Alexandre Rockwell: Rebel With a Child's Spirit

This description also suits the director himself: a rebel fond of irony who ostentatiously disregards Hollywood while laughing in its face. Rockwell's uncompromising attitude doesn't come without a price. Despite the fact that the films by the director of Hero have always appealed to critics, most of them have not achieved the status they deserve. Let's hope that the retrospective at the American Film Festival will at least partially correct this oversight and ensure that Polish audiences are able to discover Rockwell's work for themselves.

The American director's most radical film remains his debut, Lenz. In this peculiar "story about ordinary madness," the director shows both his erudition and his nonchalance. Rockwell based his film on a forgotten 19th-century story by Georg Büchner, while at the same time altering it so much that it was barely recognizable. Born of his love for New York, Rockwell's Lenz is transformed into a lyrical, punk tribute to the ostentatiousness personified by the city. The director adds certain autobiographical features to the German original, including his thoughts on the dangers lying in wait for an ambitious artist.

The latter problem also occupied Rockwell at a later stage of his career. In the well-received In the Soup, the director takes an empathetic look at the figure of aspiring screenwriter Adolph Rollo (one of Steve Buscemi's best performances). Although he thinks that he has just created a masterpiece and found a path to success, life interferes with his plans in a painful way. In an effort to bring his plans to fruition, Rollo appears to be at the mercy of shady advisers and is forced to ask himself about the limits of compromise.

Ironically, it was his story about the woes of a novice filmmaker that allowed Rockwell to get a taste of fame. His success-he won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival, for example-could easily turn into a curse. Years later, the American filmmaker said in an interview: "[After In the Soup] for a couple of years I got a little lost. I started not liking making movies, I didn't like trying to raise money. I really meant it when I said I'd rather be a drug dealer or a gangster than [in] Hollywood … I really had to deal with Harvey Weinstein and other liars, cheaters and horrible people. It was just a really weird time."

Fortunately, Rockwell revived his original cinematic vision and showed great sensitivity in his next film, Somebody to Love. With the film, the director proved that, despite his success, he could still understand what it feels like to be unable to reach the top. In Somebody to Love, Mercedes (Rosie Perez) is just such a person, an actress whose life is a series of both professional and personal missteps. Despite her successive failures, she does not give up on the belief that fate will look kindly upon her in the end. Because of this challenging and contradictory optimism, the protagonist in Somebody to Love has been compared to the title character in Fellini's The Nights of Cabiria. Like the character played by Giulietta Masina, Mercedes is finally rewarded for maintaining a childhood innocence deep in her soul.

Little Feet is particularly important to the director, since he cast his own children in the main roles. Lana and Nico Rockwell slip away from their constantly drunk father in order to go to a nearby river. This modest, impressionistic film in fact conceals revolutionary content. Little Feet is a call for a sweet, smiling rebellion against discredited authorities and an inducement to experience the world on one's own. The film shows us perhaps the most powerful manifestation of the strength of Rockwell's work, which, while avoiding big words and loathing pathos, gives the viewer courage every time.

Piotr Czerkawski