At last Night

Last night lessons: and sometimes marriage isn't even deserving of being saved.

Founded by Robert De Niro after the World Trade Center assault to revive Lower Manhattan's business, the Tribeca Film Festival has shown more than 1,200 movies from over 80 different nations since its first edition in 2002. The Last Night, by Massy Tadjedin, is a cautious story about what happens when two drops get married.

Like Keira Knightley and Sam Worthington, Joanna and Michael are a young pair who were collegiate lovers and now reside in a beautiful Tribeca lofthouse flat that has been created to make local New Yorkers sneaky. Joanna sees Michael at the first part of the film with his new co-worker Laura (Eva Mendes) at a surprise flirt.

Later Joanna asks Michael if he feels drawn to her. That makes Joanna seem stupid. Michael is defensively and equivocally enough that Joanna begins to wonder that he is honest. As Michael goes on a corporate journey to Philadelphia (with the above-mentioned Laura), Joanna, a free-lance author, remains pointless and downhearted and elegantly smokes smokers in her sleek, empty lofts.

During an early dawn stroll she has a surprising meeting with a man called Alex (Guillaume Canet) and her clumsy and sexual behaviour shows that they were once at work. and apparently just wandered through the Tribeca neighbourhood hoping to meet his old flirt.

Featuring Michael from the city, and Joanna worried about his disloyalty, she takes an invite to Alex for a cocktail that night, dress up in a seductive dark dress and vicious lilac pumping. Between the Philadelphia with Michael and Laura and the New York with Joanna and Alex.

It' Laura is after Michael. Then, in the midnight, they go to the swimming pools and swimming in their lingerie and tell more of their own story. Meanwhile Joanna and Alex are meeting Truman, a boyfriend of Alex (in an entertaining Griffin Dunne cameo), and Truman's part seems to be to barbeque Joanna, which she does with another man when her man is out of the city.

It' a legitimate issue that the movie never really answered. Joanna and Michael's relation is not clearly enough to be invested in as a pair, and none of them is particularly convincing. Both Knightley and Worthington can be very efficient with the right materials, but here they are lukewarm, and their relationships are lukewarm and insipid.

Her first battle for Laura was to give the impression of opening fissures in a meticulously erected building. In contrast to I Am Love, the latest movie to record similar footage, Last Night doesn't let us know exactly what would be damaged if the two were to separate. So every instant in I Am Love is vibrating with a perceptible feeling of imminent decay of identitys.

This kind of operation is missing last night, beyond the lecture that if you betray your husband, terrible things could do. Joanna's accidental (too much) meeting with Alex the night after Joanna struggled with Michael over his deceitful ways brings Joanna into perilous terrain. Alek and Joanna (apparently) were dating for a short time during a short time when they and Michael separated.

It was Joanna who never shared Alex with Michael. Their relation to Alex was intellectually and passionately - they spoke about, oh, literature and poesy and philosophy. "Perhaps part of the issue with all this is the cast of Guillaume Canet as Alex, who is playing the role in such an evident way that in the end he is more spooky and arrogant than romantically and depressingly.

In Philadelphia, Michael and Laura are playing with fire at the same time. Laura, at first glance thought of as the generically sexy girl, actually turns out to be a lady with a certain chemical, who for a very clear motive is behaving as she expresses herself during the swimming pool at noon.

In his work Michael is full of responsibility and wants to have a little bit of pleasure, and Eva Mendes in her swimwear in the public baths is difficult to withstand. But Knightley seems to be doomed last night, and while it's obvious that the screenplay wants us to believe that she's attracted to Alex because of the intensive past they share, her behaviour seems more like that of an obstinate, angry kid (which would actually have been more interesting if the screenplay had been more truthful about it).

But Worthington makes no impact in Last Night, which is strange because he is very sympathetic as an artist. Wonderfully shot by Satsuki Mitchell, with a dark sky and gold lamp light, Last Night has what it takes to make a melancholic New York film imbued with the romance of the Tribeca paving stones.

The last night has two occasions when Tadjedin's talent as a filmmaker and the talent of her line-up become immediately evident. At the last minute of the movie is a close-up of Knightley (to say more than that would be a spoiler), and he is all of a sudden frisky and leaves us wonderfully slack.

It' an unorthodox and thrilling experience, reminding us of the Cassavetes-inspired platforming in Woody Allen's husbands and wives, who let us know from the outset that we watch humans break up their marriage, with the platformers mirroring their inner workings. Tadjedin's decision to end the movie the way she does is courageous and talks well of her bravery as aire.

Towards the end of the movie there is also a blinking look on Eva Mendes' pretty face that gives an impression of what last night could have been if she had had had the courage to take the liberty of creating real personalities instead of dripping codes.

A message comes to her, and at that instant a desperate ripple is crossing her face, a ripple that seems to go to her belly. It' s the only look at true feelings in Last Night, and it made me hurt for the film that wasn't shot in which such an expressiveness would have mattered.