New York City, a Main Character

There’s a documentary in competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, titled “Sister Helen,” that features a 69-year-old Benedictine nun who epitomizes everything many non-New Yorkers feel about New York. Sister Helen runs a residence for substance abusers in the worst part of the Bronx, and she’s crusty, sarcastic, overbearing, foul-mouthed and generally not interested in social niceties. She’s the spiritual equivalent of the classic New York cabdriver.

But there’s another side to Sister Helen. She’s a survivor and, beneath that battle-ax exterior, a pushover. She tosses and turns one night when the Major, one of her longtime tenants, tests positive for an opiate. She breaks her own no-tolerance policy again and again for a lovable but backsliding alcoholic. Arguably, this is the side of New Yorkers and the city--the firemen in tears, the spontaneous street memorials--that the rest of the country saw in the wake of Sept. 11.

“People have warmed up to New Yorkers,” says “Sister Helen” co-director Rob Fruchtman. “After Sept. 11, they see the character behind the hard facade. This [Sister Helen] is a woman who appears to be tough but who’s caring underneath.”

Bertha Bay-Sa Pan, who directed “Face,” a feature film in competition at Sundance about several generations of Chinese American women, set in Queens and Manhattan, says, “I think there is a nostalgia or a special sentimentalism toward New York City that maybe used to be more cynical.”

Of course, as “Face” makes clear, there are millions of New Yorkers unlike Sister Helen, and they too are on display this year at Sundance. More than a dozen festival films are set in the city, all filmed before Sept. 11, and as such they document a place that no longer exists, or at least is altered irrevocably. The filmmakers are aware of this but divided about what it may mean for their movies.

According to festival artistic director Geoffrey Gilmore, who thinks there are more New York-based films here than usual, there’s something almost post-Sept. 11 about these films--meaning serious, not frivolous or self-absorbed. The attacks are on a continuum of disturbing news that filmmakers were already responding to, Gilmore believes.

“To me the issue goes back further than Sept. 11,” he says. “I think particularly at the end of the ‘90s you had very self-centered, self-assured filmmakers whose work felt like navel-gazing. With their material life assured, there wasn’t the anxiety. The anxiety didn’t start over the last couple of months but with the millennium, the elections and the disintegrating economy. And then the catastrophic events of the last couple of months. These films are exploring the real world.”

Sometimes the real world can overwhelm the cinematic world. Most filmmakers kept in their shots of the World Trade Center and lived with the consequences--one of them being that the images would take the viewer out of the movie. Frank Whaley, who directed “The Jimmy Show,” set primarily in New Jersey, was an exception. He cut the towers out of a scene because, however poignant, it was distracting.

For Bart Freundlich, whose “World Traveler” is bookended by New York, the city is his protagonist’s home, and his concern before Sept. 11 was that non-New Yorkers would have a hard time thinking of it that way. Now, he says, it feels “like people’s connection to New York has strengthened and a lot of people might not have related to New York as a home and now they can. You inevitably bring something to the table, and it only enhances people’s connection to the movie.”

Freundlich’s shot of the towers is especially problematic because it’s aerial, crossing over the Statue of Liberty and then approaching lower Manhattan--in other words, a flight path. Rather than alarming, however, he finds it consoling, at least within the context of the story, which is a tale of reconciliation.

The same holds true, in a different way, for Anthony Jaswinski’s “Killing Time,” about the odyssey of an architecture student who journeys uptown for a job interview. New York’s buildings are a character in this film, which makes the appearance of the trade center analogous to a much-beloved actor in a film who died before it was released. Jaswinski says his film, which was intended to be comedic, may not strike viewers as funny now. He found himself in the editing room trading resonance for humor.

“I have a feeling people are going to look at [the shots of the towers] as a metaphor for what happened,” Jaswinski says. “I have no choice but to be OK with that. It’s a poetic swan song to the city.”

Peter Mettei says his “Love in the Time of Money” was, in a sense, nostalgic to begin with, since it is set at the height of the dot-com-Nasdaq craze, when New Yorkers were absorbed in getting and spending and unable to do much else (though his characters are an exception). The bubble burst before Sept. 11, and the events since then have only pushed this period further into the past. It’s as if the terrorist attacks had a telescoping effect.

Similarly, New York’s all-consuming cyber-sex industry, which forms the heart of Jeb Weintrob’s “OnLine,” is “not as brash as it used to be,” he says. But the conditions that gave rise to it have not changed that much. “It’s a community that’s spatially tightly knit, but people don’t connect,” says Weintrob. “There really is something about living in this city that’s analogous to living on the Internet. People come here to reinvent themselves, and they do the same things online.”

New York has always been the perfect place to dramatize the concept of the Lonely Crowd. Sept. 11 changed that stereotype, if only for a moment. However, despite what some of these films and filmmakers suggest, New York is not simply a city of crusty characters, emotionally and sexually starved loners or money-grubbing status seekers.

Among other things, it’s also a city of ethnic enclaves, where everyone knows everyone and traditional values clash with contemporary ones. Several films at Sundance feature these New Yorkers and imply that the events of Sept. 11 may not have affected them as much because they aren’t as culturally, economically or geographically tied to the trade center or the financial district.

One such film is Eric Eason’s “Manito,” set in upper Manhattan’s Washington Heights, about a formerly drug-infested community whose inhabitants are trying to clean up their act. Terrorism is not an issue here. Jobs, day-care and schools are. Though Eason is at pains to insist that this film is not a polemic, it does implicitly take issue with the policies of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani--who became a national hero after Sept. 11--for not providing social services along with his highly successful policing. The attacks may have crowded the city’s problems and politics off the stage, but they’re waiting in the wings.

Clearly what all of these films have in common is that living in New York has always been, and always will be, a struggle. And no one exemplifies this more than director Jill Sprecher, whose “Thirteen Conversations About One Thing” is another film about city dwellers trying to connect.

Sprecher, who is from Wisconsin, was inspired to make the movie by a number of nasty New York knocks. She was mugged twice within a short period. The first time she received a black eye. The second time the mugger broke a bottle over her head, requiring brain surgery.

After Sprecher was released from the hospital, a stranger walking through a subway car she was on slapped her on the head. He kept going as if nothing had happened. Sprecher says she burst into tears while the other riders remained buried behind their newspapers--except for one, who, having caught her eye, made as if to follow the guy, then sat back down and smiled at her.

“I was carrying around a lot of anger and hostility,” she says. “People are real jerks. But that sort of restored my faith in people.”

Sprecher and her sister, Karen, who co-wrote the film, are living in Los Angeles, mostly because they can’t afford to return to New York, where they have an apartment, and also because they lost a good friend at the World Trade Center. Asked if whether, after all this, she intends to return, Sprecher says, “We’re going to end up in New York. We love New York. It’s the place I always wanted to live.

“There’s something wonderful about the city. I think the underlying message of my film is that you can get a feeling of connection to people in the city, and I think there are people there who’ve proved that.”