City at Peace

Sporting the tellingly fuzzy tagline "60 kids open up to all the colors in the world," Susan Koch's HBO-aired documentary follows a multicultural group of young adults from diverse backgrounds in Washington, D.C. and neighboring Virginia as they write, rehearse and eventually perform a musical based on their own experiences while working hard to build cultural and racial bridges between themselves. Filmed in 1994, City at Peace--executive produced, incidentally, by Barbra Streisand (a woman whose own interpersonal communication skills are reputedly a little weak)--focuses on the thoughts, feelings and relationships of eight 17, 18, and 19-year-old "kids," including Cindy, a prostitute and drug dealer; Kim, a teenage mother with a beautiful voice; D'Angelo, a parolee whose brother was killed; and Pam, whose brother is HIV-positive. The film intermixes occasionally surreal moments of introduction and rehearsal (such as when artistic director Paul Griffin rounds up the "performers" and instructs the girls to "please stand up if you have ever been raped by a man," ostensibly--one guesses, since we're never told--to build trust and develop story ideas) with lengthy interview clips that vacillate between the touching and the ridiculously pointless. Offering up a few tantalizing glimpses of musical solidarity (we see very little of the actual performance, however; which may be a blessing since the rehearsed skits with dialogue have all the narrative depth of daytime soap opera), the story is more often undercut by interminably long, repetitious, I-am-victim-hear-me-moan tales from the trenches of adolescence. In one scene that lasts for minutes, Cindy and D'Angelo stare at the camera with utterly vapid expressions as they deconstruct at extraordinarily absurd length an incident in which D'Angelo grabs a portable cassette recorder and the headphone plug hits Cindy in the nose (by contrast, when D'Angelo and the music director's son are shot in separate incidents over the course of the year long filming, we learn almost nothing about the details). Amazingly, even at a severely overlong 91 minutes, City at Peace never does tell us much about the genesis of the program, the roles of the professionals involved, or the criteria for the selection process; nor do we really learn much about the true stories of the kids themselves, since they're rarely seen outside the controlled petri dish environment of the Saturday rehearsals. At the end of the film, a coda informs us that three years later one of the kids landed a job with a dance troupe and D'Angelo (a mostly sullen/victimized looking kid who seems to get the most screen time) is still in "trouble." The others went on with their lives--not at all surprisingly, since the participants were obviously not chosen for their artistic abilities. A very optional purchase. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)