Wednesday, November 1, 2023

9th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival (October 25th - 29th, 2023)

The two films selected for the opening nights of this year’s GlobeDocs film festival could not have been programmed any better by the festival’s director Lisa Viola, and it’s rare that a couple of documentaries could be paired as well as these two films were. The festival hosted the world premiere of Isara Krieger’s excellent exploration of educational equity and opportunity, The Highest Standard, which takes an in-depth look at the daily struggles and lofty aspirations of a diverse group of 8th grade students at Beacon Academy here in Boston, all of whom are taking a year to prepare for applying to high-caliber, private preparatory high schools. The equally superb documentary American Symphony, in its New England premiere at the festival, covers a year or so in the life of the jazz/classical/R&B musician Jon Batiste, who was on the road to winning five Grammy Awards at the same time that his wife Suleika Jaouad was hospitalized to receive a bone marrow transplant and extensive treatments for cancer. The emotional wallop of watching both films back-to-back over two nights at Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline proved to be both intense and invigorating at once.

The Highest Standard is set mostly back in 2017 and focuses on three students in particular, Makai, Meleah, and Exavion, as they attend Beacon Academy day school and bounce between their school’s demands and support systems to their families’ ongoing tribulations and expectations. Given that their entire class of students is spirited and distinguished, I felt that these three individual students were well-selected by the filmmakers. Their stories complement each other and intertwine in deep and often surprising ways. We get glimpses early in the film of their “present day” statuses; Makai attended the post-screening Q&A and said that he was now ready to graduate as a Philosophy major at Tufts University (after having completed high school at St. George’s School in Rhode Island), for instance, while Meleah is an undecided major at Brown University and Exavion is attending a larger public university down south.

Meleah is an especially charming and lively subject throughout the film. She’s down-to-earth and honest about her reasons for being so interested in applying to attend Concord Academy back when she was finishing her middle school years. As someone who focuses on her academics and schoolwork (much to her father’s woe since he thinks it’s stressing her out too much), while still maintaining a social life and her offbeat sense of humor, she had a feeling that she would be teased or bullied if she had attended a public high school in Boston instead. It’s a special moment later in the documentary when her application to Concord Academy proves to be successful, and our glimpses into her life there as a resident assistant in her dorm later in the film are gratifying since we can see the maturity and sense of responsibility that she’s grown into, along with a clear upswing in her feeling of self-confidence, as well as her poise and direction.

Exavion (who goes by Zay once he starts high school) attended a private high school in New Hampshire, and he’s very open about the difficulties that he faced after the death of his grandmother, who champions his directions early in the film as the person who raised him as his guardian, due to his mother’s lengthy struggles with drug addiction. He’s also quite honest about the kinds of quietly racist attitudes that he encountered when he was attending high school in the countryside of New Hampshire, where he felt that white people on his campus were open to addressing racial issues but only in ways that suited or benefitted them. He emphasizes that really addressing the issues more openly at the school and dealing with the messy parts of what still makes something like race a mostly unaddressed issue at such a place needs to change now, so that the lives of all people on his high school’s campus could then be altered for the better.

Overall, however, all three students and their classmates at Beacon Academy are able to see how far they’ve come over time, and how much their lives were able to change in light of the many opportunities that were presented to them. We see them attending a museum field trip and analyzing paintings there side-by-side, and a whole world of ideas (in both the playful and serious senses of that phrase) just kind of opens up visibly for them right before our eyes on screen. Their teachers and administrators must also be commended for keeping them on a tight track to success since these particular students’ life circumstances often threw tremendous hurdles in their way. I was reminded a lot of the students whom I’ve advised and taught for nearly a decade now at UMass Boston, the vast majority of whom had graduated from Boston Public Schools and faced the same kinds of issues that students in The Highest Standard also faced themselves.

I can imagine that those students might also aspire to the sort of widespread success and acclaim that musician Jon Batiste has now experienced. He’s been nominated for fourteen Grammy Awards and won five statuettes, and he’s performed everywhere from Carnegie Hall to the nightly bandstand on Stephen Colbert’s popular television talk show. His music is a strong yet delicate and frequently astounding fusion of sounds, bridging his New Orleans jazz roots to the worlds of pop and soul (on stage, he’s the lovechild of James Brown, Little Richard, and Janelle Monae in a way), alongside a slice of contemporary classical compositions. The close-up look at his artistry in Matthew Heineman’s intensive documentary examination American Symphony is a very unique treat, one that digs beneath the surface of a true artist’s technique, in order to unearth the source of both his aesthetics and his humanity.

My favorite aspect of the documentary is just how real it gets at times. Batiste obviously gave very wide access to the cameras and Heineman’s crew. We have not only a front-row seat at his super-intimate wedding to his wife Suleika, but we also get to crawl right into bed beside him as he tosses and turns while speaking with his psychotherapist on the phone in their marathon remote therapy sessions. At one of his lowest points, he’s been awake for three days straight, deeply depressed about his wife’s physical condition in the midst of trying to prepare for his big Carnegie Hall show. Then right in the middle of that lifetime-highlight show, the electricity on stage goes out. To watch Batiste pause at his piano and plow right into the most incredible improvisational detour around that sudden and unexpected technological snafu is not only incredibly awe-inspiring, but it’s also a ground-level lesson about how we can face and overcome the most unanticipated types of adversity to transform them into being part of what drives our creativity.

I also enjoyed the more artful spins in Heineman’s film craft-wise, such as the framing that finds Batiste alone in natural settings. The movie opens in a freezing cold landscape of breath-clouds and marshes, which Batiste is traversing by himself with an instrument, an early potent metaphor for what he’ll be facing throughout the rest of the film. At the height of Suleika’s illness, we also see him wading out into the ocean when he’s at a stop on tour in Florida, wading out into the waves and crashing tides, again alone, to feel the force of nature push against him and sweep over his body. By the end of the documentary, I felt more respect for him as both a person and an artist than I’ve felt after watching any other documentary about a musical artist, perhaps, and that’s as someone who was mostly unfamiliar with Batiste’s music going into the documentary.

Batiste’s wife Suleika is nearly an equal focus in the movie, someone who’s not just there to cheer her husband on and bask in the Grammy-fueled glory of his musical adventures and successes, but also to closely collaborate with him as well, as a partner and as an artist herself. During her cancer treatments when her vision starts to blur, she turns from words and writing to paintings instead, creations that she shares with Batiste from her hospital bed, visual works from which he clearly draws inspiration and artistic fire when he’s working on his own musical compositions and interpretations. When Suleika is finally released from the hospital and is rolled along in her wheelchair, still in a very fragile state, down a hallway crowded with applauding hospital workers who let her cut a string draped across the exit doors to make her way back out into the world, it’s pretty much impossible for anybody watching the documentary not to be moved to tears.

After watching the opening night films in the festival, I was also glad to stay at the cinema and watch Pedro Almodóvar’s bold new short film Strange Way of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, which screened with his previous short film The Human Voice, starring Tilda Swinton. (Both short films feature stunning costumes since Yves Saint Laurent’s house of fashion funded the making of these short films.) I loved how unabashedly gay Strange Way of Life is because I still find in 2023 that gay cinema gets shunted off to the side and under-watched, especially if open physicality between male actors is involved. Let’s just be totally honest: the straight world simply does not get it most of the time, even when they think they do. But Pedro Almodóvar does entirely get it, and he lets Hawke and Pascal do ample work as a closeted western sheriff and his long-ago boyfriend, respectively, who weather a reunion night in bed together and a hardcore shoot-out (yes, the kind with guns). The Human Voice, as much as I adore Tilda Swinton, cohered a little bit less for me, more verve and style than substance, with Swinton swooping around swanky interiors swinging a shiny hatchet in the tizzy of a fraught monologue (inspired by Jean Cocteau and microtheatre) and the aftermath of a lost lover. I did appreciate the interview with Almodóvar that’s included with these shorts, in which he admits that while his fellow film directors feel that their future is in episodic television, he’ll just stick to making short films instead. I think that’s because he’s an actual artist and not just a commercial one. I could listen to (or read) him talking about absolutely anything. He’s that intelligent, and that unashamedly gay; it’s never a boring time with Pedro Almodóvar, and neither are these two distinctive shorts, which feel to me like a culmination and a distillation of his whole body of cinematic work at once.

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