79 Parts: Director's Cut

This film captures a Brooklyn that is funny, gritty, and larger than life. It brings back a time that will hopefully never die, the New York that I fell in love with, that may have only been in a dream but the one that I would like to experience, if only through movies such as this. We experience a hapless law student caught up in arranged marriage, but is the story really about him? The other characters assert their destiny, unstoppable archetypes of Brooklyn bravado, these characters with more heart and soul than superheroes. Enter the time machine of 79 parts.

It is clear that Ari Taub's new feature belongs to a vast array of the coming-of-age indie comedies that revolve around some high-schoolers or twentysomething students who make disaffected comments about life's passing them by (even if the protagonist, a law student Jack, is deliberately portrayed here as naive and innocent). The milestones of this trend are Lucas's "American Graffiti" and Barry Levinson's "Diner" that established the 1960s as a proper subject for cinematic nostalgia. "79 Parts" also captures the mood of the 70s with almost authentic minutae (in spite of the fact it is obviously shot on a minuscule budget). But it does so with such an utterly frivolic, gleeful style and offers such personable, original and very funny perspectives that from the beginning we are immediately captivated by the narrative and the performances (especially that of Eric Roberts). It's like the soul of Brooklyn represented by the Gen-Xer who grew up in NYC and now wants us to gather all parts of his past.