Thanks to our own Don Hahn Solo for sending along this
movie review from the NY Times:
It's a safe bet that the Willets Point section of Queens, setting
and subject of the new documentary "Foreign Parts," does not figure in
many New York tourist itineraries, though it has starred in a movie
before, Ramin
Bahrani's "Chop Shop." This battered stretch of junkyards and auto
repair shops may thrive (or fester, depending on your point of view) in
the shadow of Citi Field,
but it seems a universe away from that gleaming corporate food court
where the Mets occasionally win a baseball game.
The city's Economic Development Corporation touts Willets Point as
"New York City's next great neighborhood" and has an
ambitious project for its transformation, a plan that has met with
resistance from many who work there. Like Citi Field itself the
redevelopment controversy hovers in the background of "Foreign Parts,"
which was directed by Véréna Paravel and J. P. Sniadecki in an
unobtrusive, ethnographic style. Ms. Paravel occasionally appears on
screen, and many of the people who appear on camera are comfortable
talking to it, which means that the filmmakers are not concerned with
rigorous obedience to the conventions of cinéma vérité. But they are
more interested in observation than in interpretation, and in preserving
above all a visual and aural record of the texture of life in a place
that might well be destined for oblivion.
Without sentimentalizing the neighborhood or its people -- and in
spite of having only a
single legal resident, Willets Point feels, in this film, very much
like a neighborhood -- Ms. Paravel and Mr. Sniadecki cast an appreciative
eye on its beauty. It is not just the compositional artistry of the
camera work or the clarity of the high-definition video images that
reveal this quality. The persistent puddles (Willets sits in a flood
plain) and the body shop signs evoke a venerable, rough, workaday New
York, the polyglot poetry of which can be heard in Spanish, Hebrew and
English dialogue that is frequently drowned out by the noise of tools
and automobile engines.
The cars that dominate the Willets Point landscape have an
aesthetic nobility of their own. The dismantling of a minivan early in
the film resembles the ritual slaughter of a sacrificial animal, much as
the removal of a steering column later looks like a grisly act of
surgery. An alien anthropologist studying "Foreign Parts" might note
that in this area the car has a totemic, sacred function while also
serving as a source of livelihood and, in a few cases, a home.
Embedded in this compact movie are stories of drug addiction and
poverty, hard work and jail time. Like the cars, these tales are
encountered in fragments. People talk but don't say too much, and as
curious and thorough as Ms. Paravel and Mr. Sniadecki are -- "Foreign
Parts" is the result of many months of patient filming -- they are too
polite to pry. But their tact adds to the richness of their film, which
discovers a
busy, complicated world within the space of few unlovely city
blocks.
Bloomberg's gotta stay out of Willets Point.