef: That's my next film! It's about four Lebanese American girls trying to get married. When I moved to Detroit, I would see these girls who would go to the salon and get "up dos" and then go to public events like engagement parties and weddings to be seen. It's so bridal. It's a way of presenting yourself as a young woman who's ready to get married.

Guillén: That reminds me of a young woman I recently saw in San Francisco who came out of a nail salon with her nails done like eyelashes, which seemed like flirtation on a level I'd never seen before.

So if Fadi personified a subcultural constraint that encouraged Naj's emancipation and the couple's romantic freedom, it was predicated upon the fact that, in themselves, they were an incredibly sexy couple; but, sexy in terms of restraint of desire, and Sami's respect for Naj. You could have easily had them kissing or making out, but the fact that you held back made their desire even stronger so that—when they finally kissed—there was a collective gasp of relief in the audience.

Nashef: That's so cute! I love it.

Guillén: Is that restraint subcultural? Are young Lebanese American men and women compelled to that kind of restraint?

Nashef: Yes. Young Arab women are conflicted. I know I was. There are a lot of taboos that we deal with all the time. For me, they're being under the counter represents a couple of different things. If you look at them, they're so close, right? But they're also separated by this little piece of wood. Yet they're so intimate and sharing all these things.

Guillén: In the realm of such restraint, her dropping her scarf becomes provocative.

Nashef: As is the passing of the Skittles, and the passing of her phone. For me, these moments serve a metaphor of Arab American relationships that I was always witnessing or having myself where you're not supposed to touch each other. A lot of times in our communities we're supposed to know each other, but we're not supposed to date each other. We're just supposed to get engaged. He's supposed to come over with his family and ask for my hand. It's a culture of permission. That's what getting engaged is all about, really. Let's get engaged so we can actually be boyfriend and girlfriend in public in front of our parents and friends and then everything is okay; but, before that, we're not supposed to touch each other. But how are we supposed to get married if we're not supposed to touch each other? It's something we both embrace and rebel against; but, even if you rebel against it, you grow up thinking that way so the taboo is still present.

Guillén: I've often said that the principle of revolution still binds you to whatever you're rebelling against because you're in orbit around it, revolving around it, even as you're revolting against it. Taboos exert a gravitational field, even when you resist them. Since you've commented on this aspect of Lebanese American culture, have you shown Detroit Unleaded to Lebanese American audiences? How will they respond?

Nashef: We showed the film in Dubai, which had a predominantly Arab crowd, and we're working day and night to secure a distribution deal so we can put the film in theaters in Detroit, and I can't wait because the Arab American / Lebanese American people who have seen it are absolutely in love with it. It's the first time they've really seen themselves on screen as young, hip, cool and sexy. If you notice, you don't know what religion the characters are at all. There's no mention of fucking 9/11. There's no politics. There's no apologizing for being Arab American. There's no explanation of who we are as Arab Americans. There isn't a didactic approach—"This is Islam. This is our culture."—there's none of that there. It's just a fun, character-driven narrative. For me that means so much.

I've been receiving emails from young Arab American women who have only seen the trailer and tell me, "I can't believe this movie exists." I know that when I was growing up, I never saw anyone that looked like me, or any family that looked like mine, or representation of any of the issues I was dealing with, and—if they were—the representations were completely racist. It was a twofold phenomenon: we were either completely missing or completely bombarded with negative and racist imagery. So where was everybody inbetween? My absolute "favorite" is the apologetic explanation for terrorist images. "No, no, no, we're perfect. We are pious and religious and perfect people." That's boring! Nobody's perfect.

Guillén: It bores me when Christians do that, let alone Muslims.

Nashef: Right? We don't always need to be reacting to this representation. If we actually ignore it and make our own stories, that's more powerful than saying, "No, that's not us."

Guillén: In other words, defining oneself by default. Do you think your film will come under fire for bravely asserting its own self-representation? Isn't the film a bit out of the subcultural safety zone?

Nashef: It's honestly hard to tell. So far I've just received great reactions, to the humor, and to the authenticity of the characters. The reactions I've heard from Arab couples coming up to me after the screenings in Toronto and at other film festivals is: "You nailed it. You nailed the dynamic." They can identify with it. Any fire I might receive might be from people who just aren't comfortable with the film's honesty, with how the film discusses dating, which is fine. They can have that opinion but at least the discussion is out there and people are talking about it.

Guillén: Talk to me about the character of Sami's mother. She wasn't as adversarial as Fadi but she drove me to distraction. If I would have been Sami and my mother was snooping around in my room throwing away my things, I would have been furious. Can you speak to how you developed her character arc so that she finally became independent enough to allow Sami to pursue his own life?

Nashef: Throughout my life I've dealt with issues of mourning. Within the Arab community, we have a cultural tradition where the older women—not so much the younger women—are in mourning forever if their husband dies. They'll never wear color anymore. They'll never date anybody. They'll just sit and wait to die, basically. I always found that so sad and such a waste of life. My relationship to death is different than that cultural norm. To me, she represented this cultural norm, which also has something to do with what other people are going to say if a widow rejoins life. That concern over what other people are going to say is a cage. It was her cage.

Guillén: She was in a cage as Sami was in a cage.

Nashef: Exactly.

Guillén: But why wouldn't she even allow herself to interact with her neighbors? Even when they're Arab American and asking her to come visit?

Nashef: It's a form of self-punishment. "I will not have a good time here. I will live in mourning. I will no longer have friends. I will no longer live life to the fullest." It's a form of survivor's guilt. You see that a lot in my culture and it's sad. I had this one Italian woman come up to me after a screening in Toronto and she said, "That was my mother for 20 years." Whether Christian or Muslim, it's a Mediterranean thing.

Guillén: What makes her shift attitude and achieve her arc?

Nashef: Knowing that she's not really alone. When Sami says to her, "No matter where I am, you're never going to be alone." First of all, just hearing that helps her.

Guillén: Was it because he finally let go? He had been playing into her survivor's guilt?

Nashef: Right. That's exactly it. It's almost as if Sami is enabling her by never confronting her about her survivor's guilt. He begins to confront her slowly by planting ideas in her head, like "You should try that dress on. No, I'm not going to let you throw out all your colorful clothes." By his gradually resisting, it helps them work together. She also realizes she has to let him go. She tells him, "You have your whole life ahead of you. You deserve to fly in this world." That's her way of telling him that she doesn't want to weigh him down anymore. She wants him to be free. She doesn't want him to feel guilt-ridden over her and be forced to live with her and stay with her.

Guillén: It was an interesting shift in consciousness because, until then, she had been laying quite a few guilt trips on him. She started out accusing him of leaving her alone, but then she somewhat abruptly switched gears and accepted his statement that she was not alone. Her husband had already told her that she needed to let him fly, but she had to come to her own acceptance of letting him fly.

Nashef: Right.

Guillén: And in terms of narrative detail, I remain curious as to how Sami knew where to find Naj?

Nashef: I'll admit that there was a little bit of a breakdown in the narrative at that point and in its execution. In trying to establish an ending there were certain things I wanted to achieve. I wanted them to leave together. I didn't want anybody to know where she went or where they were going together. It was her secret and I didn't want to tell the audience her secret. There's a kind of superstition in my culture that—if you tell someone something secret—they'll potentially put a curse on you.

Guillén: Ah, the evil eye?

Nashef: You'll often hear people say, "If you're pregnant, don't say anything, because they'll curse you." I've always found that superstition interesting because, for me, superstition always stems from some real place.

Guillén: And as I understand it, the evil eye is based on envy and jealousy, right? So the way I read that "secret" was that—if you are in a subculture where your individuality is repressed and what people think matters—then that is the evil eye. You're collectively stalled in your individual momentum. It holds true in Latino communities as well. Gossip can tether you. I was talking to a Japanese American friend of mine once where we realized both our mothers did the same thing: they "enemy" people. My Mom can go into a room full of strangers and she'll turn to me and say, "That person doesn't like me." And I'll say, "Mom, you haven't even met that person. You don't know if they like you or not." "Oh no," she'll argue, "I know they don't like me."

Nashef: That's hilarious!!

Guillén: So, as an audience member, I have to be content that this is Naj and Sami's romantic secret that I'm not privy to?

Nashef: Yeah. We had an option to keep shooting to explain things more, but I just wanted to end it. I knew the audience would get it. I left it up to their imagination.

Guillén: Even without exactly knowing what's going on, the result is still satisfying.

Nashef: Yeah. But I do get that question a lot. Perhaps if I did it over again, I might elaborate a little bit more. There were a couple of options for the ending, but this is the one we went with.

Guillén: I did love the final image of the gas pump and of the car driving away and then turning around and driving off in the other direction.

Nashef: It's sweet, right?

Guillén: Finally, let's talk about your Toronto experience. I consider it a pretty remarkable feat that you got into TIFF with your first feature.

Nashef: Thank you.

Guillén: Let alone that you received an award and critical accolades. Can you talk a bit about how you got into TIFF and why you elected not to traffic the film first in, let's say, the Arab American film festival circuit?

Nashef: I want as wide a distribution as possible. Detroit Unleaded was inspired by my community; but, it was made for everybody. The older I get and the more experience I get, I find it more and more difficult to put myself in a box of who I am. I don't want to put this film in any kind of a box. I wanted it to have a world-class international premiere so that it would have the exposure it deserved.

Guillén: How did you negotiate getting that international premiere?

Nashef: Honestly, it was based on the quality of the film. I went through the IFP Labs in New York. They're wonderful. They take films in post-production. They sign your rough cut and they mentor you through the completion of your film and then through the premiere. They started hooking me up with film programmers and all of that; but, Jane Schoettel at Toronto was actually the one who reached out to me. She had heard about the film through IFP and she thought it might be a good fit for TIFF. The first year she reached out was in 2011, but the film wasn't done yet. In 2012, I wrote her to advise that the film was near completion and I could show her a new film. We had made a couple of reshoots by that point to make the film better. Our post-production took a year and a half. We had two or three reshoots and the script changed a lot. We just kept making it better and always sending it out and consulting, "How can I make this better?"

Once we got it up to this level, that's when Jane said, "I think you did it. You achieved what you were trying to achieve last year." So it was a matter of my understanding that the film was not done, trusting my gut intuition, and knowing it needed further cuts. I think young filmmakers often make the mistake of rushing through post-production because they just want to get the film out there. I had already been working on Detroit Unleaded for a year so patience was no longer an issue with me. I didn't care. I didn't want to put it out prematurely. I can see now that—if I had put it out even a month before—it would not have been the same film. Every single step we took was to raise the quality of the film.

Guillén: How did you negotiate financing the film?

Nashef: Four private investors in Michigan. It was a low-budget film so people who were the closest around me watched me trying to raise the money. Then my family, the four investors, came to me and said, "All right, we have this amount"—which was a fraction of what I was going for—and, at first, I was like, "I can't make a film for this amount" and then I thought, "Yes, you can. You can do it." So I took that first chunk of money that my family invested in the film and—as soon as that came in—another chunk came in, and then I called on my community. I started pulling in favors. I found my DP Keir Yee who invested his time and his equipment because he loved the script so much. He was a well-known commercial DP in Detroit and this was his first feature film. He also became a co-producer because he put in so much in-kind support.

Honestly, it was the script that sold the film. People came down on their rates. People donated all kinds of stuff. We had tons of free food. It was a 23-day shoot and restaurants around us were thrilled to support us because it was rare that someone in Detroit was making a film and it was a positive portrayal. All the products in the gas station were donated.

Guillén: Your community support is good to hear because Detroit has a bad rap. Almost everything I hear about Detroit is that it's in dissolution.

Nashef: But this wasn't like that. It wasn't sugar-coated, and even if our environment is delapidated and broken down in all these ways, Detroiters are not; they have such a strong spirit. I wanted to capture that positive spirit in the film.

Guillén: Rola, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

Nashef: Thank you for all your support.

RETURN TO GREY GARDENS—The Evening Class Interview With Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ)

I think I read on Wikipedia or some other reliable source that Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ) is genetically inclined to reappropriate films for his (her) own purposes. "Nothing is sacred," the infamous drag star impresario is rumored to have said. Specifically not the Maysles Brothers' 1975 documentary Grey Gardens, which depicts the everyday lives of two reclusive socialites, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (1895–1977), known as "Big Edie", and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (1917–2002), known as "Little Edie", who lived at Grey Gardens, a decrepit mansion at 3 West End Road in the wealthy Georgica Pond neighborhood of East Hampton, New York.

The narrative thrust of two women living together for decades with limited funds in increasing squalor and isolation is just the kind of tale that no one—not even the discriminating Peaches Christ—can leave alone. It's the perfect tale to divert our attentions from the Tea Party takeover of the U.S. government. The Maysles documentary was adapted into an Emmy®-winning HBO film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore; two plays—Little Edie & The Marble Faun by David Lally and A Few Small Repairs by David Robson; plus a Broadway musical. But hang onto your head scarves, bitches, because Peaches Christ has licked her finger, stuck it in the air, and declared it's Monsoon season! Or maybe she exposed her tits, I'm not quite sure, but one way or the other she's gotten herself banned from Facebook. Honestly, Peaches! On the very week that you need to ramp up? Really?

Jinkx Monsoon, who has been milking the Grey Gardens schtick for decades, dons her revolutionary costume again as she reprises her now-famous Little Edie routine in the upcoming stage show Return to Grey Gardens. In this Peaches Christ adaptation, the S-T-A-U-N-C-H queen is living in a dilapidated theater with her crazed drag mother. Paired with a screening of the original Grey Gardens, the production comes to San Francisco's legendary Castro Theater on October 12—just in time for a little pre-Halloween thrill. Sharing the stage with Jinkx and Peaches is everybody's favorite, Mink Stole. Post-show, Mink will be signing copies of her new CD Do Re Mink; that is, Peaches quips, "If Jinkx is awake."

My thanks to Joshua for taking time to meet me at a noisy greasy spoon during my last visit to San Francisco to talk about this weekend's main event.

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Michael Guillén: I'm always curious how you and your team decide which film to adapt for your stage shows? Why Grey Gardens?

Joshua Grannell: When we made the leap from the Bridge Theater to the Castro Theater a few years back, we re-imagined a lot of our "signature" shows like Showgirls, Purple Rain and Mommie Dearest. That whole first year was spent re-creating shows we had done on a much smaller scale on a big scale to see how it would go. Then, in these last two years, I'm surprised by the fact that we've been doing all new productions (with the exception of Showgirls). Honestly, it's refreshing and exciting for me because I was worried that we weren't going to be able to do that. I worried that new projects weren't going to be able to fill the house at the Castro. It's so expensive for me to mount a show there that I have to have minimum attendance just to break even. The Castro Theater—I don't think this is any secret—rents for $6,000.00 for a Saturday. The film rental is always expensive. It's often a big chunk percent of my ticket price. Unlike any other event promoter, I put on giant productions. The queens get paid. The crew gets paid. We rent outside lighting and sound and that's all before marketing, the cost of graphic design, and advertising.

Guillén: I haven't talked to anyone who hasn't acknowledged how professional your stage shows are.

Grannell: I'm glad everyone thinks that. Sometimes I think, "How do I make money doing this?"

Guillén: Wait a minute, I thought you were in it for the fame and the glamour?

Grannell: I used to be in the early days. [Laughs.] Obviously, getting to make a living doing something I love is still a total joy; but, as the years go on, you start to think about what you're going to do to sustain a living. It's been great. It's been really really good. There have been shows that have not paid off where I've lost money; but, the good side is that—from a business point of view—we're doing a good job. These shows and new events and new guests and new ideas are proving themselves more often than not to be a viable business plan for me, which is really exciting.

So we've been experimenting with a lot with movies that have been on a list and Grey Gardens has certainly been on that list for years. But I had certain reluctances. You remember Midnight Mass in its early days? It was a debaucherous midnight free-for-all. Certainly, I encouraged that, created that, and celebrated it with such things as drag queen roller derby. We turned a blind eye to the amount of drunkeness. So there were movies for me that were bona fide cult classics, but I was maybe afraid of my own audience's interpretation of why I was screening them. I never wanted to screen something where I felt like the audience might laugh at the movie in a way that I wasn't comfortable with. Since we had set up this sort of debaucherous Showgirls-type environment, Grey Gardens for me was almost too precious. I loved the two Edies so much, I loved the movie so much, and I've watched it so many times, that I would have been heartbroken if I ever felt that any single person wasn't getting the spirit with which we were celebrating these two women.

So it took a certain number of years for me to approach Grey Gardens as a viable project. Moving to the Castro Theatre and doing shows at 3:00 and 8:00, instead of midnight, and having become an older, more established performer, has made me better able to direct the spirit with which we present things. I was nervous to present Paris Is Burning earlier this year, but we did that and it went well. I don't know if everybody was on board for our pre-show because we attempted to authentically re-create a ball with actual ball participants—both on the judges' side and on the contestants' side—and so in the spirit of a ball, it was way too long. It was vicious. [Laughs.] The judges weren't afraid to turn against the audience. Things that people at a Peaches show are not used to. So I did get some feedback but I was like, "Well, I promised to give you a ball and I gave you a ball, so...." But it went well. The things that I was worried about were not an issue. We were celebrating those subjects and their legacy and obviously all of the significant players are no longer with us so there wasn't an option to bring one of the queens in. We had the blessing of Jennie Livingston. Jennie and I corresponded a lot before the event. I really felt that we did it correctly.

A bit earlier than that event, I met with Jinkx Monsoon over at Stacks, we had lunch, and it was the same afternoon that her Little Edie episode on RuPaul's Drag Race was airing. It hadn't aired yet when we got together to talk, but I had seen the commercials and I could tell from the marketing that she was going to do well. They were really featuring her as Little Edie in the build-up to the next episode. Jinkx just happened to be in town to do a viewing party at one of the Castro gay bars and so we had lunch and she was very generous and sweet and actually showed me pictures of me and her when I had gone to Seattle in past years. We, of course, had corresponded via email—she could quote All About Evil, all of it—and it was a mutual lovefest. I told her, "I love you on Drag Race, I love what you're bringing, and I think you're one of us for sure, and I would love it if maybe you and I could do an event together."

Whenever I had taken Peaches to Seattle, Jinkx would come to the shows; but, we had never performed together. We did a Trannyshack event together in Seattle, so we had met before, but we didn't really know each other very well. So when she came to town, we had a three-hour lunch. We talked and talked and talked. Finally, I said, "You know, I've seen the commercials for the Drag Race episode airing tonight and I've been wanting to do Grey Gardens and certain things have stalled me over the years, like the Drew Barrymore project and then the musical; but, now that I feel that they've done their thing, if you're up to it, let's do it!" Jinkx was very excited about the idea, giddy, and jumped on board, and added, "Wait until you see the episode tonight! I think you'll be even more excited." I said, "Oh, do you win?" But, of course, she couldn't tell me, but she said, "I think you'll be pleased." The episode was even better than I could have imagined because one of the things that came out in the episode was how many of the other queens weren't familiar with Grey Gardens and were looking at Jinkx like, "What are you doing? You're crazy. You're performing as this person that nobody knows." What was great was that the cool, cultured gay response was, "Shame on those queens for not knowing who Little Edie is."

Guillén: You say Grey Gardens has been on your list for a long time, and you tell me this reaction of the queens to Jinkx on Drag Race, do you have concerns that your audience will even remember Grey Gardens?

Grannell: Well, I think Grey Gardens is in the pop culture zeitgeist, but I don't know how many younger people have actually seen or studied the Maysles Brothers film so I told Jinkx, "Let's screen the original documentary and do a drag pre-show that's very much us. We're not going to do the Drew Barrymore / Jessica Lange thing"—which was actually very well done, I was a fan, and though I haven't seen the musical, Jinkx was a fan of the musical. So what was great was that we didn't dislike these things that had previously come out based on the documentary, but we agreed to do our own thing. I guess I felt it was a risk to some degree to commit to doing it, moreso than The Craft with Sharon Needles. I knew that was going to do well. When I saw The Craft back in the '90s in a theater here in San Francisco, we were already doing Midnight Mass, and I was like, "Oh, I'll do that someday. Give it time." Me and Martiny talked about it. Whereas with Grey Gardens, I'm still not sure three weeks out how it's all going to go; but, the enthusiasm for our production is there.

Guillén: Gauging from your Facebook event page, you already have quite a following committed to coming.

Grannell: We've already sold over 1,000 tickets. We've even added a second show. So I'm not as worried as I was initially. The good news is I'm not freaking out the way I normally would be if it was three weeks away and we had only sold 100 tickets. We had to add a second show because our VIP seats sold out almost immediately for the 8:00 show.

Guillén: So you don't normally screen documentaries?

Grannell: Well, we did Paris Is Burning. And, actually, Truth Or Dare was our first documentary many years ago. I can't think of any others.

Guillén: So give me a glimpse of your process and how you develop a show like this. You and Jinkx got together and decided to do it, then what? Did you have follow-up pow wow sessions where you bantered around ideas? Did you come up with a script?

Grannell: No, usually I first decide on the style of the show. If an iconic celebrity is involved who I want to interview or get inside their head then I use a model—much like I do for SF Sketchfest—of bringing someone, like Cloris Leachman, and show a movie of her's; but, the show is more of a tribute to her with a sit-down interview where the show is about me and that person.

Guillén: Idol worship.

Grannell: Exactly! Idol worship is what I always call it. Then, lately I've been having so much fun—even though it's way more expensive and lots of work—doing giant sketch comedy parodies where we appropriate the narrative through the lens of our own characters. That's what I've been really inspired by lately. So we're not doing what Heklina and the girls have done with Golden Girls or Sex in the City where they do a verbatim re-creation of an existing script, which is very funny and its own theatrical device. I, instead, live with the movie for a while, watch the movie over and over again, and adjust it to the world of our characters. For example, with The Craft it was very much Sharon Needles and Honey and Alaska as these existing witches, but they were also very much themselves: drag queen witches who had all been on Drag Race and were evil and bitchy. A kind of mash-up with Peaches as the new girl moving to L.A. to become one of them. So convincing was my announcement that I was moving to L.A. that people were devastated and emailing me and I had to assure them, "No, that was all part of the show. I'm not moving to L.A. I'm here." The other day I was at the Castro and someone was looking at the poster for Grey Gardens and another woman said, "I thought Peaches had moved to L.A.!"

Guillén: There you go starting rumors about yourself again! Now, you'll be doing the Grey Gardens show in Seattle as well the following week. What's involved with that? With transferring a show?

Grannell: A lot of times when I do out-of-town events, it's essentially a watered-down version of what we do in San Francisco, in the sense that it's maybe me in costume working with a local group. With All About Evil, we tried harder to re-create the experience everywhere we went. In Seattle, only once did we actually move our show, about eight or nine years ago when we brought Purple Rain up there; but, it was so hard and so much work that, since then for the next 10 shows I've done up there, it's been me on an airplane re-creating the show with a number or maybe an Idol Worship show, bringing in Mink Stole or whoever, which has been fabulous. But because Jinkx's home town is Seattle, and there was a less-than-subtle, almost angry, outcry from Seattle that this event was happening only in San Francisco, my good friend Jason Ford who runs Seattle's queer film festival asked me, "What would it take to bring it to Seattle?" I said, "For a show like this that's so high-profile and generating so much excitement, it's going to take more than just putting Jinkx and I on stage before the film. Let's move the show." So we have our crew renting a truck driving all the props and costumes up to Seattle; everything's being transported. The chorus will be re-cast with local queens. I mean, imagine the expense that would be involved in trying to fly the local cast up there? We have four raccoons, four cats, to flesh this out into a Peaches show. It couldn't be a two-woman show for an hour. We needed it to have my silly drag sensibility thrown into the mix. Yeah, there's a talking raccoon.

Guillén: You have a silly sensibility?!!

Grannell: I do. Believe it or not!

Guillén: Will Mink also participate in the Seattle show?

Grannell: Sadly, no. That's a bummer.

Guillén: Other than for the fact that she loves working with you, what's the rationale for casting her in this production?

Grannell: Yeah, because it's random! And I know it's random. I'll be really honest. I was home in Maryland in June, spending a lot of time with Mink in Baltimore, and she and my mom and I went shopping and we were talking about how much fun we had on the All About Evil tour. Her new CD Do Re Mink has just come out, and I love it, it's fabulous, so I said, "You should come out to San Francisco and do a concert. Let's do it together." But, again, the reality of bringing her band and doing a concert correctly would be so much work. We may do that someday, but that's a different project. Then I said, "Well, you know Mink, any time that you're available and I'm putting on a show, I will find a place for you." That was basically it. So she said, "Okay." I told her, "When I get home, I'm going to send you the dates for my upcoming shows for the rest of the year." I emailed her the dates. The only one that worked out with her schedule was Grey Gardens, because she's doing a Tennessee Williams festival in November for this show she's getting rave reviews for. I think it premiered in Provincetown and now it's going to do a run in New York. Between rehearsals and her other show, the only date that worked was Grey Gardens. So I said, "Okay, we'll figure it out."

When I sat down to do the rough writing of the pre-show, I actually knew I wanted Mink to be in it and it's too bad you're not going to see the show because I think we make it work. Ladybear plays Jackie O in the pre-show. I mean, we take liberties! [Laughs.] But without giving too much away, the conceit of our Return to Grey Gardens is that it's set 40 years into the future. Jinkx came to San Francisco on October 12, 2013 in the middle of doing her sold-out run in New York City—which is what she's going through now; her vaudevillian show has gotten rave reviews and has been extended and extended and keeps selling out—but we've set it up so that our event was already on the books so we have to pull her out of New York so she can come do Grey Gardens in San Francisco, and the conceit is that Peaches won't let her leave for 40 years. They're performing the same show in the Castro Theatre, which has gotten completely run-down because no other movies have screened there, Peaches is this megalomaniac who has insisted that they keep doing this show, and so that's where the show picks up: an empty auditorium, no audience, and we're up on stage going through the motions. Mink plays herself. There's a big birthday party scene where Mink is there, awkwardly, but it's actually part of an intervention. Of course, with this narrative set-up, we won't skip any of the moments. Jinkx will still present the costume of the day. There's a Jerry Torre, who just happens to be openly gay and living in the Castro. It'll be fun!