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by Francesca McCaffery

A production of VICE and Grolsch Film Works, The Fourth Dimension is a compilation of three different short films (thirty minutes each) directed by Harmony Korine, Alexey Fedorchenko and newcomer Jan Kwiecinski, respectively. VICE’s Eddy Moretti, who really wanted to work with Korine, developed a ‘creative brief’ and began emailing him back and fourth with ideas. Grolsch Film Works held an international contest, and Fedorchenko and Kwiecinski were chosen. No director knew what the other director was doing, which makes it quite interesting for everyone, including us, the audience.

Korine’s short starts out with a pony-tailed Val Kilmer playing a hilarious, New Age-y self-motivational speaker in the segment “The Lotus Community Workshop.” Kilmer rides around town on his tiny white BMX, with his corn-rowed gal pal Rachel (Rachel Korine) pedaling right alongside him. Did I mention that his character is also named ‘Val Kilmer?’ He delivers his sermons of sorts at an arcade-slash-roller rink to a throng of locals who really need his help, and bad. These scenes, with Kilmer inciting the crowd to chant “Awe-some, Sec-rets!” and more, are some of the most entertaining moments, truly, of the entire film. As usual, Korine has the breathtaking ability to take the audience straight past their comfort zone, and into an America that is, really, never shown onscreen. (Or at least, never quite accurately.) His hard-luck cases are not Oscar winning actors hamming it up, or the owners of meth labs (well, at least I hope not!) or any of the other two hundred and three thousand stereotypes we have all seen before on film. His people are real. They are the ones who maybe can’t get with the program or maybe, never even knew there was one, never learning that they too are allowed a place at the table. There is a great humanity at work here, and Kilmer, with his strange sweetness and zany lovability, is the perfect complement to this humanity. It’s as if, in works like this one, and past films like Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, Korine seems to have been put here to remind the ones lucky enough to have choices and privileges and aspirations that they (we?) even in this great country, are still, unfortunately, very much the minority.

Alexey Fedorchenko, who wowed the Venice Film Festival in 2010 with Silent Souls, offers the most formal and literal take on the fourth dimension in “Chronoeye,” and it’s Russian and heart-breaking and lovely all at once. A scientist lives in a concrete slab of a building, toying with his invention that only allows to go back in time to the same moments, over and over again, and always from the same point of view. A witty, melancholic commentary on memory, love and loss, Darya Ekasmova is also wonderful here, playing the game upstairs neighbor to a grieving, obsessed ‘time-traveler.’

Jan Kwiecinski’s segment, “Fawns,” is the weakest work of the three, although still quite beautiful to watch, although the visuals seem a bit derivative of current, punkish underground fashion editorials. Four kids in their early twenties wander empty neighborhood streets, recently evacuated, waiting for the end of the world to approach in the guise of an impending flood. The performances are all pretty decent, but there seems to be little at work in terms of genuine depth.

All in all, even for Korine’s segment especially, The Fourth Dimension is one of the greatest surprises at this year’s 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. Find listings and show times here.

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by Francesca McCaffery

Goodbye, First Love, the beautiful, new film by Mia Hansen-Love (Father of My Children) tells the tale of two young lovers, Camille (Lola Creton) and Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), and their hard serious and young, first romance. Sullivan is a charismatic, sweet and sensual free spirit, darting in and out of Camille’s life, although he appears to completely adore her when they are together. Camille is very earnest and quite dramatic about her intense, romantic feelings towards him. The film then explores how Camille manages to get over this great young love, truly find herself, and create a definitive, singular life for herself. The film is so simple, so dazzling in this observation, that you feel almost anyone could relate to the blistering feeling of first love. It feels like one’s very own memory of relationships past writ large onscreen. The director captures this feeling of living memory with superb brilliance and care- the painstaking bittersweet feeling of knowing these moments will not last forever, but having the knowledge you will never, ever forget them. She manages to infuse the two young actor’s performances with both innocence and a passion that seems perfectly true and heart-breaking. When Sullivan goes off traveling to South America, feeling a bit smothered by the weight of Camille’s great love for him, Creton, with her sensually blank face filled with despair and longing both, makes us feel every second of this separation.

And, as first loves often drag out, in consciousness or real life, Hansen-Love jumps to Camille in architecture school years later as a young student, still not connecting with a new love, still pretty sad and longing for Sullivan.

The filmmaker somehow conveys Camille in the process of showing up for hew own life, without those cloying “blossoming” scenes of harried montage seen in so many lesser films, but through the character’s own effort, will and the passage of time. Camille does, in fact, begin to heal, and starts an affair with sexy, older professor Lorenz (cool guy Magne- Håvard Brekkeand) Camille also starts building a genuine, solid life for herself. Her new love interest helps ease this transition- but Camille is the one living through and getting past it. On her own.

Especially as a woman, I simply have to say, I really loved this film. One’s interior life is filled with these moments all the time- longing and fulfillment, frustration and fascination. Hanson-Love weaves these often painful moments together, which quickly turn into years, (as in life) in a way that is truly cinematic, in the best sense. Threads of memory, an old hat a lover gave you, the light glancing off a river where you once swam with him…Yes, we can survive anything, Hansen-Love seems to be telling us. Even the end of love.

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by Francesca McCaffery

Juliette Binoche stars in Elles, a film that is strangely more sensual than sexual, considering one of its serious subject matters: Student prostitution in Paris. In Elles, (directed by Małgorzata Szumowska) Binoche plays an extraordinarily well-heeled journalist (one of her subjects even asks if her gorgeous shoes are “expensive”) for Elle Magazine. She is interviewing young female college students who become escorts to pay for their tuition and rent. Binoche’s character Anne is the married mother of two- one elegantly scruffy teenage boy, and a younger one of about nine. Her husband seems caring yet distracted, loving and slightly mystified, as does she, as they go through their lives, figuring out what to purchase next, dealing with their pot-smoking son, and trying to keep things running as smoothly as possible.

As she goes over her notes and recordings for the article, which is due on deadline the  next day, we see her move through her scheduled day, visiting her sick father, grocery shopping, and preparing a dinner for her husband’s boss and wife for that same evening. These scenes are intercut with the recounting of the increasingly sexual and sometimes disturbing images of the two different young women with their various johns, and the relationships she develops with each of them as she is interviewing them. Alicja (Polish actress Joanna Kulig in a searing performance) and Charlotte (the lovely Anaïs Demoustier) also seem strangely detached from what they are doing- until for Charlotte their actions finally become (very) painfully obvious. Binoche has a similar realization, yet the film physically carries us through this day with such sensual ease, such a pleasure in the unfolding, that is a visual joy to watch. The camerawork recalls early Adrian Lynne films, who shot interiors of Manhattan apartments- whether in Soho or the Upper West side, with a similar, gliding, lovingly observed sort of ease. Binoche, as usual, is perfect to watch, as well.

Yet, obviously, the film has nothing really to do or say about student prostitution- most of these girl’s “affairs” seem more like daring sexual adventures than actual tricks. But it’s interesting to see just how much it takes to sometimes jar Anne’s middle-class, pseudo “feminist” sensibility. The defining point this film has is the manner in which it conveys Anne’s dissatisfaction as something that is simply a part of one’s life to move through, rather than a point of no return, which is a refreshing take. But still, in the end, the film itself is too wan in parts to solidly build the idea around to make us really feel for, or care very deeply for Anne’s “plight.”

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