Thompson on Hollywood

On day nine of the San Francisco International Film Festival, Meredith Brody starts small and winds up enthralled by the enduring allure of Terence Stamp. Odd and thrilling to watch a tiny movie, shot by a two-person crew, about nearly-invisible lives and occupations, on the biggest screen in the Kabuki: one of the treats of a festival. The movie is Foreign Parts, by Véréna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki. For the first time in these chronicles, I’m tempted to quote directly from the SFIFF catalogue : “Anthropological in scope, sensuous in detail, and emotionally resonant throughout…,” with which I can only concur. The filmmaking pair, associates of the Harvard University Sensory Ethnography Lab, insinuated themselves into the daily life of a grubby enclave of car repair and salvage shops in the Willets Point neighborhood of Queens, New York. It’s the kind of grungy, noisy, uncomfortable place –located directly under a flight path, and with third-world-caliber streets with potholes that seem constantly full of water -- that non-residents visit only when necessary, and for as brief a time as possible. Gradually we get to meet a few of the neighborhood residents and workers, and learn that massive redevelopment plans (symbolized by the new Mets stadium looming over the auto repair shacks, close enough to touch and yet somehow untouchable) threaten the Point. It’s a visual dead end, both lower and upper case, in the sense of the play Dead End, in which the richest and the poorest denizens of a city co-exist in uneasy proximity.