“Tragedy,” Arthur Schopenhauer noted, is the “awakening of the knowledge that the world . . . can afford us no true pleasure, and consequently is not worthy of an attachment.”
Mhmmm. But so, how did the “pessimistic” German philosopher survive such a conclusion? “I’m an irreverent person. There are few things in life that I don’t like to mock, and there are few people I won’t eventually start to wind up. I enjoy laughing at serious things and being serious about ridiculous things.”
That might just be the perfect motto for Wes Anderson and his recently released The Phoenician Scheme. Brilliantly visual and intermittently entertaining, the timely comic romp that decimates the rich, the powerful, the religious, and the self-involved certainly seems to embrace Schopenhauerism.
As do many of the offerings of this past year’s Tribeca Film Fest.
Lilian T. Mehrel’s dramedy, Honeyjoon, also has a doleful essence tinged with frivolity. Lela (the superb Amira Casar), with her daughter June (Ayden Mayeri), has flown to the Azores, a favorite locale of her late husband. Within a few days, the pair, on the first anniversary of his death, plan to honor him by throwing a clipping of his hair into the sea.
As Lela, a therapist by trade, notes: “He loved life so much. Always with a cappuccino under the sun. But life betrayed him. His body betrayed him.”
However, this trip for Poppa is not uniting the two mourners as expected. In the States, Mom’s stationed on the East Coast while June’s escaped to the West. The duo seldom interact. Could June possibly be thinking the wrong parent died? Lela wonders aloud.
Of course not. All June wants is to have a good time and meet a guy or two, which might be difficult to accomplish since the hotel they’ve booked into is a mainstay for horny honeymooners. Result: no double beds and no single men except for the staff. Yes, she and her oft-bloated mom are delegated to one mattress.
A good time? How will that even be possible?
For the Persian-Kurdish Lela, who years ago escaped from the tyranny of Iran and is still mourning the loss of her country, joy is not expected. Constantly checking her phone for news, especially for any mention of Mansa Hina Amini, who was murdered by the “morality” police for not wearing a hijab. Her diligence is rewarded in an unwanted manner: a group of Iranian women have just been arrested for dancing in Amini’s memory, diminishing Lela’s hope even further that she could one day return to her birthplace.
“Can we not have a good day?” the consistently scantily clad June pouts. Please note this clever young woman turned her back on a medical career because she found hospitals too sad. As for learning Farsi to connect with her roots, forget it. Tsk. Tsk.
What follows is a wry tale of mother and daughter clashing and melding and loving each other amidst private masturbatory gropings, gaseous attacks, flirting, and hiking. There’s also their bonding with the affable tour guide João (José Condessa), who might be the wisest of the threesome. At least he is when asked about happiness by a despondent June. He, a surfer, responds, “Nobody’s happy all the time. Happiness comes in waves, in little moments, but it’s not forever, even more reason to ride the wave when it comes.”
The two heroines of Josalynn Smith’s debut feature Ride or Die, woefully, don’t have much of a wave to ride. Though if you edit out the opening minute of the film, what you have for quite a while is a poignant, interracial lesbian love story that takes place in the highly racist state of Missouri. According to my AI search results, Missouri has “the second-highest number of racial terror lynchings outside of the South.” That I assume is a statistic from the past, although around every corner of the state, at least as depicted here, a bigot proudly stands.
Driving past all these Archie Bunkers is Paula (Briana Middleton), heading to her hometown after getting her degree in filmmaking in New York. Her next hoped-for achievement is a career as a documentarian in L.A.
Stopping at a thrift store, she realizes her old high-school crush Sloane (Stella Everett) is working the cash register. The renewed sexual attraction is immediate. So immediate and intense that Sloane refuses to charge Paula for her purchase, not knowing her boss is standing nearby. She gets fired, jumps into Paula’s car, and eventually initiates a make-out session.
Now these are two beautiful, highly talented actresses sensuously embodying the characters here. In fact, casting director Lois Drabkin has brought together a uniformly impressive group of thespians for this entire project. However, Everett and Middleton are so fine you don’t want the film to become what it does become. Was the gun, the knife, and the punch-out necessary? Why go all-Tarantino on us?
And why can’t Paula realize that the quite illiterate, hard-drug abusing, calamity-inducing young woman she fetishes is dangerous to be with outside of a thrift store and off the mattress? This love object can’t even sit through a screening of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. I mean, we all have harbored desires for the hot-looking bozo with a troubled past, present, and future. I know. I’ve been there. I’ve tried it. But give me flowers, not a stranger’s hemoglobin on my jeans.
Anyway, this is not a surprise because the very first minute of this Jamie-Foxx-produced feature, even before you can digest your first Milk Dud, displays a shot of Sloane with broken eyeglasses askew and blood a-dripping. What follows, we eventually learn, is a flashback that leads us back to that first moment.
A nominee for Best U.S. Narrative Feature at Tribeca, you just know everyone involved here will have a long career, collecting SAG benefits long after I’m dead. Especially Guinevere (Go Fish) Turner. Here, as a chatty bartender, she lets loose with a lesbian-go-mad-feline-revenge saga that’s worth the price of admission and a boycott by PETA.
But wouldn’t a love story be nicer?
(Both Honeyjoon and Ride or Die are not yet being distributed or streamed. Keep checking justwatch.com for their latest status.)