The first film that came to this writer’s mind while watching Haley Elizabeth Anderson’s debut feature Tendaberry was Spike Lee’s 2020 short New York New York. That film is a tribute to the place where Lee grew up and has shown reverence for again and again in his films, but it was also shot right in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. The usual hustle and bustle of the city was gone, replaced by shots of empty piers, closed playgrounds, and abandoned landmarks. Yet, New York New York still managed to bottle the essence of an incredibly specific era. Tendaberry may be set post-pandemic (as later events will demonstrate, you can place the period sometime between 2021 and 2022), but it accomplishes the same feat as Lee’s short. It is an elliptical, multiform film — part realist drama, part docufiction, part essay — that captures the spirit of New York through one resident’s eye-level perspective, all while observing how New York has been (and still is) subjected to the marching progress of time. There have been hundreds of films about The City That Never Sleeps, but few are as unique, as freeform, and as completely alive in spirit as Tendaberry.
In South Brooklyn, near Brighton Beach and Coney Island, Dakota (newcomer Kota Johan) is a 23-year-old with Dominican roots who recently moved to New York. She is an aspiring singer-songwriter, but for now, she is trying to make money through work at a convenience store and occasionally busking on the subway. She’s also very much in love with her Ukrainian boyfriend, Yuri (Yuri Pleskun); however, when he receives news that his father has suffered a heart attack, Yuri must return home to take care of him, and Dakota must navigate life in New York on her own. Her situation becomes even more fraught when she finds out she is pregnant, soon followed by the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Soon, there is no way of contacting Yuri.
Titled after Laura Nyro’s 1969 album New York Tendaberry, and with shared ties to Raven Jackson’s similarly unconventional All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Anderson structures her film according to the seasons as she contrasts Dakota’s efforts to forge a future with her tight grip on the past, waiting for someone that may never return. Time passes, fall turns to winter. Separated from her family and with her boyfriend on the other side of the world, Dakota starts to mimic the conversations she would have had with Yuri in her apartment. The loneliness and isolation are already unbearable, and it’s easy to feel that in every moment, as DP Matthew Ballard opts for tight close-ups of Dakota (or her with Yuri) to establish a deep measure of intimacy. Jota supports this with an astonishingly raw lead performance, adding physicality and embodying both the resilience and flaws of a woman living on the brink. “I hate it here. I love it here,” Dakota says about New York, a sign of the roller coaster effect this place can have on its residents, as well as the brutality (and beauty) it can hold for people struggling to get by.
Anderson’s exploration of New York through multimedia gives Tendaberry a welcomingly handmade feel, as she and editor Stephania Dulowski weave elements and formats together in an experimental fashion. Essential to the film’s construction are the video diaries of Nelson Sullivan, a videographer who shot 1900 hours of Super 8 footage detailing queer NYC and its nightlife in the 1980s. Like Dakota, he was also a musician who moved to NYC with big ambitions — perhaps that is why she feels close to him when discovering his videos on YouTube. Elsewhere, 16 mm footage is paired with shots taken using DV tapes, which belonged to Anderson (accumulated by the director while attending NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts). A poetic, Malickian voiceover from Johan is layered over archive footage of Coney Island from 1911 (when it had an amusement park called “Dreamland”), and when integrated alongside Sullivan’s and Anderson’s footage, a document is shaped of how the city has elapsed over one 100 years, as seen through different eyes. New York persists, but always anew. Dreamland burnt down and was replaced. The Downtown Manhattan nightlife that Sullivan filmed has changed, too. Each bit of past footage feels like a mini time capsule of cultural memory and landscape, with new life breathed into the images through Anderson’s savvy construction.
Eventually, Tendaberry does peter out in terms of visceral engagement. Ballard’s handheld camerawork can begin to feel overly jittery, authentically mimicking the chaos of Dakota’s life as it unravels, but feeling increasingly aesthetically distracting in the process. Elsewhere, the thematic and narrative roving can start to become meandering as retread sets in, with the voiceover going on tangents about coyotes that fail to lead anywhere meaningful. This all leads to the sense that the film could have been a lot brisker without sacrificing much. Luckily, by the time we arrive in “Summer” (the film’s final act), the warmth and care that Anderson has for her protagonist and setting become more palpable. Dulowski’s editing also returns to the collage style where it’s at its best, reemphasizing the film’s multimedia quality and culminating in a stirring, meaningful climax that doubles down on its chief theme of concern: time.
Tendaberry is indeed a film enveloped by an awareness of time — its fleeting nature and our relationship with it as we rush to find our place in this world. As Dakota narrates: “Time is indifferent to us and so is the Earth. And when we wanna stay, the Earth says no. Time says no.” All things pass, and all the footage Anderson has collected from different decades reflects that. So too does Tendaberry’s end product. This lends an almost metatextual element here, as one is hit with the sense that the director can feel the encroaching ephemerality of her own work — a document of a specific period and of worries that will eventually evaporate. This version of New York City will too be seen in the way that gentrification looms over the film, as Dakota receives word that her apartment will be demolished. And so, as much as Tendaberry is about the ways that a place never stays the same forever, it’s also about the ways a person, Dakota, never stays the same. We chart her evolution over the seasons, her new job and hair colour, the changes forced upon her, and the ones she chooses on her own. Tendaberry is a piece of vibrant, alluring filmmaking, a dual portrait of both a person and a city that remains unsettled.
DIRECTOR: Haley Elizabeth Anderson; CAST: ddd; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; STREAMING: April 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
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