Best of Tribeca 
By KEVIN CANFIELD 

THE JOURNAL NEWS 
(Original publication: May 1, 2005) 

The Tribeca Film Festival, which ends today, included more than 250 movies from six continents. A film fan could catch a biopic about the late French President FranCois Mitterand, a documentary on the teenage inmates at Rikers Island, a thriller about an Eastern European hit man who's come to Manhattan and a restored classic by Italian master Vittorio de Seta. 

The festival, which was founded in 2002 in the name of helping to rejuvenate the neighborhood after 9/11, isn't perfect. The dozen or so venues that hosted films and related events are scattered across a wide swath of Lower Manhattan, a logistical problem for festival-goers attending more than one film a day. And unless your budget allows for upscale eateries, there's not a whole lot to do in Tribeca. 

But the eclecticism of this year's slate of films was impressive. Here are four of the best. 

"The Beat That My Heart Skipped," Jacques Audiard's loose adaptation of James Toback's 1978 film "Fingers," focuses on a second-generation pianist who has forsaken his art for a job with a sleazy real estate brokerage in Paris. Tom (Romain Duris) does as he's told, whether that means emptying a bag full of rats in the hallway of a run-down tenement building or chasing away squatters with the aid of baseball bat; the purpose is to get the property on the cheap and flip it for a big profit. 

Happening upon his mother's former musical agent, Tom is reminded that he was once a promising talent. He decides to rededicate himself to the piano, but his life is about to become infinitely more complicated. His father, also a real estate shark, is being harassed by Russian gangsters, and his business partners are starting to lose faith in him, believing he's gone soft. 

With a series of visually arresting images — the camera often focuses on Tom's hands (which are occasionally bloodied from his day job) as they dance gracefully over the piano keys in the dark of night — this is nouveau noir at its best. Best of all, it's devoid of the sort of emotional button-pushing that's common in so many American films. (Opens in New York July 1.) 

Dori Berinstein's "Show Business," a documentary about Broadway musicals, played last week to an ecstatic crowd; the audience laughed out loud a dozen times. The overwhelmingly warm reaction is well deserved. Berinstein, a Tony-winning Broadway producer who lives in Westchester, serves up a rich brew of gossip, song-and-dance numbers and behind-the-scenes footage. In the process, she makes her subject interesting, even to those with little knowledge of musical theater. 

From the summer of 2003 till the following spring's Tony Awards ceremony, Berinstein followed the life cycles of "Caroline, or Change," "Avenue Q," "Taboo" and "Wicked." Her status as an insider — she's a producer working on her 11th Broadway production — earned her the trust of the four shows' actors, directors, writers and composers. Berinstein gives viewers a peak inside the rocky relationship between "Avenue Q's" book writer and one of its lyricists, and her camera was there when Idina Menzel was spray-painted green. "Wicked," which starred Menzel as the Wicked Witch of the West, did well because audiences took to its underdog tale. But as Jacques le Sourd, the theater critic for The Journal News, points out in the film, its box office success is also a product of a vast budget, which helped make it a visual spectacle. 

Berinstein also examines the influence of critics through the lens of "Taboo," which inspired cult-like devotion among its fans — the director interviewed one diehard who'd seen the show 25 times and another who'd attended more than 50 times — but closed earlier than expected after a series of negative reviews. Boy George, whose life story is the subject of "Taboo," tells Berinstein that he wouldn't mind taking a swing or at Michael Riedel, the theater columnist for the New York Post. Which, come to think of it, sounds like a show worth staging. ("Show Business" is still looking for a distributor. It will have a screening at The Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville on a date to be determined.) 

"Play" is a gorgeous Chilean film that eschews conventional narrative devices in favor of a nonlinear approach. 

Cristina (Viviana Herrera) is a lovely loner who looks after a dying man. She carefully shaves the old gent's head and reads National Geographic articles to him at breakfast. Dropping off the trash one day, Cristina finds a stranger's briefcase. She takes it home and carefully unpacks it, assembling each of the items — which include identification papers — in a neat row on her bedroom floor. Deciding that she'd like to know more about the bag's owner — a man named Tristan — she begins turning up at his home and following him around Santiago. 

Having recently been mugged and assaulted (by a stranger) and dumped (by his girlfriend), Tristan wanders the streets with a bloody shirt and a blank stare. Though one feels Cristina and Tristan are destined to find one another, theirs is not a love story so much as it as a meditation on the randomness of life in a modern city. 

Written and directed by Alicia Scherson, "Play" feels like a daydream — unhurried, lyrical and a bit melancholy. The characters don't talk a lot; they do more with gestures than with words, and Scherson has the patience to let them explore her script's more poignant moments. ("Play" is still seeking an American distributor.) 

Finally, there's the very nice children's film, "PelicanMan." A fable about a bird that becomes a person but decides humanity is lacking when compared to life with wings, it arrived at Tribeca on the heels of rapturous press in director Liisa Helminen's native Finland. Helminen's film works on several levels. It's a buddy movie — the friendship that links 10-year-old Emil (Roni Haarakangas) and the title character, played by Kari Ketonen, is rather sweet — and a humorous fish-out-of-water story. Make that bird-out-of-sky. 

Though aimed at a family audience, "PelicanMan" is not all giggles and cotton candy — which is why it works so well. The director clearly has faith in her young audience's ability to recognize that life isn't always about storybook endings. ("PelicanMan" is still looking for an American distributor.)

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