Beyond the Multiplex

"Autumn": A French gangster film, made by an American in a Paris that never existed
Here's what the young American director Ra'up McGee, who has previously made three documentaries, tried to sell a series of producers, both in the United States and France: For his first narrative feature, he wanted to make a classic film noir, pretty much in the style of the early French New Wave. He would shoot in Paris, in French, with French actors and crew. Even though he didn't speak French and, to repeat myself, had never made a narrative feature film of any kind.

Surprise of surprises, nobody wanted to produce this movie. I wouldn't have either; to say that the project is foolhardy, arrogant and almost unbelievably pretentious feels like understating the case. OK, you know there's a punch line coming: McGee went ahead and made the movie himself, on his own dime or his own centime or whatever. He recruited a shockingly good French cast, including Laurent Lucas (of "With a Friend Like Harry...") and Irène Jacob (of "The Double Life of Véronique") as his central doomed couple, trying to escape the Parisian underworld with a mysterious stolen suitcase.

And after he had finished "Autumn," he got it into the 2004 Toronto Film Festival, one of the big international showcases for ambitious movies. And then ... well, then, nobody wanted to distribute it. McGee has been toting "Autumn" around the world for the past year and a half, finding no takers, and finally he's self-distributing it through Landmark Theatres' Truly Indie program, which gives outsider filmmakers a pay-as-you-go crack at national or regional distribution.

OK, now you know there's another punch line coming: "Autumn" is actually pretty damn good. It's a defiantly odd work, a movie-movie set more in the crime-film Paris of Jean-Pierre Melville or Jacques Becker or early Godard than in the real 21st century city. This fictional city is a haunted, romantic universe, where the guys are rugged, wear long coats and smoke Gauloises, and the girls put up with being slapped around (until they shoot you in the back). If that sounds like your cup of bitter, nicotine-scented absinthe, don't miss it.

Erin Harvey's cinematography is sensational; somehow his images split the difference between the mythical Paris that McGee's script tries to capture and the real one. Lucas and Jacob are great as the central guy-and-doll, deeply in love but also destined to betray each other. Veteran French actor Michel Aumont is even better as a sinister crime boss, and Dinara Droukarova nearly steals the whole picture as a gamine, ballerina-esque and utterly ruthless hit woman. No reasonable person would ever have told McGee this movie was a good idea, but now that it exists, in all its film-geek gravity and majesty, I'm grateful he was so bullheaded. I don't know if the Truly Indie model can really turn an off-the-radar picture like this into a hit, but we're about to find out.

"Autumn" opens June 9 at the Quad Cinema in New York and the Westside Pavillion in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.

"Crossing the Bridge": From rock to rap to a louche chanteuse and the Elvis of Turkish music, all in one city (and on two continents)
Turkey is much on the minds of Europeans lately, as the source of many immigrants, the first majority-Muslim nation to seek admission to the European Union, and the literal gateway to Asia and the Islamic/Arab worlds. In that context, Fatih Akim's film "Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul" comes as a joyous revelation. Akim follows Alexander Hacke, bass player in the veteran German avant-rock band Einstürzende Neubaten, on his explorations of the Turkish city's many musical subcultures, and finds an almost unbelievably vibrant array of East-West hybrids.

At first, Hacke gravitates toward Istanbul's underground rock scene, where bands like the Replikas, Duman and Baba Zula combine post-grunge punk (or psychedelia, or noisy art-metal) with distinctive local flavors. But the journey of "Crossing the Bridge" is much longer and more hallucinatory than that. Hacke convinces Orhan Gencebay, an Elvis-like figure in Turkish pop who never plays in public, to perform an "unplugged" set for Akim's camera.

We meet an English-speaking Canadian woman who has apparently become one of Turkey's leading singers of traditional music. We hear Kurdish and Romany (i.e., Gypsy) music, both formerly banned by the nationalist government. We see performances by 86-year-old Müzeyyen Senar, a bawdy chanteuse in a blue beaded gown (and now an almost-forgotten legend) and by Sezen Aksu, Turkey's greatest female pop singer -- somewhere between Edith Piaf and Celine Dion, it seems -- who's revered by traditionalists and hip-hop fans alike.

On that front, Hacke's strangest and most endearing voyage is to the "East Coast" of Istanbul, on the Asian side of the Bosporus, where he finds the city's working-class rap subculture. Some of these kids are idiots trying to perform gangsta rap in pseudo-black English, but others are trying, in total sincerity, to create a politically conscious music that will reflect both the modern reality of their lives and the traditional, family-bound culture behind them. Whatever you think you know about Turkey, "Crossing the Bridge" will change your mind. With a dynamite album of music from the film in simultaneous release, I smell a "Buena Vista"-style crossover hit.

"Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul" opens June 9 at the Angelika Film Center in New York, June 16 in Chicago, June 30 in Los Angeles and Washington, July 14 in San Francisco, July 28 in Seattle and Aug. 4 in Denver and Portland, Ore., with other cities to follow.

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