Beyond the Black Rainbow: Death by Celluloid

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When you start viewing the selections of a film festival, the initial few will definitely color your expectations for the rest. What were the curators thinking? you might just ponder,

Happily, the first offering of this year's Tribeca Film Festival that I screened was Pierre Thoretton's superb documentary on the designer Yves Saint Laurent, L'Amour Fou, a true must-see if you adore fashion, interior design, the Sixties and Seventies, travel, and an exploration of depressed genius with guest appearances by Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger.

Unhappily -- and "unhappily" is an understatement here -- the next movie I confronted immediately afterwards was Panos Cosmatos' experimental piece of crapola, Beyond the Black Rainbow.

Now, to be fair, I only viewed the film's first 30 minutes, but after four other reviewers ran for the exit, I knew if I valued my sanity, I had to join them.

Set in a "futuristic 1983," the screenplay focuses on the rather insane Dr. Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers), who runs the Arboria Institute, a foundation that offers "happiness through technology." Seemingly, his only patient is Elena (Eva Allen), a beautiful but mostly comatose young woman he awakens at one point by pounding his pen on some sort of microphone. The resulting noise's effect on Elena and the viewers (us) is no more annoying than any other sound on the soundtrack (which was composed "entirely on analog synthesizers"). This aural bombardment is not even more annoying than the film-student cinematography. "Hey! Let's shoot the next whole scene with a dark red tint."

Well, at one point, Nyle leaves Arboria and goes home to where a rather introverted and mentally abused Rosemary Nyle (Marilyn Norry) is sleeping, an act which is apparently a no-no. To overcome this apparent misbehavior, she tells the good doctor, who might just be her husband or brother, "If you're hungry, there's some brown rice and steamed asparagus in the refrigerator."

In the succeeding shots, instead of seeing Nyle munching on veggies, we get to view him swallowing twenty pills, one at a time. Did I tell you it was one at a time?

I departed the theater soon after, joyfully inhaling the Big Apple's fragrant night air while skipping under a star-laden sky, which reminds me that Victor Hugo once noted, "Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time." I had just lengthened mine.