Beyond the Multiplex

Fast forward: Brooklyn before sunrise in "Quiet City"; revisiting Chile's left-wing martyr in "Salvador Allende."

Last week I discussed Joe Swanberg's intriguing mixed bag "Hannah Takes the Stairs," first among the so-called DIY or mumblecore films to get something resembling commercial distribution. This week, the IFC Center's retrospective ("The New Talkies: Generation DIY") shifts its focus to New York director Aaron Katz's supernally lovely second feature, "Quiet City." Katz is addressing the same generational cohort as Swanberg. Both pictures could be called romantic comedies and were made for very little money using (mostly) hand-held cameras. But form and budget don't dictate content, as it turns out, and they certainly do not dictate mood.

Where "Hannah Takes the Stairs" is talky, itchy, sleepless, self-regarding, "Quiet City" is a contemplative widescreen experience that views its landscape -- the borderline-industrial hipster neighborhoods of Brooklyn, N.Y. -- with painterly patience. Swanberg is usually right on top of his characters, seeking a Bergman-esque intensity, while Katz's characteristic gesture is more the Terrence Mallick long shot or the Edward Hopper midnight tableau. In place of the symmetrical but non-linear structure of "Hannah Takes the Stairs," Katz offers a classic lonely-hearts romance, not categorically different from many you've seen before.

Jamie (Erin Fisher) is just off the plane from Atlanta. She's something of a blithe spirit, and has apparently come to New York on very short notice, maybe on impulse. She can't find her space-case Brooklyn friend and is pretty much stuck on the street. In the mode of winsome girls around the world, she musters the courage to talk to floppy-haired Charlie (Cris Lankenau) in a subway station. She has chosen well. He behaves like a perfect gentleman, and they end up spending several hours in an all-night cafe and finally hitting Charlie's apartment. Jamie is receiving torturous phone calls from a not-quite-ex-boyfriend back home and Charlie's mired in an ocean-bottom depression, so we're not talking torrid instant late-night face-sucking passion here. But at the same time, their diffidence and introspection never seem like the Berlin Wall that impedes romance in Swanberg's or Andrew Bujalski's films.

Katz's characters are instantly likable (he co-wrote the film with the two leads) and the slow-burning spark between them is played with a light touch. "Quiet City" never feels forced, in the quip-laden mode of most indie love affairs. (Swanberg appears in a nice supporting role, as one of Charlie's friends, whom he visits to retrieve a beloved hat.) Fisher and Lankenau are agreeable enough as performers, but neither is a sufficiently powerful actor to draw the focus away from Andy Reed's cinematography, or ever throw the dramatic outcome into doubt. In contrast to Swanberg's film, with its avowedly experimental method, "Quiet City" is identifiable as a micro-indie only because of its budget. Put movie stars in it and set it in Europe, and it's "Before Sunrise." Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is up to you. (Now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with more engagements to follow.)

Patricio Guzmán, the great Chilean documentary director, recently returned home after many years in exile to make "Salvador Allende," a biographical tribute to the democratic socialist leader, overthrown as Chilean president in a 1973 military coup, whose ghost continues to haunt Latin America (and should haunt our own country as well). It's a movie for students of the 20th century left and its historic failures, sure, but if it comes close to hagiography in places it's nonetheless a haunting exploration of the Allende paradox, and deserves to be widely seen. (Guzmán's three-part film "The Battle of Chile," made in the '70s, remains the definitive work on Allende's revolution and the resulting counterattack that culminated with the CIA-supported coup.)

Like so many revolutionaries, Allende was a cultured man of the upper middle class (a physician) who took up the cause of the poor. But unlike Lenin and Trotsky and Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Allende called for nonviolent and democratic social transformation, never embraced orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine and never tried to implement a police state. One could argue he was a more dangerous revolutionary because of that, and his reward was to be villainized by Washington, subjected to endless propaganda paid for by American taxpayers, betrayed by his own military leaders and toppled in a U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that set back the cause of Latin American democracy by decades.

With characteristic subtlety, Guzmán develops Allende's story through such figures as the old men in the coastal city of Valparaíso who knew his family, the woman who cooked for him and the one who served as his secretary (and perhaps lover), along with more official sources. He humanizes one of the last century's most enigmatic and tragic figures, and makes an almost forgotten episode of modern history come vividly to life. Guzmán concludes on a fatalistic note: Allende's peaceable utopia was a beautiful vision, but not one that could be sustained in 1970s Chile, or perhaps anywhere else. You can draw many lessons from this history, but as "Salvador Allende" makes clear, none of them are salutary. (Opens Sept. 5 at Anthology Film Archives in New York.)

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