Vincent Gallo is a publicist's nightmare and a reporter's dream. The Guinness Book hasn't certified it yet, but Gallo  whose out-to-lunch feature writing and directing debut, "Buffalo 66," was presented in competition at the Deauville Festival of American Film in September  must be the front runner in the Not Mincing Words category.

Before his distinctive opus unspooled, and at the wildly refreshing press conference afterwards, Gallo cast enough aspersions on other festivals, fest programmers, fellow helmers, thesps and humankind in general to create an aspersion shortage throughout Western Europe. A self-styled auteur who actually qualifies for the label, Gallo stars in "Buffalo 66" as Billy Brown, who, freshly released from prison, kidnaps a young woman (Christina Ricci) at random from her tap dance class and coerces her into posing as his adoring wife just long enough for a visit to the wigged-out parents (Anjelica Huston and Ben Gazzara) who think he's a successful young married professional. "Buffalo 66" (due out here Feb 3) is nearly unclassifiable: It's a film so independent you half expect it to sneak out of the projector and leave the theater in search of kicks.

In Gallo's view, truly independent filmmaking has been co-opted and perverted by a clique-ridden fest system. He concludes, apropos of Deauville: "The best film festival I've ever been to in my life is right here. There seems to be a real interest in cinema here. In America, so-called independent cinema is just low-budget mainstream filmmaking. The most conniving producers I've ever worked with were indie producers. One of the things independent filmmakers do is make movies where they don't pay anybody. They cheat the workers."

He recalls, "I came to France when I was 16 years old when I became really interested in cinema. I lived here for a year and I saw three movies a day with my friends. In a way, I've always wanted to be more popular in this country than in America." French director Claire Denis, who cast Gallo in her fest hit "Nenette et Boni," came to Deauville to support his feature directing debut.

Which brings us to Gallo's features, period. When asked if his work with Abel Ferrara in "The Funeral" helped him keep his independent vision, the former model replies, "Did working with Abel help me do anything? Yeah  it helped me rearrange my face. I broke my nose and lost a few teeth on that set. It was out-of-control chaos. Abel is unquestionably the best director in America but I'm very sensitive about my face. Look at 'Nenette and Boni' [made before "The Funeral"]. Look at my skull in that film. I've got a different nose now."

?

Meet Darren Aronofsky and Sean Gullette

When "Saving Private Ryan" hit theaters, veterans of WWII said, "Now everybody can know what the carnage of D-Day was like." A similar service to an even more disregarded segment of the population is performed by "?" which does justice to the torment of migraine sufferers. "I don't have migraines myself," says the film's writer-director, Darren Aronofsky, "but people who do tell me: 'Your film is great  now I can show my boyfriend what my headaches are like, so he'll finally understand.'"

Understanding the patterns of the universe is at the riveting core of Aronofsky's debut feature, an authentic low-budget gem starring Sean Gullette as very intense mathematician Max Cohen, a brilliant guy who's long on obsessive behavior and short on social skills. When he was 6 years old, Max stared directly into the sun. Although he recovered his sight, it's not until the period covered by the film that Max's computer-assisted spiritual search brings him insight.

Max is on the brink of a breakthrough so profound he's got Wall Street goons and no-nonsense Hassidic Jews on his tail. His stress level is not improved by the increasingly ferocious migraines that bring his customary activities to a halt the way the lava from Vesuvius stopped the good people of Pompeii in AD 79. Thanks to Gullette's splendidly focused performance and the film's sensational sound design, "?" is to the depiction of really bad headaches (and a doozy of a remedy) what "Gone With the Wind" is to the burning of Atlanta.

We met with Aronofsky (who won the directing prize at Sundance in 1998) and his star (the two have been friends since high school) at Deauville. Sean, in fact, lived in Paris for a while in the late '80s and worked at a branch of the "FreeTime" fast food chain, now defunct. "Yeah," he says with mock regret, "I guess the world wasn't really ready for the 'Longburger.'"

Was the New York transit authority ready for the scenes in which Max sees a quivering disembodied brain on the steps of a subway station? The co-conspirators laugh  they stole those shots, for the excellent reason that, per the director, "to shoot one night in the subway costs more than the entire budget of our film."

Balzac wrote two novels on how the search for perfection leads to madness (  "La recherche de l'absolu"and "Le chef d'�uvre inconnu"  if nothing else, this is an excellent home-grown excuse for French authorities to use when opting not to try to fix the Y2K problem). "One of the film's themes," says Aronofsky, "is about the fine line between madness and genius and how the search for the absolute can lead to destruction or death." Adds Gullette, "We are trying to scare the hell out of you."

As "a digital retelling of the Faust tale," the film throws a "?" in the face of conventional pieties. "The reaction of the Jewish community has been very strong," says the director. "In movies, Jews are either one-dimensional or they're not addressed at all. I grew up in a very multicultural neighborhood in New York with some very tough Jewish guys and I've never seen them depicted on film."

Since "mathematics is the language of nature," when Max looks up at the clouds he really does see "?" in the sky. A splendidly eerie, totally engaging movie full of imagery you've almost certainly never seen before, "?" hits Paris screens Feb 10.

issue: February 99

webmaster

Name & Contents Copyright © 1999 parisvoice.com , advertise    subscribe    photo credits
 Online version of The Paris Free Voice co-published by Gyoza Media.
Permission is granted to make WWW links to this page. All other rights reserved.