Rhythm Thief

Lower East Side, one of Manhattan's least fashionable areas. This is where Simon lives. He is a ''bootlegger'', i.e. he records concerts with rock-bands and lives off the income he gets from selling cassettes in the street. This illegal activity is barely enough to rent a decrepit flat in one of the more run-down areas. His next-door neighbour routinely tries to sell him stolen TV-sets. Another couple next-door argues every night which makes the plaster fall off the ceiling in Simon's flat, and the landlord is hardly an obvious member of his fan-club. Among Simon's friends is Cyd, the girl he sleeps with every morning with the mutual agreement ''only sex, nothing more''. In his circle of friends is also the persistent Fuller, who most of all wants Simon to inaugurate him into the fine art of bootlegging. Finally there is Marty, a girl from his past, recently released from a mental hospital. ''Friends'' is clearly an overstatement. The biggest commitment in his life is probably the cat at home and the cockroaches at his local lunch restaurant. Simon doesn't want friends; he tries to be independent. Hostile and self-sufficient, he tries to live an indifferent life, free from all ties, free from feelings and commitments towards other people. A kind of teflon human being: nothing sticks. ''Just another piece-of-shit white guy without a cause'', as he himself puts it. This existence without goal or meaning is disrupted when the militant girl punk-band 1-900 BOXX finds out that he is making money off them. During the escape from the band's heavy-handed henchman he finally realises that no-body can exist in ''splendid isolation'', that no man is an island. For maybe the first time, and surely the last, he will remove his armour of self-sufficiency. Hand-held camera, jump cuts and that special, over-exposed sensuality that only black and white film can produce are ingredients in Matthew Harrison's Rhythm Thief which is refering to the French New Wave of the sixties. And now and then in cinematic history there have been petty criminals who one way or the other have died face down in the gutter, mumbling profundities such as ''I ain't so tough''. In the end more recent references seem more valid in this case, for example Jim Jarmuch's black and white reflections over people's inability to com-municate, as in for example Stranger than Paradise. But cinematic history train-spotting aside, Matthew Harrison's second feature holds its own. It is an independent film, sprung from a very specific ''here and now'', from the shabby environments of the Lower East Side and its multitude of human destinies and very specific rhythm. MS