New York Film Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

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New York Film Festival 2019 (Sept. 27-Oct. 13). Opening, Centerpiece, closing night films.

FILM FORUM THREAD (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4678-New-York-Film-Festival-2019-(forum)&p=37796#post37796)

Links to Reviews:
Atlantics/Atlantique (Mati Diop 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37930#post37930)
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Juliano Dornelles 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37988#post37988)
Beanpole Дылда (Kantemir Balakov 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37926#post37926)
Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe 2019)
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37917#post37917)
Girl Missing, A (Koji Fukada 2019)
I Was at Home, But. . . (Angela Schanelec 2019)
Irishman, The (Martin Scorsese 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37977#post37977) Opening Night Film
Liberté (Alberto Serra 2019)
Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37928#post37928)
Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37920#post37920) Centerpiece Film
Moneychanger, The (Federico Veiro 2019)
Motherless Brooklyn (Edward Norton) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37939#post37939) Closing Night Film
Oh Mercy!/Roubaix, une lumière (Arnaud Desplechin 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37915#post37915)
Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria (Pedro Almodóvar 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37906#post37906)
Parasite 기생충 Gisaengchung)(Bong Joon-ho 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37938#post37938)
Portriat of a Lady on Fire/Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Céline Sciamma 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4762-PORTRAIT-OF-A-LADY-ON-FIRE-PORTRAIT-DE-LA-JEUNE-FILLE-EN-FEU-(C%E9line-Sciamma-j2019)&p=38112#post38112)
Saturday Fiction 兰心大剧院 (You Lee 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37929#post37929)
Sibyl (Justine Triet 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37922#post37922)
Synonyms/Synonymes (Nadav Lapid 20190 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37913#post37913)
To the Ends of the Earth (Koyoshi Kurosawa 2019) (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4565)
Traitor, The/Il traditore (Marco Bellocchio 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37925#post37925)
Varda by Agnès (Agnès Varda 2019)
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4776-VITALINA-VARELA-(Pedro-Costa-2019)-at-Lincoln-Center-(on-line)&p=38184#post38184)
Wasp Network (Olivier Assayas 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=38742#post38742)
Whistlers, The/Gomera (Corneliu Porumboiu 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37927#post37927)
Wild Goose Lake, The 南方车站的聚会 (Diao Yinan 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37907#post37907)
Young Ahmed/Le jeune Ahmed (Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4763-YOUNG-AHMED-LE-JEUNE-AHMED-(Jean-Pierre-Dardenne-Luc-Dardenne-2019)&p=38113#post38113)
Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=38202#post38202)

[Chris Knipp]

The 57th New York Film Festival Main Slate

(Officially announced August 6, 2019)

Opening Night
The Irishman
Dir. Martin Scorsese

Centerpiece
Marriage Story
Dir. Noah Baumbach

Closing Night
Motherless Brooklyn
Dir. Edward Norton

Atlantics: A Ghost Love Story/Atlantique
Dir. Mati Diop

Bacurau
Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles

Beanpole/Dylda
Dir. Kantemir Balagov

Fire Will Come
Dir. Oliver Laxe

First Cow
Dir. Kelly Reichardt

A Girl Missing よこがお
Dir. Koji Fukada

I Was at Home, But…
Dir. Angela Schanelec

Liberté
Dir. Albert Serra

Martin Eden
Dir. Pietro Marcello

The Moneychanger/Así habló el cambista
Dir. Federico Veiroj

Oh Mercy!//Roubaix, une lumière
Dir. Arnaud Desplechin

Pain and GloryDolor y gloria
Dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Parasite 기생충
Dir. Bong Joon-ho

Film Comment Presents
Portrait of a Lady on Fire/Portrait de la jeune fille en feu
Dir. Céline Sciamma

Saturday Fiction
Dir. Lou Ye

Sibyl
Dir. Justine Triet

Synonyms/Synonymes
Dir. Nadav Lapid

To the Ends of the Earth 旅のおわり世界のはじまり
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

The Traitor/Traditore
Dir. Marco Bellocchio

Varda by Agnès
Dir. Agnès Varda

Vitalina Varela
Dir. Pedro Costa

Wasp Network
Dir. Olivier Assayas

The Whistlers/La Gomera
Dir. Corneliu Porumboiu

The Wild Goose Lake 南方车站的聚会
Dir. Diao Yinan

Young Ahmed/Le jeune Ahmed
Dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Zombi Child
Dir. Bertrand Bonello

NYFF Special Events, Spotlight on Documentary, Convergence, Shorts, Retrospective, Revivals, and Projections sections, as well as filmmaker conversations and panels, will be announced in the coming weeks.

Tickets for the 57th New York Film Festival will go on sale to the general public on September 8. Festival and VIP passes are on sale now and offer one of the earliest opportunities to purchase tickets and secure seats at some of the festival’s biggest events, including Opening and Closing Night. Learn more at filmlinc.org/NYFF57Passes. Press and industry accreditation for NYFF57 is open now and closes August 16th; apply here.BEA


http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/NY57FF.jpg

[Chris Knipp]

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR: PAIN AND GLORY/DOLOR Y GLORIA (2019)

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ANTONIO BANDERAS IN PAIN AND GLORY/DOLOR Y GLORIA

Bright moments: Almodóvar's beautiful summing up

My sense of Almodóvar has always been overwhelmingly visual. Does anybody make more bright-colored movies? In content Pain and glory is darker and more self-absorbed than usual, more of a summing up. Yet the surface is as much cheerful eye candy as ever, its visual delight acquiring the special poignancy of the clown suicidal behind his ludic mask. The utensils on a kitchen counter are all bright red. When somebody pulls out a cell phone, it's red, or wrapped in red. Each shirt the protagonist wears is a different multicolored pattern, except for the robin's egg blue polo shirt he starts out with. But this is a man whose life has gone stale and who has run out of inspiration.

His name is Salvador, he is a illustrious filmmaker in a creative crisis. He's blocked, he's in all sorts of pain, and he's doing heroin to deal with his sufferings, physical and mental. He chokes all the time, and for that, nothing helps. This is caused by an unusual ailment, detected later, to do with his vertebrae.

Salvador is played by a deliberately worn and aged-looking Antonio Banderas, in a low-keyed performance that won the Best Actor award at Cannes. Alberto Iglesias won the Cannes soundtrack award. This is one of the director's most important films, even if it may truly please only his most ardent fans, and yet displease some of them because it's atypical.

Pain and Glory is the segmented picture of a complicated life. From the way Almodóvar started out in the provinces you'd never have known he'd become Spain's most famous movie director and the darling of the Madrid cultural scene. And here, it is hard to see the moody, blocked filmmaker in the small son of impoverished parents who wind up living in a cave house.

Hardship is downplayed in a masterful opening scene of little Salvador (Asier Flores) with his mother (Penelope Cruz) and other women singing as they do the wash by a stream, wishing they were men so they could swim naked. This luminous sequence is like a musical. Even the cave house the poor family moves into turns out to be flooded with sunlight - a part of it has no roof. The boy gets sunstroke - or is he just love-struck? - reading while he sneaks looks at Eduardo (César Vicente), his "first object of desire" - a ready-made Almodóvar movie title.

Eduardo is a handsome, strapping young workman who's illiterate, till little Salvador, who loves books and writing, is called in to give him lessons. The exchange is that Eduardo puts up tiles (bright colored) and whitewashes the cave. He gets so dirty doing that one day he asks Salvador, while his mother is away, to let him take a bath in a tub, and hence the boy gets treated to a spectacular display of beefcake. Eduardo probably knows what he's doing. Handsome young men are usually aware when they're being admired.

Creating what will become a kind of Rosebud, Eduardo, who's artistic, does a drawing of young Salvador reading that long gets lost but then turns up by chance many years later and is bought by the blocked, or perhaps now unblocking, filmmaker. Isn't he unblocking, since he's making this film? Pain and Glory eventually begins to reflect back on itself - another Almodóvar trademark being deft plot construction that, like psychedelic color, delights despite, or even because of, its artificiality.

A voiceover sequence very early in the film where the mature Salvador lists his multiple ailments, which include back trouble, tinnitus, and depression, to name only a few, is illustrated by a dazzling series of bright-colored diagrams and symbols. If he's sad, he doesn't let us see it in his choice of visuals. If only Power Points were like this, students would stagger out of lectures high on imagery. (Even the opening credits sequence of this film is memorably elegant, simple, and gorgeous.)

The movie's sketch of the family side concludes later with the grownup Salvador sweetly caring for his aged mother (Julieta Serrano), a sequence among the film's most mundane yet most poetic. There is no detailed, practical picture of the protagonist's creative life or his love life except in reference to his most famous film, Sabor, from thirty years ago, the lead actor he's been estranged from all those years, and a long lost lover who was a heroin addict. The grownup portion of the film is about Salvador's lingering unease, hypochondria, troubling physical ailments, and writer's block. Hope appears through reunions with the actor and the lover. Salvador finds the actor Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia) and they collaborate on a new performance called "Addiction." By coincidence (Almodóvar's plots also have a fairy tale aspect) the former lover, Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), long a resident in Argentina but in town to collect an inheritance, sees "Addiction," realizes it's about him, and seeks out the author, even though it was presented anonymously.

Alberto, the actor, and Salvador seem two egocentric basket cases when a restored print of Sabor is shown and they can't manage to show up for the post-screening Q&A and only answer some questions for the emcee on the phone broadcast to the audience. It's an enthusiastic crowd, an ego boost to the director, and at the end he is about to have the choking problem solved. Somehow this ending seems hopeful, happy, sad, and scary all at once: it's overwhelmingly emotional, and satisfying if you want a good cry.

In his Hollywood Reporter review (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/pain-glory-review-1195284) Jonathan Holland complains repeatedly that Pain and Glory isn't funny enough, hardly funny at all. This is true. But the surface of the film is continually pleasing. And Banderas' low keyed performance gets to you. In my case I have always liked best when Almodóvar was quiet and magical, especially in Talk to Her. Perhaps the giddy comedy he developed so fluently in the Eighties was a mask to hide whatever was going on inside. Anyway after 36 films the director has a right to be serious. Yet at the same time, Pain and Glory has Almodóvar's distinctive look and structure. It may take repeated viewings to perceive that it's a triumph. But obviously there were inklings at Cannes.

Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria 113 mins., it opened in Spain Mar. 22, 2019, then as mentioned debuted in Competition at Cannes in May, winning Best Actor and Best Soundtrack awards. Other festivals included Sydney, Melbourne, Taipei and Munich, Toronto. Showing today at the NYFF. US theatrical release from Oct. 4, 2019. Current Metascore 82%.

[Chris Knipp]

DIAO YINAN: THE WILD GOOSE LAKE 南方车站的聚会 (2019)

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FROM DIAO YINAN'S WILD GOOSE LAKE

Noise, color, romance and doom

With this new film, which was in Competition at Cannes, Diao Yinan establishes himself as some kind of Asian B-noir master, I suppose, yet while he touches all the bases, something feels missing, or he is just trying too hard. Nonetheless there are pleasures in The Wild Goose Lake (whose Chinese title means something different, South Station Gathering), pleasures of the senses above all, sight and sound.

In her Variety review (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/the-wild-goose-lake-review-1203219296/)Jessica Kiang rightfully credits Dong Jinseng, the cinematographer, with visual beauties that are almost but not quite as gloriously artificial as Wong Kar-wai's films and Chris Doyle's work. She notes the "whole sequences in neon pinks and garish reflected blues." And the sound design and score are just as essential, making the images "throb with particular sleaze" behind "B6’s clanging, dramatic score." This score isn't crudely obtrusive, like a modern American comic book thriller, but selective - though there are clangs and bangs like a John Cage symphony that filled the Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln center cranked up to the max, all the more to be appreciated from my front balcony seat. Sound design and set design are also top notch.

What the movie's all about logically comes second, though unlike Diao's Berlin prize-winning previous film Black Coal Thin Ice (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3937-San-Francisco-International-Film-Festival-2015&p=33474#post33474), there is a well-worked-out and clear plot line. There's a - noisy, vivid - fracas at a gathering to train a gang of motorcycle thieves and assign them districts to work in. It's infiltrated by cops and one gets shot. This basis provides plenty of action and noise. The shooter becomes a police fugitive. His flight bookends the whole, and a soulful prostitute who comes to get, or rescue him. He plans to turn himself in so his wife can get the reward - though I never quite saw how that could work. The meeting of the wanted Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge), to the with Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun Mei, the Black Coal, Thin Ice star as well) in heavy rain, just one cluster of intense but renewed noir clichés, sets the tone of romantic doomed B-gangster movie artiness Diao strives for, and mostly achieves.

Some devices, or genre routines, are so enthusiastically worked as to be almost silly, perhaps intentionally so. The largely young and Chinese Alice Tully Hall audience laughed a lot, but not too much; they were having a good time, not scoffing. How often does somebody ask for a light so we can her the clack and click of the classic Zippo lighter? A unique running joke is the colorful T-shirts worn by the (often doomed) young men, which are pointed to when an undercover cop is called out and told to switch his designer T for something drabber. See Kiang's review (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/the-wild-goose-lake-review-1203219296/) for a listing of all the other wonderful things that go on, including Zhou Zenong's twisty dance to bandage his wounded torso without help.

But this points to an artificiality and lack of what classic noirs have, emotion. It's impressive how Diao renders both intimate and (tackily) epic-scale sequences with equal panache, but the stars aren't quite charismatic (or even good looking) enough. This relationship can't match the doomed romance of Jia Zhang-ke's superb Ash Is Purest White, nor can Gwei Lun Mei quite match Jia Zhang'ke's wife and muse Zhao Tao in that and other films. Diao's well-developed plot leaves no room to breathe, to pause and savor the doom. Still, there is a lot for us to savor, and one walks out with pleasingly intense visions of glowing neon and clanging noises in one's head.

The Wild Goose Lake 南方车站的聚会, 113 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition, with seven other top festivals (some to come) listed on IMDb. Reviewed here as part of the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival (Sept. 29, 2019). Theatrical debut to be in France Nov. 27. Current Metascore 74%.

[Chris Knipp]

NADAV LAPID: SYNONYMS/SYNONYMES (2019)

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QUENTIN DOLMAIRE, TOM MERCIER, LOUISE CHEVILLOTE IN SYNONYMS

Nationality malaise as a form of madness

Synonyms is a bracing, invigorating film with an explosive young star (found in acting school) and a series of astonishing high-energy, highly-verbal set pieces. They only begin to pall toward the end when things go on a bit too long and as you realize Lapid isn'g going anywhere, that the astonishment hides a certain emptiness. It's surprising to learn the movie's autobiographical because its protagonist is borderline crazy, maybe full-on crazy. But Lapid's treatment of his own experience is free and fanciful and riffs off the distinctive abilities of the lead who's little like him. He has reimagined himself as an idealistic superhero.

Yoav (Tom Mercier, a 26-year-old Israeli* whose actual father is French (http://frenchmania.fr/tom-mercier/)) arrives in Paris from Israel, enters a large unoccupied apartment and takes a shower. The movie revels in Mercier's well-built, well-hung young body throughout: he has a background as a judo champion and dancer. One of his main assets is his intense physicality and boldness (no apparent hesitation about frontal nudity), which in fact is the picture. Once out of the shower, he discovers that his clothes and his whole big sack of possessions are gone. He runs around frantically from one big empty room to the other naked, freezing. There seems to be no heat. Was there hot water? The movie is vague about details, including how the protagonist speaks French so well.

The movie will return to the fact that Yoav, though he goes out and bangs on other apartment doors, begging in French in vain for help, he never descends to the street and instead returns to the bath tub. Cut to a young (very) French couple who discover him lying there asleep or unconscious. Émile (Quentin Dolmaire of Desplechin's My Golden Days) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), partially revive him and carry him out to the big posh nearby apartment they share. The situation that develops may remind you of Bertolucci's The Dreamers, but without the period flavor and graceful ménage à trois interactions of Eva Green, Louis Garrel, and Michael Pitt. In its deliberate unreality, its young seekers, and its eccentric declarations Synonyms suggests Godard films like La Chinoise. The shock-value set pieces also somewhat resemble Ruben Östlund's 2017 The Square (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36218#post36218).

The opening is shot with vigorous handheld photography whose deliberate brutality conveys a sense of Yoav's dislocation, and is marked by Mercier's sheer exhibitionism. He's a dazzlingly confident , go-for-broke actor whose skill is only undermined by a certain blankness. He's as much a performance artist as a dramatic actor. But is his whole nature perhaps symbolic of Israel itself, bold, brave, intense, but essentially rudderless and heedless? Underlying the whole film there is the implied sweeping, if superficial, critique of Israel. Yoav turns out to have come to France intending to abandon his native country though a decorated soldier. He has no other real plan but to cease being Israeli, stop speaking Hebrew, and become French. He calls Israel "nasty, obscene, ignorant, idiotic, crude and mean-spirited" (méchant, obscène, ignorant, hideux, vieux, sordide, grossier, abominable) and a string of other expressive derogatory adjectives he pronounces with pleasure in the poetic sound of the French words.

"It can't be all those at once," Émile says. "Choose." All this is in French, and Yoav refuses to speak Hebrew throughout except for one humiliating "artist's model" gig and declares his intention to become French. However he gains no other French friends besides Émile and Caroline, though he bonds with a tough, violent Israeli security guard called Yaron (Uria Hayik). He goes to live in a tiny chambre de bonne where he survives on ultra-cheap meals of pasta and canned tomato sauce, whose preparation is dwelt upon almost fetishistically. Eventually Caroline comes there and sleeps with him, overlapping Émile's decision that she should marry Yoav so he can become a French citizen. Godardian, absurdist scenes of a citizenship class follow, along with sequences of semiviolent macho Israeli encounters, some involving the Israeli embassy, and meetups by Skype and in person with Yoav's parents, whom he directs with polite firmness to leave him alone.

The movie presents one scene after another featuring Yoav, in no particular order. Émile, the son of a wealthy industrialist, and his girlfriend Caroline, who plays the oboe in a local arrondissement orchestra, adopt Yoav and want to protect him. One of the movie's most obvious weaknesses is the thinness and wanness of the two French characters. Émile is a would-be writer, who has written 40-odd pages of a novel, but lacks energy and invention. Caroline's main character trait is that she plays the oboe. Yoav begins spouting stories in his odd but curiously fluent French, to augment which he acquires a "good, but light" French dictionary at a bookstore. The film is dominated not only by Mercier's physical presence but by his harsh, confident male Israeli voice, spouting French. He often recites series of words he likes with similar sound, or similar meaning - hence the title. Sexy, graceful, strong, and somehow sensitive, Mercier is always attractive, though with his pointed nose and little mouth he's not handsome.

Instead of mal de pays, longing for homeland, Yoav has the opposite, a kind of nationality malaise. The specific details of why one might be discontented with his native land, its racism, its chauvinism, its militarism, its brutal repression of the Palestinian people, are things Yoav never goes into, though there is a telling scene in French citizenship class where the teacher proudly vaunts the "laïcité," the secularity of France. But this lack of detail reenforces Synonyms' Godadian, Brechtian fable quality. Yoav repeatedly tells Émile how his father told him as a boy the story of Hector and Troy, but refused to reveal to him how it ends. He tells other stories of his life, in an intense, fable-like style, and announces he "gives" these stories to the story-deficient would-be fabulist Émile, who accepts them gratefully.

Yoav becomes increasingly crazy as the oddball distinctiveness of Tom Mercier's personality and thespian skills is slowly but surely ramped up. When asked a profound question about Israel, redemption through nationality vs. inner change at a NYFF Q&A, Lapid answered "Sometimes I just have to say I am only a filmmaker." This movie is notable for its effective theatricality and gritty cinematic qualities - as well as the spot-on editing by the director's mother that's so breathtakingly flashy at times you don't know whether to cheer or jeer. It's not noted for its calm and thoughtful exploration of ideas, or for a meaningful plot line beyond the stunning initial premise.

I enjoyed this film - it's fresh, has an unforgettable opening, and holds your attention much of the way - but in the end I was left wanting more. It may be best discussed by Israelis: its theme is one worth their taking seriously. But it has reminded me that I found Lapid's first two films, both of which I reviewed as part of Lincoln Center film events, were similarly bold and striking yet crude, vague, and lacking structural coherence.

Synonyms/Synonymes, 123 mins., in French with some Hebrew and English, premiered at the Berlinale, winning the Golden Bear top feature prize. Opening a fortnight later in Israeli cinemas, it was slated for nearly two dozen other festivals, including Toronto, New York, and Mill Valley. Watched at a NYFF screening Oct. 1, 2019. It opened in France in March with a fair critical reception (AlloCiné press rating (http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-261649/critiques/presse/) 3.4, but top praise from Cahiers du Cinéma and Les Inrocks). Coming to US theaters Oct. 25, it has a current Metascore of 85%.
_____________
*See more about Mercier in Haaretz (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-synonym-for-instant-movie-star-israeli-tom-mercier-1.7020353).

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NADAV LAPID AT NYFF Q&A [CK photo]

[Chris Knipp]

ARNAUD DESPLECHIN: OH MERCY!/ROUBAIN, UNE LUMIÈRE (2019)

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SARA FORESTIER AND LÉA SEYDOUX IN OH MERCY!

A sumptuous but pointless detour for Desplechin

The director departs from bourgeois intellectual families and love affairs to focus on a slow police procedural focused on the death of an old woman, set n his poor, crime-ridden hometown of Roubaix near the Belgian border, and made in declared admiration of Hitchcock's The Wrong Man.

Everything here is beautifully done - yet misguided. The main focus is on the sordid murder of a helpless old woman by a lesbian couple, Marie (Sara Forestier) and Claude (Léa Saydoux), and the captain in charge of the investigation, Commissaire Yacoub Daoud, played by the estimable Roschdy Zem. There is the obligatory rookie detective on the case, Louis Cotterel (Antoine Reinartz). The first hour is spent on other things, a half drunk man caught out in a fake insurance claim, a house fire seen to be arson, cocky young men evading he police, Daoud's angry nephew in prison and his love of horse racing, which Cotterel turns out to be good at betting on.

And still the process of getting Marie and Claude to confess to their murder takes an hour that seems very long. We see the cops work in threes separately on each of the two suspects, a woman and a good cop-bad cop, with Daoud always playing the quiet, restrained good cop. Earlier he has confirmed to Cotterel the rumor that he always knows who is innocent and who is guilty. But such a sixth sense is hardly needed for Marie and Claude because there is so much evidence of murder and of their presence before they[re brought in for questioning. So there is no mystery and nothing interesting to discover. Then when they have separately and together both confessed, with the tougher Claude holding out longer, we have to watch them taken to the crime scene to act it out in more detail. I found this scene, which is gruesome yet trivial, a true banality of evil moment, particularly hard and unrewarding to watch.

This would seem to misunderstand what makes us interested in dramas that depict detailed police investigations. Who cares whether both women had their hands on the poor old lady's neck as she was strangled? This is indeed a detailed introduction to French police methods, but not in a way that holds our interest. It is true that Desplechin departs from the conventional, but only in minuscule ways. Jay Weissberg observed in his Variety review (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/oh-mercy-review-1203223481/) that Daoud is the interesting character, not the women (both actresses rather wasted, especially Seydoux). There's a hint of more to come (as if this were a series pilot) in the news that all Daoud's family have all returned to the "bled", to North Africa, while he's chosen to stay here where he grew up. There could be more about Cotterel, perhaps an emotional trajectory of the relationship between rookie and oldtimer as in Xavier Beauvois' moving The Little Lieutenant (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=556&view=previous) .

At the same time the film excels in its rich cast details, nuanced depiction of Roubaix at and just after Christmstime (with a memorably drab shot of street decorations coming down). But somehow this doesn't read as any kind of portrait of Roubaix beyond what we're told at the outset of its former vigor and present poverty and decline.

Desplechin is one of the best and most distinctive contemporary French directors when he's got the right material. The 2015 My Golden Days (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4022-New-York-Film-Festival-2015&p=33973#post33973) was great; last time's Ismael's Ghosts (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36273#post36273) was a misfire. This is another of the latter: so much good work, with the wrong material.

Oh Mercy!/Roubaix, une umière,/ 119 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, released in France in Aug. 2019, with very good reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.7); apparently only in four other festivals, including New York and Vancouver. Screened for this review as part of the NYFF, Oct. 2, 2019. Metascore 51%.

[Chris Knipp]

KELLY REICHARDT: FIRST COW (2019)

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JOHN MEGARO AND THE COW IN FIRST COW

A particularly intense study in Reichardt's taut minimalism

Set in 1820, 25 years before the time of the director's Meeks Cutoff (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2875-New-York-Film-Festival-2010&p=25170#post25170)(NYFF 2010), First Cow, about what would become Oregon and beavers and men on the frontier, is a dreamy, cramped, primitive, sad scene of hostile people scrambling... slowly... to survive. Two men cling to each other, the temporary trappers' cook Cookie Figowitz (John Megaro) to King Lu (Orion Lee), a well-traveled Chinese man fluent in English Cookie finds naked fleeing angry Russians.

He helps him and they part, but meet again later, which leads to their sharing a tiny cabin. Together they quietly enter into a business venture to sell tasty buttermilk biscuits laced with honey to the locals in the market. But this tasty, lucrative trade, a hot success in this wild uncivilized place where home cooking is so missed, depends on a supply of milk poached at night from the newly-arrived sole cow in the region, which belongs to the British trapping firm overseer known as the Chief Factor (Toby Jones). This theft is a dangerous game that poses a looming threat over the rest of the tale. The partnership and cohabitation, intensified by the risky venture that makes it feel delicate and doomed, makes us ponder the film's epigraph from William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. Is it even more, a desperate, lonely love?

The scene is full of vague but intense class strictures: the shyness of Cookie, his secondary status to the macho trappers; the outlier Chinese man he feels safe with, the pompous Chief Factor, the local grandee.

One is continually struck with a sense of things missing, the intentional minimalism of Reichardt's style, the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, eschewing wide horizons, the many scenes in such low light you can barely make things out. The cakes Cookie bakes, using ingredients King Lu assembles, such a tiny thing to make their fortune, in small batches. This is Slow Food cinema too, a thing not for everyone, but a delight to the devotee.

I kept thinking of Jarmusch's Dead Man, for some reason: it must be set much later, but it evokes raw frontier primitivism too. . . differently, though, with lots of snappy dialogue, humor, and a richer narrative. Yet in the end First Cow wins out in this comparison in certain important categories: sincerity, genuine pathos. I also thought of Young Adult novels. Perhaps too tilted toward the tragic, but this has that quality of showing boys what the frontier life was like, how a man can cook, that it's wrong to steal.

It is in fact difficult to imagine the ideal audience for Kelly Reichardt, which may change from film to film. I respected the subtlety of her debut Old Joy, but seem to have most enjoyed her most conventional film, the 2014 almost-thriller about terrorists, Night Moves (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3761-NIGHT-MOVES-%28Kelly-Reichardt-2013%29&p=32468#post32468). Actually, she can appeal to any fan of uniquely crafted independent films. It's like enjoying being smothered, or at least that's the feeling this time. This is a particularly intense, intimate version of her style, though you know where it is going, and toward the end it moves toward conventional suspense - nicely ending in the air, with an unmistakable but hopefully not too neat visual rhyme with the opening.

First Cow is again freely adapted with the writer Jonathan (or Jon) Raymond, her collaborator for most of her features, this time from the first work of his she read and his debut, The Half-Life. But that book is composed of two stories 150 years apart, and this is just the earlier one, plus a contemporary opening of the finding of two old skeletons shallowly buried side by side, a foreshadowing. Besides, in the book the joint venture is extracting castoreum, a beaver musk highly prized in China. I have not read the book, but I think I would still prefer the simpler version of this film. The minimalism strains the patience at times, but through it Reichardt creates a mood here that haunts and lingers.

First Cow, 121 mins., debuted Aug. 30, 2019 at Telluride, showing also at the New York Film Festival (where Reichardt, Megaro, and Lee were present at Lincoln Center Oct. 3 for a Q&A - watch it HERE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1SukKUVCYE) - with festival programming director Dennis Lim); it comes to US theaters, distributed by A24, Mar. 6, 2020. Metascore went from 76% at the time of this review to 89% since its US theatrical release.

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KELLY REICHARDT AND CAST OF FIRST COW INTERVIEWED BY DENNIS LIM AT NYFF Q&A [CK photo]

[Chris Knipp]

NOAH BAUMBACH: MARRIAGE STORY (2019)

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SCARLET JOHANNSON AND ADAM DRIVER IN MARRIAGE STORY

A dramedy for all seasons

This is not just a shift from looking at divorce from the kids' to the parents' point of view, but a dramatic example of how far Baumbach has come as a writer-director since fourteen years ago when his early feature The Squid and the Whale (http://www.filmleaf.net/articles/features/nyff05/squidandwhale.htm), also about divorce, debuted at the New York Film Festival. He seems so much more fluent, powerful, and at ease here. Squid was witty, snide, subtle, keenly observed. It also seemed a bit snobbish and parochial. It was content with being minor. It was also very "East Coast." Though the battle between the coasts is dramatized here, with the husband, Charlie (Adam Driver) struggling throughout to have his disintegrating nuclear family defined as New York-based, not only is this a battle that he is continually losing, but most of the movie action actually takes place in L.A.

Beyond that, this is a warmly accessible and insanely enjoyable as any American film this year. Quite possibly Baumbach's best work, certainly in some sense the stars', Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver's best. There is a double aria knockdown verbal yell-fest that's the mother of all marriage squabbles, also a stunning combined tour de force for Driver-Johannson , the director and the crew. The two and a quarter hours go by swiftly. Never before has Baumbach better melded humor and emotion.It's particularly exciting, not to say thrilling, to encounter a film that's at once so accessible and so well-made and specific. Hopefully this time Baumbach can be enjoyed by his widest audience yet, and this can be appreciated by many as one of the best movies of the year. It's the director's tenth feature, and it's a ten out of ten.

The structure is simple and forceful. It's bookended by two statements where Charlie, then Nicole (Johansson), describe what they like and admire about each other - an activity done at the directive of a mediation coach. Charlie is a successful New York theater director, Nicole is an actress. They are breaking up. Things are going to get heated, painful, maybe hostile. This list-making is to ground them in a sense of the good things, the reasons they got together in the first place. The film returns to these lists at the end in a neat and touching way. Throughout, neatness may overwhelm Baumbach's usual subtlety, but there is plenty of wit, and raw emotion trumps sentimentality - the rawness often reflected in the intimacy, sometimes calculated roughness, of the visual style, enhanced by shooting on 35mm.

Any sense of the generic is avoided by the specific focus on the bicoastal issue and the custody and divorce law questions tied to it, while the comedy and the pain are jointly grounded in the work, equally hilarious and cruel, of the divorce lawyers Nicole and Charlie eventually engage. When they're splitting (but still friendly) Nicole goes to Los Angeles to star in a TV series and takes their eight-year-old son Henry (Azhy Robertson) with her.

The balance of sympathy seems to lean toward the male side here. Nicole's TV series remains sketchy. Charlie's theater group comes more to life, with Wallace Shawn highlighting colorful scenes. A play Charlie has developed, a version of Euripides' Electra, is about to go on Broadway. Charlie has to go back and forth to California. During this time he gets a MacaAthur "genius" award totaling $625,000 over five years in quarterly installments.

The divorce threatens to be disastrous for Charlie and his company. He may throw a lot of the grant money to the divorce lawyers, which he wants to use to pay credit card debut and expenses of the company. All the trips to California - and setting up additional residence there - he blames for the failure of the Broadway Electra.

The original plan was for just the two of them, Charlie and Nicole, to sit down and work things out. But Nicole's ditsy former actress mother (Julie Hagerty) talks her into seeing an ace divorce lawyer, Nora (a lean, mean Laura Dern). This means Charlie has to get one and he winds up with the very human but slightly over-the-hill Bert (Alan Alda), because he thinks the high powered lawyer he sees at first (a splendid Ray Liotta) is too expensive and too aggressive.

Public and private, monetary and emotional: the sparring of the lawyers, finally seen in the dreaded divorce court, is a simultaneously hilarious and frightening objective correlative of the squabbling of the couple whose love has turned to hostility or indifference. If the hotshot lawyers miraculously don't finally quite prevail, we see how destructive the mechanism they represent can be.

There is raw emotion and raw language here, but it's wonderful how often Marriage Story evokes some updated version of a screwball comedy. While there's an illusion to Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage that implies Charlie's company may have put on some version of that, this movie plainly isn't directly about the agonizing emotional breakdown of a relationship - except in the moments when it is. It shows the emotional pain more subtly, perhaps more touchingly, mostly by indirection, or by proxy.

This is specifically about American divorce. The title might have been "Divorce Story"; it might even better have been simply "Custody." Because a lot of the focus is on whether the family is defined as California- or New York-based, and what visitation rights Charlie gets with Henry. The Squid and the Whale focuses on teenage boys beginning to see through their pretentious intellectual father played by Jeff Daniels. Here sympathy is with the father. But the spotlight is often on little Henry, who quickly starts liking his California school and classmates, which were supposed (Charlie thought anyway) to be temporary. But while Henry leans toward the new location, it's balanced: he still loves his dad too.

In fact balance describes Marriage Story throughout and is what's so remarkable about it. Baumbach isn't always the most economical of writers. There are details of Henry, or of Nicole's family, that seem unnecessary. But what stands out is how painful, real emotion and hilarious satire coexist in the writing - and the always enjoyable and honest acting. This seems unusual, till you realize it's the mark of classic comedy. It's almost Shakespearean. Can one bestow a higher complement than that? And there are even musical elements, with both principals performing from Sondheim's Company. It's a dramedy for all seasons.

Marriage Story, 136 mins., debuted at Venice 29 Aug. 2019, featured in 8 or 10 other festivals including Telluride and Toronto; showing as the Centerpiece Film at the NYFF Fri., Oct. 4, 2019. Theatrical release Nov. 6, 2019, followed by digital streaming by Netflix Dec. 6. Metascore currently 95%.

[Chris Knipp]

JUSTINE TRIET: SIBYL (2019)

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VIRGINIE EFIRA IN SIBYL

An embarrassment of riches

Sibyl is a disappointment after Victoria, Triet's highly amusing previous film with the same star, Virginie Efira. I was surprised to find people consider Sibyl a comedy. It's more like an account of how a woman in recovery from alcoholism returns to drinking, and why: is that a funny subject?

Too much is going on here, and it's hard to know how to take it. There's a good basic topic (if this can be said to have one): a psychiatrist who steals from a patient's life to turn it into successful fiction. A simpler, more conventional treatment of this could have been interesting enough. But Triet and cowriter Arthur Harari pile on the complexity and obscure this theme. On top of that there's a surreal back-and-forth-flashback-montage editing technique of very short clips (a bad new fad) that's pretentious and adds confusion.

Sibyl (Efira) was a bestselling author but a painful breakup with her former boyfriend Gabriel (Niels Schneider), with whom she has a child, led her to quit writing and turn to psychotherapy (go figure). She is happy now (it would seem) with a new man, Etienne (Paul Hamy) by whom she has had another child, a little girl. She is going to meetings to conrol her alcoholism and isn't drinking. (Just wait.) Of course she goes on seeing her own shrink too.

She has a younger sister, Laure Calamy (from the Netflix French TV hit Call My Agent), who appears several times, most notably to give the little girl a quick lesson in emotional manipulation: she tells her mother she "lacks the tools to deal with life." An amusing, but gratuitous, moment.

As the film begins - but it is full of flashbacks to the affair with Gabriel, including a gratuitous full-on sex scene (eschewed in Victoria) - Sibyl can no longer resist the temptation to go back to writing and to that end is dismissing her patients. There is a crudely comic scene of a patient royally pissed off at this. Tellingly, he says he has given her his whole life. Soon we will learn that she's quite likely to use it.

At least she does when she takes on a new patient who forces herself upon her for an emergency. She is Margot Vasilis (Adèle Exarchopoulos, in full hysteria mode), an actress on contract for a film to be made on and around the island of Stromboli (evidently a homage to the 1950 Bergman-Rossilini film). She is pregnant by her costar, Igor Moleski (Gaspard Ulliel), but he's involved with the film's German director, Mika Saunders (Sandra Hüller of Toni Edrmann). The emergency is that she can't decide whether to have the baby or not, and she can't bear to tell Igor she's pregnant.

Sibyl is never any discernible help in this matter, and Margot goes back and forth. Meanwhile Sibyl - who has none of the qualities of the wisdom of that name, or even any moral compass - is furiously writing a manuscript based on Margot's sessions, and presumably other stuff cribbed from people's lives. As time goes on, publishers turn out to be very pleased with the results. She's also having play-therapy sessions with a little boy grieving for his dead mother. (These seem gratuitous, and not that interesting, but that goes for much of the material that crowds this over-stuffed film.) Flashbacks frantically depict intense encounters between Sibyl and the handsome Niels Schneider.

Soon - and here is when we enter into farcical territory, though it seemed heavy-handed to me - Sibyl winds up with the film crew on Stromboli, because Margot is even more confused and desperate, but the filmmaking must go on, so she, Sibyl, is called in to hep Margot function. But due to the emotional complications with Igor, Margot, and Mika, Mika also is nearing a meltdown, her directing becoming ever more neurotic and extreme. (I couldn't help wondering if the way Mika's directing is handled might make future actors hesitate to take on Triet as a director.)

In a series of heavy-handed filmmaking sequences, Sibyl emerges for a while as the only competent person around, except perhaps for Igor, who mostly holds his temper. (This is a long-suffering and selfless role for Gaspard Ulliel and one of his most unflattering.)

In a way Victoria was a wild, disorderly mess too, with Efira in a ditsy but sexy role. A hilariously absurd courtroom sequence toward the end, the charm and suavity of the great Melvil Poupaud, and the sweetness of Vincent Lacoste as a babysitter enamored of Efira, make that movie charming and fun. That doesn't happen here.

Eventually the responsibility - or the succession of inappropriate roles, not to mention the inappropriate behavior in assuming them, all the while breaking all the rules of medical ethics - causes Sibyl to meltdown, and her return to alcoholism is spectacular. It's also embarrassing, clumsily staged, and profoundly unfunny. While I sided with French critics on Victoria against the Anglo ones who trashed it, this time I have to agree with the Anglos, and hope that Triet will have more success with her material in her next feature.

Sibyl, 100 mins., debuted in Belgium and France May 24 and the same day at at Cannes, Justine Triet's first film in Competition there. It played in four other festivals including Toronto and New York, screened at the latter for this review, Oct. 5, 2019. AlloCiné press rating 3.7 (butI Victoria was 3.8, La bataille de Solférino 4.0), Metascore (same as for Victoria) 57%.


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JUSTINE TRIET AT NYFF Q&A [CK photos]

[Chris Knipp]

MARCO BELLOCCHIO: THE TRAITOR/IL TRADITORE (2019)

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PIERFRANCESCO FAVINO AS TOMMASO BUSCETTA IN THE TRAITOR

For the Italians, a national epic; for us, a sprawling gangster movie with a weird trial sequence

Marco Belloccio's The Traitor seeks to depict the real life of Sicilian gangster Tommaso Buscetta, the so-called "boss of the two worlds." He is important because he was the first major mafia informant in Italy in the 1980's. The movie dramatizes with mind-blowing accuracy Bruscetta's trial as "il primo grade pentito di Mafia," the first high ranking Mafioso "penitent one" or state's witness, or traditore, ("traitor") in the eyes of the Cosa Nostra. This film is very highly regarded in Italy (see Paolo Casella in MyMovies (https://www.mymovies.it/film/2019/il-traditore/) or Federico Girone in ComingSoon (https://www.comingsoon.it/film/il-traditore/55760/recensione/), two big Italian movie sites) and was in Competition at Cannes. Anglophone critics have found it impressive in scope, but in some ways underwhelming. To us it seems somewhat bogged down from the start by an over-abundance of detail, such as a long initial sequence of horrific, loud, violent moments showing assassinations, accompanied by a roll call of flowery Italian names.

Because this is different, more "documentary," though not in the least lacking in the elements of gangster grand opera, The Traitor may seem, to Anglos, ultimately lacking in the flair of the director's other works, such as his muted, haunting 2003 Aldo Moro kidnapping drama Good Morning, Night or his energetic and beautiful fascist biopic Vincere (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2644-New-York-Film-Festival-2009&s=&postid=22961#post22961) (NYFF 2009). And this is not to mention possible overshadowing by the famous early career-making Belloccio films of the Sixties, Fists in the Pocket and China Is Near, the latter celebrated by Pauline Kael as "one of the most astonishing directorial debuts in the history of movies."

The Traitor covers twenty years, skipping most of Bruscetta's early career as a Mafia princeling. It falls into sections, dominated by its make-or-break testimony and trail segment. After the assassinations sequence shows off Cosa Nostra violence, we see Bruscetta move to Brazil, to get away from that and to run crime operations in Rio with his family and Brazilian wife. He leaves behind his two adult sons, one of whom is a heroin addict; it's a decision he regrets after they are both killed by his enemies. But in Brazil he is arrested and tortured. A flashy scene shows him in one helicopter and his wife dangling from another as the cops try to loosen him up by threatening to drop her.

He goes back to Italy and reluctantly, more to save his family than out of any "repentance" (and he rejects all titles for what he's doing), he begins testifying to Judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi). This happens in a series of private sessions and is the film's key relationship. Pierfrancesco Favino, the longtime character actor who plays Bruscetta with enigmatic grandeur, made a point in the NYFF Q&A of repeatedly insisting (in his excellent English) that Falcone is the hero of this story, not Bruscetta; that the men of the Cosa Nostra are evil, stupid fellows. Bruscetta himself hereafter cherishes his relationship with Falcone - whose courage in pursuing this case will lead later to his death in an explosion in a car (duly depicted). In time Bruscetta is given a roommate in his spacious prison accommodations, Totuccio Contorno (an excellent, low-keyed Luigi Lo Cascio), another high-ranking mafioso joining the ranks of pentiti.

Next, after Bruscetta is provided with his choice of tailored suits (with a chance meeting at the tailor's with the soon-to-be-tried "Il Divo" Giulio Andreotti), comes the trial. This is what makes The Traitor special. It seems to a non-Italian operatic, chaotic, absurd: but it not only follows transcripts and extensive films of the events, but was able to be shot in the actual huge courtroom where the trial took place. The "cross-examinations" where mafiosi abuse and accuse each other are wild, crazy macho stuff. Bruscetta, this first time (he will return from witness protection later for a repeat performance), is in a glass cage in the middle, while lesser prisoners are in metal cages along the side.

After this, which results in the sentencing of hundreds of mafiosi, Bruscetta joins his family in the US, in witness protection in various locations from Florida to New England to Colorado. This is interesting too, for its detail, the taste of danger he always felt, though, we learn, he died in his bed as he had wanted, at 71 - but this is also anti-climactic, the stuff of documentary, not of drama.

For Italians we have to remember the story of Tommaso Bruscetta is a great national epic, some kind of partial rite of purification from a long, dark past. For us the movie is more of a mixed bag, with too many digressions to make well-structured drama. The craft and the acting are impeccable, though, and often impressive.

Another important point noted by Bellocchio in his NYFF Q&A (speaking in crystal-clear Italian) but lost to anglophone-only viewers, is that much of the dialogue of the film is in Sicilian dialect that is subtitled in Italian when the film is shown in Italy. He can't understand Sicilian himself. Most Italians can't. This important alienation effect is lost for the US audience, since the Sicilian dialogue simply gets the same English subtitles as the Italian. Bruscetta tries to elevate himself by speaking a mixture of Sicilian and Italian (with some Portuguese, which he speaks always with his wife), but Contorno repeatedly points out that he cannot speak Italian. Awareness of this might help us understand a little better that Cosa Nostra is an alien empire, a strange and powerful cancer on the Italian state.

The Traitor/Il traditore, 145 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes with simultaneous Italian release; nine other festivals listed including Toronto and New York, screened at the latter for this review. Bought by Sony it's scheduled for US release Jan. 31, 2020. Current Metascore based on eight reviews: 57%. Highly regarded in Italy. Released in France Oct. 30, with an AlloCiné press rating of 4.3, equivalent to 86%.

[Chris Knipp]

KANTEMIR BALAGOV: BEANPOLE/Дылда (2019

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VIKTORIA MIRONSHNICHENKO IN BEANPOLE

Vibrant grimness

Kantemir Balagov is only 27 years old and this is his second feature; Jessica Kiang calls him in her Variety review (https://variety.com/2019/film/markets-festivals/beanpole-review-1203215728/) a "blazing" talent. This is a long, agonizing study of two battle-scarred young woman working in a hospital in Leningrad, and those around them, just after the end of the War, showing how Russia and its people were ravaged then. The titular figure is Iya (Viktoria Mironshnichenko), whose height, pallor, and strange nervous and muscular condition got her that nickname.

The glowing look and the closeup intensity reminded me at first of Hungarian Laszlo Nemes' amazing debut feature Son of Saul (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4022-New-York-Film-Festival-2015&p=33994#post33994) (FCS/NYFF 2015). Balagov fools you, showing you a gallery of hopeless cases but then seeming to focus on cheer and life with Beanpolel's relationship to a cute little boy, then he delivers a rude shock. The plot is a tangled web of associations, manipulations, and disappointments. But if I understood Balagov correctly, the movie grows wholly out of his fascination with a book he discovered about PTSD among Russian woman after WWII, The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich.

From early on, the action is almost too much to bear and too hard to watch. Yet all the characters, played by non-actors, are vivid, and the images glow with yellows and ochres. The cinematography by Ksenia Sereda is great. As ugly and depressing as the events are, they look beautiful, and the director's youthful enthusiasm makes this contradiction seem not cynical but right. This is a film about youth - youth sabotaged. The rickety, minimal trappings - long trolley cars, ornate but ancient automobiles - still seem very alive, if, like the people, likely to collapse and die at any moment. One old but elegant vehicle is driven by Sasha (Igor Shirokov), who comes one night looking for fun, and his hilariously clumsy frolic with Iya's friend Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina) leads to a tenacious connection. He is homely but he turns out to be rich. He can woo Masha with fruit, salt, and other goodies she shares with Beanpole.

I didn't altogether buy into the action, even though I remained open to being astonished. It's all too much, and the main characters are too fluid. When Shasha takes Masha to meet his mother in a grand house, it's a typically jaw-dropping sequence, an opening up of the action that typically soon closes down. Like everything, it all feels improvised, but in some ways all the more real for that. I salute this wunderkind's remarkable talent and invention.

Balagov hit the Russia film scene by surprise only two years ago with his debut feature, Closeness, which also unexpectedly made it into Un Certain Regard at Cannes, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize. At the time even Russians hadn’t heard of the young director, a disciple of the great Alexander Sokurov, whom he gave a nod to in his NYFF introduction of the film as "my teacher." A great deal may be understood by exploring this connection, but obviously Galagov has made what he learned from Sokurov his own as any master pupil does. It seems beyond the point to say this is one to watch. This is a brilliant, unforgettable film.

Beanpole/Дылда (Dylda), 130 mins., debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes May 2019, winning its Best Director award. Seven other festivals followed, including Toronto and New York, screened at the latter for this review. US theatrical release is planned for Jan. 29, 2020. Current Metascore 81%.

[Some of my information is drawn from this site: Russian Beyond (https://www.rbth.com/arts/330436-beanpole-movie-balagov).]

[Chris Knipp]

CORNELIU PORUMBOIU: THE WHISTLERS/GOMERA (2019)

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STILL FROM THE WHISTLERS

The trappings of a crime caper don't make for much entertainment

Corneliu Porumboiu is one of the most admired of the new generation of Romanian directors, whose Police, Adjective (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2644-New-York-Film-Festival-2009/page2&s=&postid=23034#post23034) I reviewed in the 2009 NYFF, and his The Treasure (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4022-New-York-Film-Festival-2015&p=33970#post33970) in the 2015 one. He has his admirers, no doubt. I am not particularly one of them, and even less so after this latest effort.

Porumboiu provides the trappings of a unique crime story here with an unusual Canary Islands setting, but it's all tongue in cheek, and kind of by-the-numbers, so it's not fun and ultimately makes little sense. If conceptual genre flicks are your thing, go for it. Otherwise, stay away from The Whistlers.

"Corneliu Porumboiu's deadpan, daffy noir has a cop caught in a labyrinthine plot involving women, whistling and a mattress full of money" says Jessica Kiang, in her Variety (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/the-whistlers-review-1203219289/) review. Reviewing this film for the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/20/the-whistlers-la-gomera-review-corneliu-porumboiu) at Cannes, Peter Bradshaw calls it a "elegant and stylishly crafted piece of entertainment," with "a nifty plot" that is "quite involved" but "hangs together well."

There are however essential things missing from the start in this film and they are never supplied: what is this all about, and what are these different players' parts in it? There are mattresses full of cash, yes: where did the cash come from? Cristi (Vlad Ivanov), the stolid, corrupt cop who's the main focus throughout is involved in this business. But what is the business? How did he get involved in it?

Instead of providing details of the crime or personal touches about the characters, Porumooiu gets involved in motifs and peculiar local color. There is a hotel called "Opera" where the proprietor, who's in on the crime, constantly plays opera, on vinyl, loud in the reception area. He has a particular penchant for the Barcarolle from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman. (This gets old after a while.) Most of all, Porumboiu has discovered Gomera, in the Canary Islands, where a code language to communicate with whistles is part of the local culture, and actually taught. Cristi gets lessons and eventually he is able to communicate this way across a considerable distance to the lovely Gilda (Catrinel Marlon). (Why if this is the local culture it's claimed that police would think the whistling was bird calls is unclear. I guess not on Gomera.)

I enjoyed the tightly organized edit of the film, the flashy cars, the pretty if repetitious music, and the beautiful Catrinel Marion. There is a dazzling music-and-lights show at an Asian entertainment park that's used for the final sequence. It's pretty. But it was impossible to enjoy or even understand the rest of the film.

The Whistlers/Gomera, 97 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition and was scheduled for 13 other festivals including New York, where it was screened for this review Oct. 7, 2019. Metascore 74%.


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CORNELIU PORUMBOIU AT NYFF Q&A [CK photo]

[Chris Knipp]

PIETRO MARCELLO: MARTIN EDEN (2019)

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LUCA MARINELLI (CENTER) IN MARTIN EDEN

Jack London translated into Italian

This is director Pietro Marcello's half-terrific, half-off-putting Italian adaptation, with previous collaborator Maruizio Braucci, of the 1909 American novel by Jack London about a proletarian intellectual who decides to become a writer despite lack of education and is troubled by an upperclass girlfriend, becoming too successful too soon, then despairing. Though there was a 1942 film (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034431/?ref_=tt_urv) with Glenn Ford in the lead, the book is well known in Europe but now largely forgotten at home. In America London's dwindling fame rests on his north woods tales and he seems like a YA writer; I had no idea he had this philosophical side.

Pietro Marcello's movie is intermittently engaging, and grabs you from the start, thanks to the charisma and intensity of the rangy Italian star, Luca Marinelli, who proclaims his lines and stares out at us with his big blue eyes. Because Eden is a seaman the protagonist's home base has been shifted to Naples, and despite some lingering American names, Marcello has thoroughly Italianized this material.

Some of Marcello's avant-garde methods can be a bit distracting as we go along. Chief among these is indifference to what era of the twentieth century the action is taking place in, a freedom with period detail he doesn't handle with the same convincing panache as Derek Jarman. An initially intriguing use of edited archival footage also comes to seem distracting and arbitrary, though it's nice that he prefers film and worked with 16mm., and the use of archival footage is something he is particularly wedded too.

It's also true that the character of Martin Eden becomes increasingly shrill and unsympathetic, but that is intended and part of the Jack London novel. This is not meant as a stirring intellectual bildingsroman so much as a disturbing cautionary tale, though that isn't clear until later. It's astonishing when Martin, pushed by his provocative older friend Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi), addresses a socialist rally and attacks their ideology with nihilistic declarations, declaring socialism a "slave mentality." Later at an author lecture he simply sounds crazy. He gets out of control and starts to turn ugly.

As Lee Marshall writes in a Screen Daily review (https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/martin-eden-venice-review/5142449.article), Marcello is best known for his "unclassifiable arthouse documentaries" that "hover" between "reality" and "a cinematic fugue state." I found this a bit hard to take in the one previous film of his I'd seen, his 2015 Lost and Beautiful/Bella e perduta (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34485#post34485) (ND/NF 2016). He has gone much more mainstream here, and with a bigger budget, though he ultimately makes no concessions to conventionality. Martin Eden is innately a strong, accessible story. We're grabbed by the protagonist's naive passion, his discovery of poetry and books through Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), the upperclass girl he meets through rescuing her little brother from a bully. The sympathy will dwindle rapidly later on.

It turns out that in the terms of Italian education, Martin is so lacking in general information that he needs to go back to primary school, which he's too poor to do, even if he could face the humiliation. Conventional education just isn't what he wants. He simply reads and reads and writes and writes and sends his stories and poems to magazines, which all come back marked "return to sender" - until one doesn't, he's paid an enormous 200,000 lire, and the tide turns toward wealth and fame.

The relationship with Elena is ambiguous. It stands for Eden's ambiguous relationship toward class, conventionality, maybe even toward life. She pledges her undying love, but wants Martin to let her father set him up in some kind of office job. Instead when he needs money he goes to the sea, or takes brutal work on a foundry, and he gets into fights. When he becomes known, and turns into an ideologue, expounding the brutal Darwinian theories of Herbert Spenser, Elena rejects him. Eventually he seems also to reject himself - and when she comes back, he rejects her too.

There is something grand but flawed about Eden as played by Marinelli, grand and flawed also about this film. Pietro Marcello's boldness and freedom engage at first, even with the random found footage and the mixing of 1900's clothes and modern cars. Something grand and revolutionary seems afoot, as with Martin Eden himself: one can see how this filmmaker, with his glut of ideas and penchant for breaking genre barriers, would like this class-hopping anti-hero who breaks all the rules and succeeds - till he crashes. Eden's half-cracked plunge into ideology seems cool for a while. It's something so rare in American movies.

Eden's transformation into a rich, spoiled, self-absorbed superstar author happens too fast, especially given how well the film has depicted some of the proletarian settings, Eden's naivete, his affection for the little family he lives with in the suburbs, his speaking of Neapolitan dialect whenever required. (As with Bellocchio's The Traitor, English subtitles fail to reveal the constant shifts from Italian to dialect to the Anglophone audience.) Suddenly Marinelli has bleached hair combed differently, he lives in a grand house, and he wears fussy collars and neckties. It doesn't really compute. Pietro Marcello's plunge into more conventional storytelling is promising but he might do better to pare down some of his avant-garde methods. This is a memorable if flawed experiment.

Martin Eden, 129 mins., debuted at Venice, where Marinelli won the Best Actor prize. It's in seven other listed festivals, including Toronto, New York, and London, and it was screened for this review as part of the NYFF (Oct. 7, 2019). The film received many wards and nominations at Rome. Metascore (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/martin-eden) 57% (when this review was written, which seemed extreme; it's better than that; now at US release time, Oct. 2020, it's grown to 73%). US release date: Oct. 16, 2020.

A Toronto Q&A with the director HERE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNxOu4a2Gak).

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PIETRO MARCELLO AT NYFF Q&A [CK photo]

[Chris Knipp]

LOU YE: SATURDAY FICTION 兰心大剧院 (2019)

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GONG LI IN ISATURDAY FICTION

Exploded atmosphere

Lou Ye's elaborate new black-and-white spy film, a showcase for the still glamorous and beautiful Gong LI set in Shanghai in the week before the December 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, is glamorous and atmospheric. One revels in the rainy streets, the big heavy black cars, the men and women dressed to the nines, the public rooms and suites of the elegant "Cathay Hotel" and a puzzling theater stage that seems like a dance hall perpetually in motion.

If I told you that I never quite understood exactly what was going on, that might not differentiate this movie from Casablanca or The Big Sleep. But something is lacking in the characterizations and the dialogue that those classics have. When it is all over and more than two hours have passed, there has been a lot of mystery and finally a lot of noise and blood, but there is not much satisfaction.

The action takes place in the cosmopolitan "French Concession," a place apart in the "solitary island" that the city of Shanghai has been since it was occupied by Japan in 1937 and a privileged neutral zone. Here, Jean Yu (Gong Li, as a famous actress, not a stretch) has come to join Tan Na (Mark Chao), the lead actor and director, in a play, to be staged at Shanghai's Lyceum Theatre, and they are former lovers. This much is clear.

But the scene in which they first meet here blurs the line between reality and theater, and it keeps getting repeated. I never quite understood why. (It almost seems the director of the film has mistakenly left in alternate takes, an effect that's intriguing, but also distracting.) The action begins in murkiness. And while there are continually moments in the light as various characters, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese, come and go, that murkiness continues and floods our perception of the proceedings. We are trapped in ongoing rehearsals, interrupted by double-crosses, surprised by furtive sendings of encrypted messages, and stunned by fatal shootouts. And yet the murkiness triumphs.

Toward the end, the on screen audience assembles for the play, entitled, yes, Saturday Fiction. But Jean Yu cannot perform because she is in too much danger. Her role is taken, temporarily, by Bai (Huang Xiangli), a reporter, spy operative, and acting hopeful who has infiltrated herself early on into Jean Yu's life. Switcheroos and multiple roles are the essence of this piece.

Jean Yu, who's been in Hong Kong a while, is ceremonially greeted as she arrives in the French Concession by the Cathay Hotel's manager Saul Speyer (Tom Wlaschiha of "Game of Thrones"). He turns out to be spying for the Allies, and will report also on all her activities. She has come not only for the play but to locate her ex-husband, and get him out of the hands of the Japanese, who have captured him. She has been a spy operative herself, hence Saul Speyer's special interest. But she's here also for a third reason. She's been summoned by Frédéric Hubert (Pascal Greggory), a French book dealer who reveals his possession of a rare copy of Sorrows of Young Werther signed not only by the author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but by Friedrich Nietzsche. M. Hubert walks with a cane, but it's just an elegant accoutrement. He's quietly natty dresser who's also a spymaster who has looked over Jean Yu over the years while running her espionage missions for some years.

This is a movie that goes a little too slow for quite a while, until it goes too fast. It steeps itself in rich period atmosphere (though with a few touches that are plainly anachronistic), and lingers over Jean Yu's meetings with various men, and has to take time to introduce us to the puzzling play, the Cathay Hotel's labyrinthine passages, and the cast of characters. The latter include Mo Zhiyin (Wang Chuanjun), the Lyceum's untrustworthy and malicious producer, and importantly, Captain Saburo (Joe Odagiri), a Japanese military intelligence officer who has come to Shanghai to distribute to his operatives the updated Japanese operational codes. These M. Hubert is extremely keen on learning. It so happens that Jean Yu may be able to help him pry them out of Saburo, because she closely resembles his dead wife. (Several people get slipped a sleeping potion that helps unlock their secrets.)

Once all this gets set up, the Japanese come in, violence breaks out, and Jean Yu, in the semi-darkness, becomes a nearly indestructible superhero on the Chinese side, capable of wielding a pistol and an automatic weapon with equal pinpoint accuracy. After the long scenes of dreamy dialogue, I confess I found this sudden turn to violence bewildering. After all, it's Gong Li. All that lovely, if somewhat draggy, atmosphere, exploded, thrown away in a prolonged shootout? It seems modern directors love doing period but lack insight into the genres that go with it. Watch, though, to see what happens to The Sorrows of Young Werther, in a memorable sequence when M. Hubert slips away.

Saturday Fiction 兰心大剧院 (Lyceum Theatre), 125 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2019, also in five other festivals including Toronto and New York, screened at the NYFF for this review. Slated for US release by Kino Lorber. Metascore: 51%.


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[Chris Knipp]

MATI DIOP: ATLANTICS/ATLANTIQUE (2019)

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MAME BINETA SANE, WHO PLAYS ADA IN ATLANTICS

Economic desperation, drowned African refugees, a love story and a ghost story

Atlantics is a refugee drama, transformed into magic and mystery and revenge by possession, that focuses on the women left behind by a group of men suddenly lost at sea when desperation in their work leads them to try to sail to Spain in an open boat. It focuses on a popular suburb of Dakar, poor but vibrant with youth, where workers on a construction site with a futuristic (CGI) tower have striven for months without pay. Among them is Souleiman (Traore), the tall, handsome young lover of Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), who is to marry the well-off Omar (Babacar Sylla) in ten days. A French reviewer called this film "an emotional, visual, and sonorous poem." As the action plays out, the real gives way to dream: the young women take back their power through being possessed by the spirit of their men. The busy trailer for the film uses the tag line DF Wallace's biographer DT Max links to him, "Every love story is a ghost story."

Despite its grand prize, a few French critics found the 36-year-old Diop's film mix of genres lacked mastery; resorted too often to shots of the sea or the full moon. Mike D'Angelo was bothered by the fact that Soleiman possesses the notably fit and young police inspector Issa (Amadou Mbow) instead of Ada and can't agree with Jay Weissberg's interpretation that in his Variety review (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/atlantics-review-1203217085/) that this switch is to "avoid any same-sex 'awkwardness' towards the end." Maybe what both writers really object to is resorting to the supernatural to resolve socioeconomic issues in the first place. That is what bothers me - while nonetheless Diap's choice to focus on the bereaved women, partly a practical one, seems justified as a way of examining the tragedy of drowned African refugees.

The main force of the action is that grief is transformed into righteous anger when a group of the women turn milky-eyed at night and go several times to haunt the crooked building project boss, Mr. N’Diaye (Diankou Sembene) and eventually force him to pay them all the lost men's back wages. But there is also the brief return of Soleiman in the body of the fit Issa to make love once with the bereaved Ada. Soleiman's entering the body of Issa is emotional logic, the only kind that prevails here.

This is a film that makes great sense overall but has shortcomings in the details. You can find fault with various plot elements. Another is that though Ada has the conservative friend, Mariama (Mariama Gassama), who berates her for not being nice to her new rich husband she doesn't love, Omar, it would have been better to include severe hijab-wearing friends, and not just fun-loving ones. D'Angelo certainly has a point that Inspector Issa's investigation of the fire of the marriage bed and persecution of Ada is repetitious and inexplicable. The repeated shots of the sea are indeed repetitious, though they do serve as a reminder of its devouring maw and the loss of all the fine young men.

But all this is beside the point in a way because what is enchanting and strong is the way Mati Diap captures the vivacity and physical beauty of the Senegalese people here. This is Africa, and the film shows us what that means. Soleiman is a gorgeous young man, tall, pretty, with the long, loose, forward stride they all have, which conveys a sense of optimism, strength, confidence: you can imagine how they'd think they could sail to Spain in a little open boat. Ada is equally beautiful, slim, supple, forward-striding, charming, coquettish. In their brief afternoon scene when they kiss and long for more, and there is never a goodbye and Soleiman (like all the men) never tells his beloved he is going to sail away, is yet a bright and memorable moment full of sensuality and lost promise.

Likewise all the scenes of the women afterwards glow with color and energy. The action sparkles. The whole film flashes and pops, underlined by Fatima Al Qadiri's music and Claire Mathon's cinematography that is somehow vivid and rough, in-your-face yet pleasing, a palette that's "muted," as Weissberg says, emphasizing the people, and the (bright and often hazy) light. Even the repetitious full moon and sea horizon shots underline the sensual simplicity of the style. The vigor of the young men is so well conveyed in the opening scenes that their temporary survival after death in the night-possessed women feels possible. This is about the beauty of African youth and an energy and strength that can live on after death. Even if Diap's story choices seem alien to you, you can feel that they come from somewhere profound. This is a film bold in its ambition and imagination, so much so it skips over certain details of logic or consistency.

Atlantics/Atlantique, 104 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes May 16, 2019, and subsequently was awarded the Grand Prix. Mati Diop is the first woman of African descent to have a film showing in Competition at the festival or win an award in its 72 years. The film opened theatrically in Dakar in Aug. Eight other festivals are listed including London, the Hamptons, Chicago and New York. It was screened at the NYFF for this review Oct. 9, 2019. AlloCiné press rating 3.4 from 28 review (though many admired it, a good number of French critics also found it seriously flawed), while the Anglophone critics response was apparently much more glowing, given a Metascore of 81% (based on 14 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

BONG JOON-HO: PARASITE 기생충 (Gisaengchung) (2019)

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LEE SON-KYUN AND JO YEO-JEONG IN PARASITE

Crime thriller as social commentary? Maybe not.

I've reviewed Bong's 2006 The Host (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?1851-Ny-Film-Festival-2006&p=16019#post16019) ("a monster movie with a populist heart and political overtones that's great fun to watch") and his 2009 Mother (https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2135898/?ref_=tt_urv) which I commented had "too many surprises." (I also reviewed his 2013 Snowpiercer (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3775-SNOWPIERCER-%28Bong-Joon-ho-2013%29&p=32507#post32507).) Nothing is different here except this seems to be being taken more seriously as social commentary, though it's primarily an elaborately plotted and cunningly realized violent triller, as well a monster movie where the monsters are human. It's also marred by being over long and over-plotted, making its high praise seem a bit excessive.

This new film, Bong's first in a while made at home and playing with national social issues, is about a deceitful poor family that infiltrates a rich one. It won the top award at Cannes in May 2019, just a year after the Japanese Koreeda's (more subtle and more humanistic) Palm winner about the related theme of a crooked poor family. Parasite has led to different comparisons, such as Losey's The Servant and Pasolini's Theorem. In accepting the prize, Bong himself gave a nod to Hitchcock and Chabrol. Parasite has met with nearly universal acclaim, though some critics feel it is longer and more complicated than necessary and crude in its social commentary, if its contrasting families really adds up to that. The film is brilliantly done and exquisitely entertaining half the way. Then it runs on too long and acquires an unwieldiness that makes it surprisingly flawed for a film so heaped with praise.

It's strange to compare Parasite with Losey's The Servant, in which Dick Bogarde and James Fox deliver immensely rich performances. Losey's film is a thrillingly slow-burn, subtle depiction of class interpenetration, really a psychological study that works with class, not a pointed statement about class itself. It's impossible to speak of The Servant and Parasite in the same breath.

In Parasite one can't help but enjoy the ultra-rich family's museum-piece modernist house, the score, and the way the actors are handled, but one keeps coming back to the fact that as Steven Dalton simply puts it in his Cannes Hollywood Reporter review (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/parasite-review-1212755), Parasite is "cumbersomely plotted" and "heavy-handed in its social commentary." Yet I had to go to that extremist and contrarian Armond White in National Review (https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/movie-review-parasite-laughs-at-family-and-social-ruin/) for a real voice of dissent. I don't agree with White's politics or his belief that Stephen Chow is a master filmmaker, but I do sympathize with being out-of-tune, like him, with all the praise of Boon's new film.

The contrast between the poor and rich family is blunt indeed, but the posh Park family doesn't seem unsubtly depicted: they're absurdly overprivileged, but don't come off as bad people. Note the con-artist Kim family's acknowledgement of this, and the mother's claim that being rich allows you to be nice, that money is like an iron that smooths out the wrinkles. This doesn't seem to be about that, mainly. It's an ingeniously twisted story of a dangerous game, and a very wicked one. Planting panties in the car to mark the chauffeur as a sexual miscreant and get him fired: not nice. Stimulating the existing housekeeper's allergy and then claiming she has TB so she'll be asked to leave: dirty pool. Not to mention before that, bringing in the sister as somebody else's highly trained art therapist relative, when all the documents are forged and the "expertise" is cribbed off the internet: standard con artistry.

The point is that the whole Kim family makes its way into the Park family's employ and intimate lives, but it is essential that they conceal that they are in any way related to each other. What Bong and his co-writer Jin Won Han are after is the depiction of a dangerous con game, motivated by poverty and greed, that titillates us with the growing risk of exposure. The film's scene-setting of the house and family is exquisite. The extraordinary house is allowed to do most of the talking. The rich family and the housekeeper are sketched in with a few deft stokes. One's only problem is first, the notion that this embodies socioeconomic commentary, and second, the overreach of the way the situation is played out, with one unnecessary coda after another till every possibility is exhausted. This is watchable and entertaining (till it's not), but it's not the stuff of a top award.

Parasite 기생충 (Gisaengchung), 132 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, winning the Palme d'Or best picture award. Twenty-eight other festivals followed as listed on IMDb, including New York, for which it was screened (at IFC Center Oct. 11, 2019) for the present review. Current Metascore 95%. It has opened in various countries including France, where the AlloCiné press rating soared to 4.8.

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PARK SO-DAM AND CHOI WOO-SIK IN PARASITE

[Chris Knipp]

EDWARD NORTON: MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (2019)

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GUGU MBATHA-RAW AND EDWARD NORTON IN MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

Edward Norton's passion project complicates the Jonathan Lethem novel

The NYFF Closing Night film is the premiere of Edwards Norton's adaptation, a triumph over many creative obstacles through a nine-year development time, of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 eponymous novel. It concerns Lionel Essrog (played by Norton), a man with Tourette's Syndrome who gets entangled in a police investigation using the obsessive and retentive mind that comes with his condition to solve the mystery. Much of the film, especially the first half, is dominated by Lionel's jerky motions and odd repetitive outbursts, for which he continually apologizes. Strange hero, but Lethem's creation. To go with the novel's evocation of Maltese Falcon style noir flavor, Norton has recast it from modern times to the Fifties.

Leading cast members, besides Norton himself, are Willem Dafoe, Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Cherry Jones, Bobby Cannavale and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. In his recasting of the novel, as Peter Debruge explains in his Variety review (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/motherless-brooklyn-review-1203320042/), Norton makes as much use of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, about the manipulative city planner Robert Moses, a "visionary" insensitive to minorities and the poor, as of Lethem's book. Alec Baldwn's "Moses Randolph" role represents the film's Robert Moses character, who is added into the world of the original novel.

Some of the plot line may become obscure in the alternating sources of the film. But clearly Lionel Essrog, whose nervous sensibility hovers over things in Norton's voiceover, is a handicapped man with an extra ability who's one of four orphans from Saint Vincent's Orphanage in Brooklyn saved by Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), who runs a detective agency. When Minna is offed by the Mob in the opening minutes of the movie, Lionel goes chasing. Then he learns city bosses had a hand, and want to repress his efforts.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw's character, Laura Rose, who becomes a kind of love interest for Lionel Essrog, and likewise willem Dafoe's, Paul Randolph, Moses' brother and opponent, are additional key characters in the film not in the Johathan Lethem book. The cinematography is by the Mike Leigh regular (who produced the exquisite Turner), Dick Pope. He provides a lush, classic look.

Viewers will have to decide if this mixture of novel, non-fiction book and period recasting works for them or not. For many the problem is inherent in the Lethem novel, that it's a detective story where, as the original Times reviewer Albert Mobilio said (http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/99/10/17/reviews/991017.17mobilot.html), "solving the crime is beside the point." Certainly Norton has created a rich mixture, and this is a "labour of love," "as loving as it is laborious, maybe," is how the Guardian's (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/12/motherless-brooklyn-film-review-edward-norton) Peter Bradshaw put it, writing (generally quite favorably) from Toronto. In her intro piece for the first part of the New York Film Festival for the Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/movies/new-york-film-festival.html) Manohla Dargis linked it with the difficult Albert Serra'S Liberté with a one-word reaction: "oof," though she complemented these two as "choices rather than just opportunistically checked boxes." Motherless Brooklyn has many reasons for wanting to be in the New York Film Festival, and for the honor of Closing Night Film, notably the personal passion, but also the persistent rootedness in New York itself through these permutations.

Motherless Brooklyn, 144 mins., debuted at Telluride Aug. 30, 2019, showing at eight other festivals including Toronto, Vancouver, Mill Valley, and New York, where it was screened at the NYFF OCT. 11, 2019 as the Closing Night film. It opens theatrically in the US Nov. 1, 2019. Current Metascore 60%.

[Chris Knipp]

[Found also in Filmleaf's Festival Coverage section for the 2019 NYFF]

MARTIN SCORSESE: THE IRISHMAN (2019)

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AL PACINO AND ROBERT DE NIRO IN THE IRISHMAN

Old song

From Martin Scorsese, who is in his late seventies, comes a major feature that is an old man's film. It's told by an old man, about old men, with old actors digitized (indifferently) to look like and play their younger selves as well. It's logical that The Irishman, about Teamsters loyalist and mob hit man Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), who became the bodyguard and then (as he tells it) the assassin of Union kingpin Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) should have been chosen as Opening Night Film of the New York Film Festival. Scorsese is very New York, even if the film is set in Detroit. He is also a good friend of Film at Lincoln Center. And a great American director with an impressive body of work behind him.

To be honest, I am not a fan of Scorsese's feature films. I do not like them. They are unpleasant, humorless, laborious and cold. I admire his responsible passion for cinema and incestuous knowledge of it. I do like his documentaries. From Fran Lebowitz's talk about the one he made about her, I understand what a meticulous, obsessive craftsman he is in all his work. He also does have a sense of humor. See how he enjoys Fran's New York wit in Public Speaking. And there is much deadpan humor in The Irishman at the expense of the dimwitted, uncultured gangsters it depicts. Screenwriter Steven Zaillian's script based on Charles Brandt's book about Sheeran concocts numerous droll deadpan exchanges. It's a treat belatedly to see De Niro and Pacino acting together for the first time in extended scenes.

The Irishman is finely crafted and full of ideas and inspires many thoughts. But I found it monotonous and overlong - and frankly overrated. American film critics are loyal. Scorsese is an icon, and they feel obligated, I must assume, to worship it. He has made a big new film in his classic gangster vein, so it must be great. The Metascore, 94%, nonetheless is an astonishment. Review aggregating is not a science, but the makers of these scores seem to have tipped the scales. At least I hope more critics have found fault with The Irishman than that. They assign 80% ratings to some reviews that find serious fault, and supply only one negative one (Austin Chronicle, Richard Whittaker (https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2019-11-08/the-irishman/)). Of course Armond White trashes the movie magnificently in National Review (https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/movie-review-the-irishman-martin-scorsese-cliched-gangster-tale/) ("Déjà Vu Gangsterism"), but that's outside the mainstream mediocre media pale.

Other Scorsese stars join De Niro and Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel. This is a movie of old, ugly men. Even in meticulously staged crowd scenes, there is not one young or handsome face. Women are not a factor, not remotely featured as in Jonathan Demme's delightful Married to the Mob. There are two wives often seen, in the middle distance, made up and coiffed to the kitsch nines, in expensive pants suits, taking a cigarette break on car trips - it's a thing. But they don't come forward as characters. Note also that out of loyalty to his regulars, Scorsese uses an Italo-American actor to play an Irish-American. There's a far-fetched explanation of Frank's knowledge of Italian, but his Irishness doesn't emerge - just another indication of how monochromatic this movie is.

It's a movie though, ready to serve a loyal audience with ritual storytelling and violence, providing pleasures in its $140 million worth of production values in period feel, costumes, and snazzy old cars (though I still long for a period movie whose vehicles aren't all intact and shiny). This is not just a remake. Its very relentlessness in showing Frank's steady increments of slow progress up the second-tier Teamsters and mafia outsider functionary ladders is something new. But it reflects Scorsese's old worship of toughs and wise guys and seeming admiration for their violence.

I balk at Scorsese's representing union goons and gangsters as somehow heroic and tragic. Metacritic's only critic of the film, Richard Whittiker of the Austen Chronicle (https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2019-11-08/the-irishman/), seems alone in recognizing that this is not inevitable. He points out that while not "lionizing" mobsters, Scorsese still "romanticizes" them as "flawed yet still glamorous, undone by their own hubris." Whittiker - apparently alone in this - compares this indulgent touch with how the mafia is shown in "the Italian poliziotteschi," Italian Years of Lead gang films that showed them as "boors, bullies, and murderers, rather than genteel gentlemen who must occasionally get their hands dirty and do so oh-so-begrudgingly." Whittiker calls Scorsese's appeal to us to feel Sheeran's "angst" when he's being flown in to kill "his supposed friend" (Hoffa) "a demand too far."

All this reminded me of a richer 2019 New York Film Festival mafia experience, Marco Bellocchio's The Traitor/Il traditore (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37925#post37925), the epic, multi-continent story of Tommaso Buscetta, the first big Italian mafia figure who chose to turn state's witness. This is a gangster tale that has perspective, both morally and historically. And I was impressed that Pierfrancesco Favino, the star of the film, who gives a career-best performance as Buscetta, strongly urged us both before and after the NYFF public screening to bear in mind that these mafiosi are small, evil, stupid men. Coppola doesn't see that, but he made a glorious American gangster epic with range and perspective. In another format, so did David Chase om the 2000-2007 HBO epic, "The Sopranos." Scprsese has not done so. Monotonously, and at overblown length, he has once again depicted Italo-Americans as gangsters, and (this time) unions as gangs of thugs.

The Irishman, 209 mins,. debuted at New York as Opening Night Film; 15 other international festivals, US theatrical release Nov. 1, wide release in many countries online by Netflix Nov. 27. Metascore 94%.

[Chris Knipp]

KLEBER MENDOÇA FILHO, JULIANO DORNELLES: BACURAU (2019)

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SONIA BRAGA (CENTER) IN BACURAU

Not just another Cannes mistake?

This is a bold film for an arthouse filmmaker to produce, and it has moments of rawness and unpredictability that are admirable. But it seems at first hand to be possibly a misstep both for the previously much subtler chronicler of social and political unease as seen in the 2011 Neighboring Sopunds (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3246-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2012&p=27538#post27538) and 2016 Aquarius (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35022#post35022), Kleber Mendonça Filho, and for Cannes, which may have awarded novelty rather than mastery in giving it half of the 2019 Jury Prize. It's a movie that excites and then delivers a series of scenes of growing disappointment and repugnance. But I'm not saying it won't surprise and awe you.

Let's begin with where we are, which is the Brazilian boonies. Bacurau was filmed in the village of Barra in the municipality of Parelhas and in the rural area of the municipality of Acari, at the Sertão do Seridó region, in Rio Grande do Norte. Mendonça Filho shares credit this time with his regular production designer Juliano Dornelles. (They both came originally from this general region, is one reason.) The Wikipedia article introduces it as a "Brazilian weird western film" and its rural shootout, its rush of horses, its showdowns, and its truckload of coffins may indeed befit that peculiar genre.

How are we to take the action? In his Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/bacurau-review-1211067) review, Stephen Dalton surprises me by asserting that this third narrative feature "strikes a lighter tone" than the first two and combines "sunny small-town comedy with a fable-like plot" along with "a sprinkle of magic realism." This seems an absurdly watered down description, but the film is many things to many people because it embodies many things. In an interview (https://nofilmschool.com/bacurau-movie-interview) with Emily Buder, Mendoça Filho himself describes it as a mix of "spaghetti Western, '70's sci-fi, social realist drama, and political satire."

The film feels real enough to be horrifying, but it enters risky sci-fi horror territory with its futuristic human hunting game topic, which has been mostly an area for schlock. (See a list of ten (https://www.fandom.com/articles/10-great-humans-hunting-humans-movies), with the 1932 Most Dangerous Game given as the trailblazer.) However, we have to acknowledge that Mendonca Filho is smart enough to know all this and may want to use the schlock format for his own sophisticated purpose. But despite Mike D'Angelo's conclusion on Letterboxd (https://letterboxd.com/gemko/film/bacurau/) that the film may "require a second viewing following extensive reading" due to its rootedness in Brazilian politics, the focus on American imperialists and brutal outside exploiters from the extreme right isn't all that hard to grasp.

Bacurau starts off as if it means to be an entertainment, with conventional opening credits and a pleasant pop song celebrating Brazil, but that is surely ironic. A big water truck rides in rough, arriving with three bullet holes spewing agua that its driver hasn't noticed. (The road was bumpy.) There is a stupid, corrupt politician, mayor Tony Jr. (Thardelly Lima), who is complicit in robbing local areas of their water supply and who gets a final comeuppance. The focus is on Bacurau, a little semi-abandoned town in the north whose 94-year-old matriarch Carmelita dies and gets a funeral observation in which the whole town participates, though apart the ceremony's strange magic realist aspects Sonia Braga, as a local doctor called Domingas, stages a loud scene because she insists that the deceased woman was evil. Then, with some, including Carmelita's granddaughter Teresa (Barbara Colen), returned to town from elsewhere, along with the handsome Pacote (Tomaso Aquinas) and a useful psychotic local killer and protector of water rights called Lunga (Silvero Pereira), hostile outsiders arrive, though as yet unseen. Their forerunners are a colorfully costumed Brazilian couple in clownish spandex suits on dustrider motorcycles who come through the town. When they're gone, it's discovered seven people have been shot.

They were an advance crew for a gang of mostly American white people headed by Michael (Udo Kier), whose awkward, combative, and finally murderous conference we visit. This is a bad scene in more ways than one: it's not only sinister and racist, but clumsy, destroying the air of menace and unpredictability maintained in the depiction of Bacurau scenes. But we learn the cell phone coverage of the town has been blocked, it is somehow not included on maps, and communications between northern and southern Brazil are temporarily suspended, so the setting is perfect for this ugly group to do what they've come for, kill locals for sport using collectible automatic weapons. Overhead there is a flying-saucer-shaped drone rumbling in English. How it functions isn't quite clear, but symbolically it refers to American manipulation from higher up. The way the rural area is being choked off requires no mention of Brazil's new right wing strong man Jair Bolsonaro and the Amazonian rain forest.

"They're not going to kill a kid," I said as a group of local children gather, the most normal, best dressed Bacurauans on screen so far, and play a game of dare as night falls to tease us, one by one creeping as far as they can into the dark. But sure enough, a kid gets shot. At least even the bad guys agree this was foul play. And the bad guys get theirs, just as in a good Western. But after a while, the action seems almost too symbolically satisfying - though this is achieved with good staging and classic visual flair through zooms, split diopter effects, Cinemascope, and other old fashioned techniques.

I'm not the only one finding Bacurau intriguing yet fearing that it winds up being confused and all over the place. It would work much better if it were dramatically tighter. Peter DeBruge in Variety (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/bacarau-review-1203215347/) notes that the filmakers "haven’t figured out how to create that hair-bristling anticipation of imminent violence that comes so naturally to someone like Quentin Tarantino." Mere vague unexpectedness isn't scary, and all the danger and killing aren't wielded as effectively as they should be to hold our attention and manipulate our emotions.

Bacurau, 131 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, where it tied for the Jury Prize with the French film, Ladj Ly's Les misérables. Many other awards and at least 31 other festivals including the NYFF. Metascore 74%. AlloCiné press rating 3.8, with a rare rave from Cahiers du Cinéma. US theatrical distribution by Kino Lorber began Mar. 13, 2020, but due to general theater closings caused by the coronavirus pandemic the company launched (https://www.cinematropical.com/cinema-tropical/brazilian-hit-bacurau-is-now-available-in-a-virtual-theatrical-streaming) a "virtual theatrical exhibition initiative," Kino Marquee, with this film from Mar. 19.

[Chris Knipp]

BERTRAND BONELLO: ZOMBI CHILD (2019)

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LOUISE LABEQUE AND WISLANDA LOUIMAT (FAR RIGHT) IN ZOMBI CHILD

Voodoo comes to Paris

If you said Betrand Bonello's films are beautiful, sexy, and provocative you would not be wrong. This new, officially fifth feature (I've still not seen his first one, the 2008 On War), has those elements. Its imagery, full of deep contrasts, can only be described as lush. Its intertwined narrative is puzzling as well.

We're taken right away to Haiti and plunged into the world of voodoo and zombies. Ground powder from the cut-up body of a blowfish is dropped, unbeknownst to him, into a man's shoes. Walking in them, he soon falters and falls. Later, he's aroused from death to the half-alive state of a zombie - and pushed into a numb, helpless labor in the hell of a a sugar cane field with other victims of the same cruel enchantment. In time however something arouses him to enough life to escape.

Some of the Haitian sequences center around a moonlit cemetery whose large tombs seem airy and haunted and astonishingly grand for what we know as the poorest country in the hemisphere.

From the thumping, vibrant ceremonies of Haitian voodoo (Bonello's command of music is always fresh and astonishing as his images are lush and beautiful) we're rushed to the grandest private boarding school you've ever seen, housed in vast stone government buildings. This noble domaine was established by Napoleon Bonaparte on the edge of Paris, in Saint Denis, for the education of children of recipients of the Legion of Honor. It really exists, and attendance there is still on an honorary basis.

Zombi Child oscillates between girls in this very posh Parisian school and people in Haiti. But these are not wholly separate places. A story about a Haitian grandfather (the zombie victim, granted a second life) and his descendants links the two strains. It turns out one of those descendants, Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat), is a new student at the school. A white schoolgirl, Fanny (the dreamy Louise Labeque), who's Mélissa's friend and sponsors her for membership in a sorority, while increasingly possessed by a perhaps imaginary love, also bridges the gap. For the sorority admission Mélissa confesses the family secret of a zombi and voodoo knowledge in her background.

Thierry Méranger of Cahiers du Cinéma calls this screenplay "eminently Bonellian in its double orientation," its "interplay of echoes" between "radically different" worlds designed to "stimulate the spectator's reflection." Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2020-02-19/zombi-child-review-bertrand-bonello) bluntly declares that it's meant to "interrogate the bitter legacy of French colonialism."

But how so? And if so, this could be a tricky proposition. On NPR (https://www.npr.org/2020/01/23/798864658/zombi-child-when-the-real-horror-is-colonialism) Andrew Lapin was partly admiring of how "cerebral and slippery" the film is, but suggests that since voodoo and zombies are all most white people "already know" about Haitian culture, a director coming from Haiti's former colonizing nation (France) must do "a lot of legwork to use these elements successfully in a "fable" where "the real horror is colonialism." The posh school comes from Napoleon, who coopted the French revolution, and class scenes include a history professor lecturing on this and how "liberalism obscures liberty."

I'm more inclined to agree with Glenn Kenny's more delicately worded praise in his short New York Times review (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/movies/zombi-child-review.html) of the film where he asserts that the movie’s inconclusiveness is the source of its appeal. Zombi Child, he says, is fueled by insinuation and fascination. The fascination, the potent power, of the occult, that's what Haiti has that the first wold lacks.

One moment made me authentically jump, but Bonello isn't offering a conventional horror movie. He's more interested in making his hints of voodoo's power and attraction, even for the white lovelorn schoolgirl, seem as convincing as his voodoo ceremonies, both abroad and back in Haiti, feel thoroughly attractive, or scary, and real. These are some of the best voodoo scenes in a movie. This still may seem like a concoction to you. Its enchantments were more those of the luxuriant imagery, the flowing camerawork, the delicious use of moon- and candle-light, the beautiful people, of whatever color. This is world-class filmmaking even if it's not Bonello's best work.

Bonello stages things, gets his actors to live them completely, then steps back and lets it happen. Glenn Kenny says his "hallmark" is his "dreamy detachment." My first look at that was the 2011 House of Tolerence (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3165-Paris-movie-report-%28oct-2011%29&p=26924#post26924) (L'Apollonide - mémoires de la maison close), which I saw in Paris, a languorous immersion in a turn-of-the-century Parisian brothel, intoxicating, sexy, slightly repugnant. Next came his most ambitious project, Saint Laurent(2014), focused on a very druggy period in the designer's career and a final moment of decline. He has said this became a kind of matching panel for Apollonide. (You'll find that in an excellent long Q&A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsfj9vOZ0HY) after the NYFF screening.) Saint Laurent's "forbidden" (unsanctioned) picture of the fashion house is as intoxicating, vibrant, and cloying as the maison close, with its opium, champagne, disfigurement and syphilis. No one can say Gaspard Ulliel wasn't totally immersed in his performance. Nocturama (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4282-Rendez-Vouz-with-French-Cinema-2017&p=35290#post35290) (2016) takes a group of wild young people who stage a terrorist act in Paris, who seem to run aground in a posh department store at the end, Bonello again getting intense action going and then seeming to leave it to its own devices, foundering. Those who saw the result as "shallow cynicism" (like A.O. Scott) missed how exciting and powerful it was. (Mike D'Angelo didn't (https://letterboxd.com/gemko/film/nocturama/2/).)

Zombi Child is exciting at times too. But despite its gorgeous imagery and sound, its back and forth dialectic seems more artificial and calculating than Bonello's previous films.

Zombi Child, mins., debuted at Cannes Directors Fortnight May 2019, included in 13 other international festivals, including Toronto and New York. It released theatrically in France Jun. 12, 2020 (AlloCiné press rating 3.7m 75%) and in the US Jan. 24, 2020 (Metascore 75%). Now available in "virtual theater" through Film Movement (Mar. 23-May 1, 2020), which benefits the theater of your choice. https://www.filmmovement.com/zombi-child

[Chris Knipp]

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: WASP NETWORK (2019)

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GAEL GARCÍA BERNAL AND PENELOPE CRUZ IN WASP NETWORK

Spies nearby

The is a movie about the Cuban spies sent to Miami to combat anti-Castro Cuban-American groups, and their capture. They are part of what the Cubans called La Red Avispa (The Wasp Network). The screenplay is based on the book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War by Fernando Morais, and it's mainly from the Wasp, Cuban point of view, not the FBI point of view. Unlike the disastrous Seberg, no time is spent looking over the shoulders of G-men, nor will this story give any pleasure to right wing Miami Cubans. But it won't delight leftists much either, or champions of the Cuban Five. The issues of why one might leave Cuba and why one might choose not to are treated only superficially. There's no analysis of US behavior toward Cuba since the revolution.

On the plus side, the film is made in an impeccable, clear style (with one big qualification: see below) and there's an excellent cast with as leads Edgar Ramirez (of the director's riveting miniseries Carlos (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2875-New-York-Film-Festival-2010&p=25088#post25088)), Penelope Cruz (Almodóvar's muse), Walter Moura (Escobar in the Netflix series "Narcos"), Ana de Armas (an up-and-comer who's actually Cuban but lives in Hollywood now), and Gael García Bernal (he of course is Mexican, Moura is Brazilian originally, and Ramirez is Venezuelan). They're all terrific, and other cast members shine. Even a baby is so amazing I thought she must be the actress' real baby.

Nothing really makes sense for the first hour. We don't get the whole picture, and we never do, really. We focus on René Gonzalez (Édgar Ramirez), a Puerto Rican-born pilot living in Castro’s Cuba and fed up with it, or the brutal embargo against Castro by the US and resulting shortage of essential goods and services, who suddenly steals a little plane and flies it to Miami, leaving behind his wife Olga and young daughter. Olga is deeply shocked and disappointed to learn her husband is a traitor. He has left without a word to her. Born in Chicago, he was already a US citizen and adapts easily, celebrated as an anti-Castro figure.

We also follow another guy, Juan Pablo Roque (Wagner Moura) who escapes Havana by donning snorkel gear and swimming to Guantanamo, not only a physical challenge but riskier because prison guards almost shoot him dead when he comes out of the water. Roque and Gonzalez are a big contrast. René is modest, content with small earnings, and starts flying for a group that rescues Cuban defectors arriving by water. Juan Pablo immediately woos and marries the beautiful Ana Marguerita Martinez (Ana de Armas) and, as revealed by an $8,000 Rolex, is earning big bucks but won't tell Ana how. This was the first time I'd seen Wagner Moura, an impressively sly actor who as Glenn Kenny says, "can shift from boyish to sinister in the space of a single frame" - and that's not the half of it.

This is interesting enough to keep us occupied but it's not till an hour into the movie, with a flashback to four years earlier focused on Cuban Gerardo Hernandez (Garcia Bernal) that we start to understand something of what is going on. We learn about the CANF and Luis Posada Carriles (Tony Plana), and a young man's single-handed effort to plant enough bombs to undermine the entire Cuban tourist business. This late-arriving exposition for me had a deflating and confounding effect. There were still many good scenes to follow. Unfortunately despite them, and the good acting, there is so much exposition it's hard to get close to any of the individual characters or relationships.

At the moment I'm an enthusiastic follower of the FX series "The Americans." It teaches us that in matters of espionage, it's good to have a firm notion of where the main characters - in that case "Phillip" and "Elizabeth" - place their real, virtually unshakable loyalties, before moving on. Another example of which I'm a longtime fan is the spy novels of John le Carré. You may not be sure who's loyal, but you always know who's working for British Intelligence, even in the latest novel the remarkable le Carré, who at 88, has just produced (Agent Running in the Field - for which he's performed the audio version, and no one does that better). To be too long unclear about these basics in spydom is fatal.

It's said that Assayas had a lot of trouble making Wasp Network, which has scenes shot in Cuba in it. At least the effort doesn't show. We get a glimpse of Clinton (this happened when he was President) and Fidel, who, in a hushed voice, emphatically, asserts his confidence that the Red Avispa was doing the right thing and that the Americans should see that. Whose side do you take?

Wasp Network, 123 mins., debuted at Venice and showed at about ten other international festivals including Toronto, New York, London and Rio. It was released on Netflix Jun. 19, 2019, and that applies to many countries (13 listed on IMDb). Metascore 54%.

[Chris Knipp]

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BEN HARDY, JASON PATEL IN UNICORNS

SALLY EL HUSEINI, JAMES KRISHNA FLOYD: UNICORNS

Mechanic meets drag queen

Unicorns is a lively dramatic exploration of identity, queer culture, and the relationship between a working class, straight white, single dad from Essex, southwest of London, and a professional drag performer of British Indian origin based in Manchester. It's also an example of relliably polished English filmmaking, exhibiting the way with a few good actors and good direction, manners and accents in a British film can be used satisfyingly to convey the nuances of class, custom and region and ways they can be blended and interwoven.

The Guardian review (https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jul/06/unicorns-review-sally-el-hosaini-james-krishna-floyd-ben-hardy-jason-patel#:~:text=It's%20an%20evocative%20visual%20lea p,the%20screenwriter%20of%20this%20film).)by Wendy Ide stresses how the monochrome world of Essex garage mechanic Luke (Ben Hardy) is transformed and set alight when he meets the colorful British Indian drag queen. What is it like to fall for a drag queen and then realize "she" wasn't quite the"she" you thought? Yes, it's encountering glamor, filigree, facade, then getting a shock, then, perhaps, coming to terms with the deception and realizing what he didn't understand still mysteriously, troublingly attracts him.

At the first meeting Luke takes Aysha away from a brawl. When she explains to him what it was about, he says it sounds complicated, but she answeres that it’s simply that “Everybody just wants what they can’t have.”

A key scene is where we see the excellent Jason Patel, as Ashaq, the quiet drugstore makeup counter employee by day living with his conservative family, totally making himself over to enter his other nighttime identity, hidden from his parents, as Aysha, bathing, shaving his whole body, making his skin look more glowing and glassy and smooth; then the makeup, then the wig, then the clohes, for the magic transformation. The personality behind Aysha is silky but also tough. It is a total transformation whose effort and accomplishment and magic we're shown.

There is a kiss, when the tough young garage mechanic, Luke, doesn't know he's kissing a drag queen. Then later Aysha comes to the garage where Luke works to beg him to give her a ride as he did the night they met - because as she said she does not drive - to go the gathering she wants to attend in another town. Her drag life involves these treks around the country. Luke has a boring, grimy sex life and the primary responsibility of raising a son, litle Jamie (Taylor Sullivan), who has a behavioral problem and gets called out for repeatedly kicking another boy in a school dispute.

In the case of Ben Hardy as Luke the transformations aren't elaborately physical like Jason Patel's but there are transfomratins seen in layers of emotion all reflected in his"everyday" face without makeup or glitter, with just a bit of washing up. Luke's changes are a thing of rapidly shifting emotons, a kaleidoscope of altering facial expressions, often quite subtle.

These two characters, Asaq/Aysha and Luke, who bond as she pays him to transport her to clubs or dates in different towns, make a striking combination, the odd couple, which fills the screen becaause of how fully Jason Patel and Ben Hardy realize their characters and make belieable the chemistry between the two characters they create. Through them the film has no trouble taking a deep, natural dive into the themes of self-discovery, acceptance, and fluid desire as they bond as "mates" and something much more.

Aysha is warned by her brother at one point that “people are saying things back in Manchester about you," and she she herself darkly remarks to Luke at one point that for closeted South Asian drag queens like her, “there’s only ever two outcomes, forced marriage abroad or jumping off a cliff." But the romance, the excitement, are there fror LUke and Aysha, who're both discovering something both in each other and in themselves with this affair.

True, we've seen these themes before. The tough, macho guy who becomes attracted to an exotic creature, a tough-and-tender drag queen is not new. But these actors are excellent and the backgrounds are convincing. The treatment is honest and sensible. As Angie Han points out in her Hollwood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/unicorns-ben-hardy-sally-el-hosaini-review-1235583707/) review, the film doesn't draw near defining lines around the two main characters, point some sort of trite moral, or come to any easy conclusion.

Unicorns, 119 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 8, 2023, showing aso at BRI London, Göteborg, later in 2024 at BFI Flare London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival, Sydney, Rio, and Seoul, and released in the UK, Ireland, Denmark and Israel. Opening in the US July 18, 2025, expanding July 25.

[Chris Knipp]

GIOVANNI TORTORICI: DICIANNOVE (2024)

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MANFREDI MARINI, CENTER, WITH DANA GIULIANO AND VITTORIA PLANETA IN DICIANNOVE

Being Leonardo

Bravo Guadagnino, to have passed the torch to Giovanni Tortorici, born in 1996: to have found somehing good close at home in an assistant director of his great "We Are who We Are" HBO miniseries, which after all is a coming of age story too, like this. Except that was an American boy and girl of fourteen on an American base in Italy, and this is Italy proper, and the boy, Leonardo (Manfredi Marini, in an engaging debut) is nineteen. And he goes through some changes, while the film avoids most of the conventions of the genre. Bravo Tortorici, writer and director for this film produced by Guadagnino, for delivering a traditional genre in a way that is non-traditionally fresh and intelligent, as well as frankly autobiographical, and feels unexpected and is even radical in how deeply, historically traditional it is.

Reviews, at least American ones, comment on the use of many techniques, jump cuts, Dutch angles, and so forth, the multiiple approches to point of view. First though, this is a European, not an American, film about European experience and the European mind. There is no joking about sex and little in the way of actual sex. There is a hint of a hardon on a train where the only other psssenger in view is a large old man, whatever that means. There is a hint that Leonardo is masterbating on a moment from Pasolini's Salò. Natural enough to be turned on by perversity when it involves a young woman's perfect ass and perfect breasts. There is also a 15-year-old liceo boy with a garland of coevals of both sexes, and a brilliant smile, that Lele (a nickname he's grown tired of) flashes on over and over and tries to find on the internet. He too knows how to smile. But mostly he is trying to find who he is and what he wants to study, who he wants to be. Perhaps he is gay, but more surely he is flirting with conservtism.

As the film begins Leonardo goes to London from his native Palermo to bunk at the flat of his older sister Arianna (Vittoria Planeta) (and she greets him as "fratelllino," little brother) where he is to enroll in business school--but wait! (And there will be many sudden shifts): before that he will immerse himself in his sister's hard-partying lifestyle for a while, pourihg down the liquor which will come back out before the night is over.

Clearly Leonardo has had second thoughts about business school and is not at home with either his sister's lifeestyle, London as a milieu, or business as a subject, because before very long he is on the internet looking up (in Italian) "best Italian universities for the study of literature," and he's getting "Siena" and Bang! he in Siena, enrolled at the university, flat-sharing with a couple of girls, a depressive law student and a fat giggly student of medicine, and preparing to study Italian literature. He eschews the kitchen because they love meat (he's vegetarian) and cooks with a hot plate in his room.

The film is a little bit of a travelogue in giving the names of cities he goes to, all Italian from now on, posted on the screen humorously in big old fashioned letters, first Palermo, then London, now Siena, later Milano, Torino, and then again at the end Palermo (where at last for once he apppars to be in a friendly social group, old schoolmates no dobut). Because we don't know where Leonardo is going next and often he seems not to know either, and he does get buffeted back and forth, starting with his bossy mother (Maria Pia Ferlazzo), this seems for a minute like it's going to feel like a picaresque novel. But eventually it's clearly much more a Bildungsroman. To the extent that except for relatives, including an important young cousin, the other key figures are elders, and Leonardo devotes zero time to making friends. That ready smile is used more to placate proessors or keep attracted girls at a safe distance than to win girlfriends, or any friends. Is he gay? It's not 100% clear. But when he gets access to wi-fi in Siena his first search is for Justin Bieber naked.

All the time there is the "formal invention," which simply means a playful use of devices, fast zooms, odd angles, slo-mo, animation, expressionistic devices to clue us in on Leonardo's POV.

Leonardo is, like most young men on their own for the first time, a messy, even dirty boy, and one of the film's memorable shots comes when his sister comes to Siena for a weekend tovisit him from London and looks around his room and we see what she sees: a great mound of expensive, ornate looking books on one side, a bed, and on the other side a chaos of unwashed clothing and junk.

The books are not at all incidental. Leonardo seeks to define himself by an eccentric focus on pre-modern Italian literature. Even befofe he leaves London he is. seen with a copy of an 1836 book, Lettere familiari by Giuseppe Marco Antonio Baretti, is a replication of a book originally published before 1836. He'sinterested in the seventeenth-century Jesuit writer Daniello Bartoli, with its descriptions he reads of mortifications of the flesh (with illustratiojs), and the nineteenth-century Pietro Giordani's Epistolario. He has squandered what is from a student point of view a small fortune on the special books to go with these pursuits. These he reads intensively on his own initiative. He goes nearly bankrupt, and is down to little more than fifty euros in his account when he calls on his mother for help, and tries pimping himself out to men at this point for soldi, not very successfully. Some rather original animations breifly flash by here. On the streeet nearby he keeps seeing the smiling liceo boy, fascinated by him, evidently.

Tortorici shows all those arcane titles without caring if anybody gets them. Guadagnino told him he should make his own film, trying to please would ruin it, and this is what makes it so unique and good.

With the Dante professor's lectures from the first Leonardo is bored to death. Considering himself a good judge, he writes derogatory squibs during lectures and finds his own supposed "errors" in his oral exam with him were trumped up (he finds the word he used for "vespers," "vespero," though archaic, means the same as the more standerd "vespro"). He cheerishes suchn quibbles because he insists on being right, even when he isn't, quite. He prepares a diatribe against this professor and has it duplicated to distribute around the university, but then thinks better of it. It emerges that squabbled with his profs even at the liceo: his father suggests it's he who's the problem. He is hard headed and egocentric. One senses that he is right, though, that Siena's literature studies, supposedly the best in Italy, may be hidebound and sensecent, the great Dante scholars all gone.

Obviously, Diciannove is serious about its intellectalism, providing onscreen shots of title pages of numerous books Leonardo reads, Gasparo Gozzi's 'Defense of Dante,' for instance, and the literary studies of eighteenth-century Jesuit scholar Saverio Bettinelli, arcane books even for Italians. Leonardo pours over these books. He is highly opinionated and self confident--and prejudiced against anything after the nineteenth century. He declares that Pasolini, for instance, did not write well, and decrees that a famous historian of Italian literature is unworthy of his bookshelf, and in lieu of throwing it out the window, he pees on the book to declare his disapproval. This may about sum up the arrogance of is attitude.

In the last act following the quick visit from London of his sister (where he hides that he has no friends) Leonardo has significant male encounters. His cousin (Zackari Delmas, lively and intense) summons him to Milano to smoke and say he's sick of studying law and is "feeling more letters, more art" himself now. Another wild club and drinking passage follows whose beautiful edit must have taken a long time to get right. Back in Siena, Leonardo walks the centro storico and views one of its high-up plaques with lines from Dante that says: "But could I see the miserable souls/of Guido, Alessandro, or their brother,/I’d not give up the sight for Fonte Branda." All very specific, all very Italian. As Leonardo sits outside reading Ovid we hear a choir singing a work of the eighteenth-century composer Metestasio to show the exhlatation of this experience. (Sedate pre-ninetenth-century music us ysed as a background--except when it's hip hop briefly in the foreground--throughout the film.)

There are two key encounters with older men (not for sex!) that are grueling and precise evaluations of Leonardo's intellectual development and his moral position. One is with a professor who examines him. It's the same professor whose boring Dante lectures Leonardo has sat through a few of and complained of on the phone. He also complains of fellow students and roommates. Phone conversations serve like staccato journal entries sometimes. Right away the professor asks if he has read his book. Of course he hasn't. Zero! In fact this encounter shows Leonardo isn't as well informed as he thinks. The second more profound encounter is with an important friend of his grandmother who turns out to be very wise and perceptive, and a stern judge of the position Leonardo has assumed.

This gentleman is an imposing presence, literally large in all directions, a collector of modern art (in fact played by Italian psychoanalyst Segio Bienvenuto) who grills Leonardo on his choices of subject matter and what the intellectual, political, and moral posiitiohas been making are ns these choices imply. He suggests the conservative, retro literary choices Leonardo has been making are just what a contemporary terrorist--were he to be Italian and study literature--would have made. Leonardo's choice of "morals," he sees as a severe narrowing-down.

All this is relatively terra incognita for Americans, whose college experiences tend to take place in the embrace of a collegial "alma mater" that takes care of all our needs. In the traditional European university town represented clasically by Siena, scholars are on their own and not only have no cosy dormitory but must find their own curriculum and mentors.

But Leonardo is winging it and this is why this fllm at best is like prime Jean-Luc Godard, fresh, provocative, and unexpected. At its best moments the result is exhilarating, and at the very least, with thie appealing young actor and inventive screenplay, it's charming. But Manfredi Marini is never just charming, because he convinces as someone with intellectual ambitions who wants to become a writer and has original ideas, even though he can't always correctly answer the conventional quiz questions of dull, jaded profs. But he is also bull-headed and annoying at times and thinks he knowsmore than he really does.

Making all this exciting and cool is a surprise for a movie called "19." And it works for nearly two hours. But there's plenty of fun here, and plenty of youth of the golden Italian kind; lots of specific information neatly packed in. Guy Lodge's Variety (https://variety.com/2024/film/reviews/diciannove-review-1236128983/) review calls this film "vivid" and "humane," and that's just the beginning of the praise he heaps on it--with justification: Guadagnino has introduced us to an exciting new discovery.

Jordan Mintzer's Hollywood Reporter review (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/diciannove-review-luca-guadagnino-1235985853/) as well as an interview there (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/giovanni-tortorici-interview-luca-guadagnino-diciannove-1235989530/) with the director also attest to how well received this film was at its Venice premiere.

Diciannove, 107 mins., premiered in Venice's Orizzonti section Aug. 30, 2024 and opened in Italy Feb. 27, 2025. It has shown in other festivals at Toronto, Hamburg, BFI London, Mumbai, the Viennale, Göteborg, and in a number of US festivals, most recently coming June 25, 2025 to Frameline in San Francisco. Released in the US by Oscilloscope July 25, 2025.

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MANFREDI MARINI IN DICIANNOVE

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THE FILM MAKES USE OF DUTCH ANGLES: MANFREDI MARINI AGAIN

[Chris Knipp]

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LEXI VENTER IN DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT

EMBETH DAVIDTZ: DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT (2024)

Here is a film whose main characters are white racists, colonialists in South Africa. The sting may be lessened by having the main character an eight-year-old girl who knows no better and accepts the condescension of her elders. She's told black people have no last names, and she accepts that. We may watch with a sort of horrified curiosity to see the situation of 1980 Rhodesia recreated so convincingly. But the film is a rather a disappointment after that because it doesn't have very much to say. Nor does the life of white racists, this hardscrabble, disintegrating farm, seem an attractive environment.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight was written and directed by Embeth Davidtz in her feature directorial debut. It's based on Alexandra Fuller's 2001 memoir about the experiences of her White Zimbabwean family following the Rhodesian Bush War when she was that little girl. The film can be compared to Claire Denis' 2009 White Material starring Isabelle Huppert as a heedless white woman in an unnamed African country who adamantly refuses to leave when the whites are being driven out. The mother here is, similarly, quoted by her daughter as saying she won't leave but she lacks the ruthless authority of Huppert's character and seems only a stubborn hedonist. This film is from the point of view of Bobo (Lexi Venter), eight-year-old tomboyish girl whose face is dirty and hair uncombed and who roams free, questioning her black carers - and adoring her nurse, Sara (Zakhona Bali), riding a motorbike and often smoking cigarettes. Her mother, Nicola Fuller, is portrayed by Embeth Davidtz, the director. The capture of the African atmosphere is good, but the action is meandering and inconclusive. Perhaps this is one of those frequent cases where a book can do what the film adaptation cannot, because ther rich descrioption, a feast of words, is missing here. The filmmakers have selected a sngle short dramatic period from a book that roams over a number of years and life in different African countries.

A review of the original memoir from the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/19/alexandra-fuller-dont-lets-go-to-the-dogs-tonight-2002-memoir) eleven years ago by Anne Enright shows how rich and dense with details Fuller's memoir is. Here were shown things that Bobo only partly understands, yet this is a crucial political situation, the very moment (we hear the announcement on the radio) when the Marxist indigenous leader Robert Mugabe wins the democratic electoin and the white colonial government is over. Wikipedia articles on Rhodesia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodesia) and Southern Rhodesia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Rhodesia) help explain what was going on during the time frame of the film.

Davidtz is good at reproducing the South African atmosphere on the famaily farm, with the cattle, the black servants, the many dogs and cats, the horse ridden with style by Bobo's mother, who as played by Davidtz looks stylish, if sweaty and a bit haggard, but is drunk a lot of the time. Bobo is cared for by Sara, whose husband Jacob (Fumani N Shilubana), a leftist, is very disapproving of the little white girl's free ways and makes clear by his subtitled words in his own language that he doesn't expect the whites to be on for long.

Caryln James in h34 Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/dont-lets-go-to-the-dogs-tonight-review-alexandra-fuller-embeth-davidtz-1235985478/) review, thinks it was a shrewd choice to rest to much on the little girl's shoulders, because the child actress is so good. Yes she is good, but she is taking us on a tour of the surroundings, the blacks, the whites, the civil war, the constant danger combined with a strangely sleepy feeling heightened by the mother's frequent drunkenness. It's hard to comment without reading the memoir, but it's been suggested that there is material in the admired book for more adaptations.

The cinemtography of Willie Nel captures both the hot sun and amiable disorder of the scene and the limitations of Bobo's vision, because often only closeup glimpses of people and scenes appear to us. The climactic moments mix the maudlin and risqué, with Bobo and her plump older sister singing Chris de Burgh's "Patricia the Stripper" as they speed away from the farm that has been sold by the father (Rob van Vuuren), and their mother cannot face it at first, pathetic compared to the strong if wrong-headed Clair Denis character in White Material. With the attempt to reenstate the black characters at the end that Robrert DAniels in Screen Daily (https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/dont-lets-go-to-the-dogs-tonight-toronto-review/5196993.article?adredir=1)has called "hamfisted," we cannot but realize that we have seen a racist world filtered down through the naiveté of a child, as we see when Bobo try to start grooming black children to be her future servants. Perhaps this has been a "bold swing with difficult materials" as Daniels suggests, but it ends by leaving us just as uncomfortable as it did at the outset.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, 97 mins., premiered at Telluride Aug. 30, 2024, also shown Toronto Sept. 6. It is released by Sony Pictures Jul. 11, 2025.

[Chris Knipp]

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AUSTIN BUTLER IN THE BIKERIDERS

C H R I S__K N I P P'S__2 0 2 4__M O V I E__B E S T__L I S T S

FEATURE FILMS
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)
Anora (Sean Baker)
Beast, The (Bertrand Bonello)
Bikeriders, THe (Jeff Nichols)
Blitz (Steve McQueen)
Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice)
Conclave (Edward Berger)
Goldman Case, The/Le Procès Goldman (Cédric Kahn)
Real Pain, A (Jesse Eisenberg)
Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar)

RUNNERS UP
The Damned (Roberto Minvervini)

BEST DOCUMENTARIES
Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressberger (David Hinton)
Merchant Ivory (Stephen Soucy)
New Kind of Wilderness, A (Silje Evensmo Jacobsen)
No Other Land (Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham)
Sugarcane (Emily Kassie, Julian Brave NoiseCat)

UNRELEASED FAVORITES
Afternoons of Solitude/Tardes de soledad (Albert Serra)
Caught by the Tides/ 风流一代 (Jia Zhang-ke)

NOT SEEN YET
Babygirl (Halina Reijn) Dec. 25 release
Complete Unknown, A (James Mangold) Dec. 25 release
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie) (also unreleased)
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross) Dec. 13 release

LESS ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT THAN SOME
Brutalist, The (Brady Corbet)
Civil War (Alex Garland)
Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
La Chimera La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola)
Queer (Luca Guadagnino 2024)
Room Next Door, The (Almodóvar)
Substance, The (Coralie Fargeat)
____________________________

COMMENTS (Dec. 1, 2024)

Just a first draft; a work in progress. But I can guarantee that "Best Features" is a list only of new movies I have watched this year with a lot of pleasure and admiration and think you would enjoy. I'll be working on it. I tend to forget things, and there are late arrivals. I also may make it numerical but for now it's alphabetical. I'm expecting a lot of Babygirl, and as always there are buzz-worthy 2024 films I have not yet seen, notably Nickel Boys. I stive to focus on movies available to everyone to watch, but that's less a problem now that there are so many eventual releases on platforms. As for the "Less Enthusiastic" list, I recommend that you watch them too, because people are talking about them - a lot, especially The Brutalist, The Substance, and Emilia Pérez.
And then there's Megalopolis. Whether or not they are as great, or for that matter as awful, as some people are claiming, they will be talked about during awards season.

Enjoy - and try to get out to see all you can in a movie theter!

[Chris Knipp]

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ALEX ROSS PERRY: VIDEOHEAVEN (2025)

The rise and decline of the video store, as told in film clips

This is a film about video stores, which has been done before. But this one is notable for its many amazing film clips. The phenomenon of video stores, Maya Hawke's narration says, began in the seventies and ended in the 2010's. The narration sees this as a kind of heyday, and when we think of, say, Quentin Tarantino, we can only agree. Didn't work in such a store give birth to this marvellous film-buff filmmaker in a special way, providing a library and a film school? The narration points out the video store era was a time when getting a movie to watch at home was a "face-to-face, hand-to-hand process," a person-to-person social transaction (and imagine talking to Tarantino in choosing and taking out your pick). There is a nostalgic cult of the VHS among film buffs, with a place for the video store in it.

Why did video stores predominate in America more than Europe? The film doesn't give a good explanation, but assumes it's because they were places mostly for Hollywood products. Does that matter, and is it even true? My favorite video stores were all ones where lots of foreign films were on offer. And yes, I watched this film because of strong memories of a dazzed, blissful period when I myself rented, brought home, and watched videos in one format or another nearly every day.

The film concentrates on showing and talkling about clips of video stores from movies, starting with Ethan Hawke's Hamlet, where a hertbreakngly young Hawke wanders wide-eyed and pale-skinned through a videos store in knitted cap and plunging neckline whilst a soft voice-over of his voice recites the "to be or not to be" soliloquy. We see a richly decorated store in the 1989 Speaking Parts. There will be many, many more.

Next comes a focus on the topic of VCR's, which, starting in the late 1970's, quickly becme a staple in Ameican homes: video cassette recorders, used primarily for playing videotapes. Some of us had two machines, one for playing the rented videotape, the other for copying it while watching it, fof future re-watching, which rarely happened, after the tape was returned to the rental store. There were those of us who accumulated thus hundreds of putatively illegal copies, in one's own private library. Who watches them now? But there still are a few video stores, which mostly might have the DVD's that replaced the tapes, but the tapes too. I find from a search that "Seattle's Scarecrow Video is one of the world's largest physical media collections, with over 130,000 film titles available to the public to rent on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VHS. The institution's VHS collection is comprised of around 15,000 items." And it's current. The importance of this survival is that, as with 78 rpm to LP, and LP to CD, many titles in one format never get transferred to the new one.

VHS tapes first appeared in the US in 1976 (in Japan a year before) and interest in the wonder of independent home viewing (not relying on what came over your TV channels) rapidly grew. Over the course of the 1980's, the narration tells us, there was "a profound change in American movie culture," signalled by the growing dominance of home video-watching over movie-theater-going. Not a happy development, I might say; but then, it meant people could watch lots more films. Videos and video stores were the main conduit through which new movies got seen. The chain stores like Blockbuster took over from the little, dark, ideosyncratic stores with their film buff staffs. They instead were "family-friendly," large, brightly-lit, uniformly laid out, organized, but lacking that je-ne-sais-quoi that made the little video stores places with a vibe and more of a cult feeling and following. Those of us who were video fiends and buffs never really warmed to the big chain video stores, but we had to resort to them as the cool ones were overwhelmed or gave up - though a few powerhouse indie stores remained like the famous Scarecrow Video in Seattle, Beyond Video in Baltimore or Movie Madness in Portland. The force of change of course was technology. This film doesn't much go into that, but people continue to watch videos at home, ideally on blu-ray, probably on much bigger and nicer screens than were common in the heyday of VHS. But they must have to buy them rather than rent them.

I remember videotapes. They coild let you down, as when you got stuck with a bad copy or a broken or damaged tape. But with a high quality VCR it was possible to watch segments of a film in slow-mo, and even frame by frame, to pick apart how a sequence was made. Apparently this is still possible with high-quality players. It is I who have fallen off. Though over the past 20 years I have watched a lot of new films in the Walter Reade Theater at New York's Lincoln Center, which is as good a sound system and big screen as you can find, I've also myself to become largely reduced to watchiing online screeners on a laptop.

That way, something is lost - the physicality of the movie-viewing experience. When we are no longer getting access to the thing in a physical form, and it's robbed of its thing-ness, it also loses an essential element of its value. Think of the difference between wearing a diamond necklace and looking at a picture of one. An online screener, a blu-ray DVD, or a VHS tape all provide an image on a screen, but the disc and tape deliveries have a physical, artisial quality.

Alex Ross Perry's film, as I've suggested, is most notable for its many short clips of movie scenes set in video stores. A brief one from Juice (1992) simply shows the behind of a very fetching female video cleark in rolled up denim short shorts - and long black stockings. Next there immediately comes Hélas pour moi (1993), where another female cleark proffers a video of Cannibal Man to a tall blond young French guy with a top knot, who sets the video aside and says, "Pour que le mal existe, il faut justement la créature" (For evil to exist, the creature is necessary).

The rapid, entertaining onrush of clips throughout is sometimes ironic; repetitive; not always selective. Some quirky or violent moments occurring in video stores appear after the statement that they had become a dull and ordinary feature of ordinary life. But the point is made that, in the 2010's, video stores in movies became routine, "unremarked-upon." And meanwhile a big format shift had come, from videotape to DVD (laster disc isn't mentioned, and true, it's only a blip, though I had them), which further downgraded the indie stores that might not have had the funds to lay in a full stock of DVD's. Partly this is a history not just of video stores so much, but of video stores on film, and the point is repeatedly (rather reduntantly) made that now, such images are historical only, because despite a few lingering stores, they have vanished from daily life.

Videoheaven's history shows that at first in movies video stores were shown a lot as associated with violence or porn. In the later 1980's they started to become more routine background with no special associations. The narrator also recounts how the stores themselves changed, as has been mentioned already, but also with the addition of small video rental sections in electronics stores or supermarkeets, etc. Again the dizzying number of short clips continue, showing how often video stores appeared in movies, in their day. We also see a dizzying array of bad male hairstyles.

In fact video stores were partly associated with violence and porn in real life, because one thing at least some of them did was make available movies that couldn't be shown in movie theaters or on television, B movies, slasher movies. Some of them actually had a little room with porn curtained off from the rest. But now the internet has no curtains.

Sometimes Videoheaven seems more like a doggedly thorough academic paper than a thoughtful documentary film. It doesn't seem to care about the quality of most of the films it shows clips from, which becomes obvious when it shows clips from Nicole Holofcener's 1996 Walking and Talking, where the passing affair of a female character, Amelia (a young Catherine Keener) and a "scruffy video clerk named Bill" (Kevin Corrigan), even if only a subplot of the film, seems more interesting than any of the films briefly glipsed so far. Were there no interesting movies involving video stores before 1996? This film goes back and forth in time, attaching immportance to the difference between the 1980's and 1990's, and then seeming to merge them together.

A point of interest arises when video clerks (finally!) come up as a topic, and the two clerks who became famous directors, Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino. A clip of Tarantino himself shows he revisited the store where he worked for five years to clelbrate his film's coming out on video, while Smith's Clerks is described because he alone of the two made a film set in a video store. Obviusly clerks are the human element in the video store, and important in movie representations of these places, and they play lots of different roles: potential date, mean S.O.B., smart guy, know-it-all snob, or "sympathetic outsider."

The film goes a bit overboard when it calls negociating a film rental from a clerk "a sacred transaction." Transaction, yes; but sacred? An interesting twist is scenes from bigger, more mainstream video stores where the clerks aren't so much rude, like Randal, in Kevin Smith's classic Clerks, as super-dumb about movies, like the one in Terry Zwigoff's 2001 Ghost World, who doesn't even know 8 1/2 from 9 1/2 Weeks. Basically, compared to small or independent video stores, the big chain ones in real life sucked, even if they had a lot of videos, because they lacked the individual touch or clerks who knew and cared.

It's nice, and logical, that this film gives special attention to Michel Gondry's 2008 Be Kind Rewind, with its fanciful tale of a video store that becomes, however implausibly, a center of interactive community creativity by fostering artisinal local remakes of Hollywood films. The narrator cites as the last film to be set in a video store is Marianna Palka's 2008 Good Dick, about a store clerk (Jason Ritter) who falls for an unnamed woman played by the director. The narrator is only interested in the fact that this was shot in a real video store that actually survives today, L.A.'s Cinephile Viideo. Is it a good movie? This documentary doesn't care. Tim Grierson concluded his review of iGood Dick in the Village Voice: "It feels provocative but inconclusive—brimming with intriguing ideas about love’s dark underbelly, but not quite confident enough to pull them off." Notes like that, about which of thsse movies featuring video stores are actually worth watching, would have made this a better, more useful film. It is interesting to be reminded tht Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend (2007) has a video store Will Smith visits after the apocalypse, shot in a store thatf actually went out of business shortly thereafter.

It's not germane to this film specifically perhaps, but in my mind I find the images of video stores are now replaced by videos of Criterion Closet Picks (I love the one by Mark Ryance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwcnZjmh0a8), whose "perhaps" favorite is mine too, and what he says about it is beautiful) and the French counerpart, where ten-best picks in a similar cube packed with DVD's can be found on YouTube.

Videoheaven provides much more detail than can be mentioned here. I've left out dozens of films that are briefly cited with an identifying clip showing a video store glimpse. Indeed, the seeming comprehensiveness of this documentary - in its discssions of films, in its slightly repetitive orgnization - is a feature that can tend to make it seem at times more wearying than entertining. We deserved for the filmmakers to show us a more interesting, clearer path through all this detail. Perhaps Perry's taking ten years, as reported, to make this film contributed to a loss of perspective. Nonetheless, a feast and a record for VCR fans.

Videoheaven, 182 mins., was watched for this review on an online screener: the way a lot of us watch movies at home today. It premiered Feb. 5, 2025 at Rotterdam, according to Deadline (https://deadline.com/2024/11/rotterdam-focus-strand-alex-ross-perry-videoheaven-1236176456/), as part of "a Focus strand entitled 'Hold Video in Your Hand', celebrating the community spirit of VHS culture," which included other films. It was also featured at Groningen, Nyon, Jeonju, Sydney, Tribeca and Oak Cliff. US release July 2, 2025.

[Chris Knipp]

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MEL IN T

LANE MICHAEL STANLEY: T (2024)

Filmed over lead actor Mel Glickman’s real-life first year taking testosterone, T is a
fictionalized, never-before-seen journey of transmasculine discovery, portraying the struggles and joys encountered in friendships, family, and romantic relationships over this period of time as the changes take place due to the male sex hormone. This is a minimalist doc-fiction hybrid in which people involved partially act out what they are going throush as they are going through it. No frills here, but authentic feelings.

Interview with the director. (https://distracttv.com/breaking-boundaries-inside-the-making-of-t-a-groundbreaking-transmasculine-drama/)

SYNOPSIS
Filmed over lead actor Mel Glickman’s real-life first year taking testosterone, T is a
fictionalized, never-before-seen journey of transmasculine discovery, authentically portraying
the moving struggles and joys encountered in friendships, family, and romantic relationships.
After being out as non-binary for four years, Em decides to take charge of their body and life
and begin testosterone therapy. Their fiancé Spencer reacts badly - though he is bisexual, he
can’t imagine coming out to his family and publicly dating someone who isn’t a woman. Em
leaves him, gets their prescription, and does their first testosterone shot with their friend
Rose, a trans woman navigating how to get back onstage after quitting music when she
transitioned.
Em starts dating Ana, a non-binary performance artist who shows Em how to let loose - and
inspires a sexual awakening in Em. But when Ana stops taking her bipolar medication, she
starts acting erratically - and Em falls back into the comfort of their relationship with Spencer.
Throughout the film, Em grows into themself, all while balancing their romantic relationships,
friendships, and how to tell their loving but conflicted mother who they truly are.

[Chris Knipp]

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JOEL POTRYKUS, JOSHUA BURGE IN VULCANIZADORA

JOEL POTRYKUS: VULCANIZADORA (2024)

Sad friend

In this interesting, strange film from indie auteur Joel Potrykus, two men go on a camping trip in the Michigan woods. We begin with low-quality video of fire and arson. That lures us into the handsome 16mm shots of a rural trail. There is a lot of bickering, a lot of nervous monologuing by the leader of the trek. After an overnight, they come out overlooking a sandy beach. There, a climactic event occurs. There seems to be a joint ritual planned that goes awry. Only one of the pair comes back. He has a rendez-Vous with the law that does not turn out at all as he expected. He visits the young son of his friend. It's all like a loser bagatelle, a play with an underlying strain of sad sack gallows comedy.

Samuel Beckett might approve. In the interplay of the pair in the woods it's easy to recognize something of the humor of desperation Beckett explored in his novels and then built into the iconic tragicomedy of Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Here again there is a pair fumbling through something, on the edge at least of their own apocalypse.

Derek Skiba (played by Potrykus himself, who wrote, directed, edited, and costars) is a balding man with a goatee. He first appears weighed down with camping gear and plans. His spiky hair evokes the image of the classic clown. He keeps a line of running patter going. He is accompanied by his friend, Marty Jackitansky (Joshua Burge), unincumbrered, younger, without enthusiasm. Derek has all these plans, all this foolish cheer. But Marty is the one who has the ultimate plan. He looks gloomy, hopeless, and we start to learn why.

When low-res, mini-budget filmmaking is in the hands of an experienced practitioner, as here, there is no end of how its implications may spiral. Siddhant Adlakha attempts to suggest this in his Variety (https://variety.com/2024/film/reviews/vulcanizadora-review-1236110805/) review when he says "These are men at the end of their ropes, who have now forced themselves into a symbolic purgatory. They exist, now, at the precipice of oblivion, but the result is unexpectedly funny despite this probing spiritual lens — or perhaps because of it."

There is a nice interplay of dimensions between the trek through the woods and what happens to Marty in the reckonings he faces back in town afterwards. It gives you something to think about. Ultimately Potrykus' dialogue hasn't the rich resonance the great Irishman, with his love of "the old questions, the old answers" achived. But Potrykus finds his own kind of thought-provoking tragicomedy here too nonetheless.

Musical moments achieve a considerable resonance. They range from the 20th-century European sophistication of Francis Poulenc's "La Voix Humaine" to the heavy metal violence of Christian Cooney's Vulcantera to the transcendence of "Casta Diva" from Bellini's Norma as sung by the immortal Maria Callas. See, do-it-yourselfers, what you can achieve with minimal means.

(I reviewed Joel Potrykus' Buzzard (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3686-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2014&p=31888#post31888) in New Directors/New Films in 2014.)

Vulcanizadora, 85 mins., debuted at Tribeca Jun. 8, 2024 and played also at two dozen other American and international festivals. Released by Oscilloscope, it opens in New York May 2, 2025 at IFC Center and the filmmaker will be present for the opening weekend.

[Chris Knipp]

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JAMES MCDOWELL IN JIMMY IN SAIGON

PETER MCDOWELL: JIMMY IN SAIGON (2024)

TEASER (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx3bSkr3Siw&ab_channel=BFI)
TRAILER (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9CbPHZC5g4&ab_channel=DarkStarPicturesTrailers)

Exploring the mysterious life and tragic early death of the filmmaker's elder brother, in Saigon

In this very personal debut feature-length documentary, which Peter McDowell completed in his late forties, he explores the mysterious past of his eldest brother, James Austin McDowell, who died at 24 in 1972 in Saigon when Peter was five years old, and whose life seems to have been swept under the carpet by the family. Peter McDowell worked over the space of a decade making this film to find out the story, whose personal significance he also explores here.

Jimmy was a very young soldier drafted into the Vietnam war. "SP4 HHC 20 ENGR BGE VIETNAM," his tombstone reads. The twentieth engineers was a combat division. "The battalion was attached to the 18th Engineer Brigade for most of the war," an online site explains. "With its organic and attached special companies, the battalion constructed airfields and basecamps, conducted land clearing and route clearance operations, built roads and bridges, and supported Special Forces operations." It sounds intense and challenging, not to mention dangerous, but this film doesn't delve into that aspect of Jimmy's Vietnam experience. Vietnam came to mean much more to him than that.

What was Jimmy like when he returned to the US? We don't learn much about that either. Afer his military service ended Jimmy soon returned to Vietnam to live as a civilian. Why? For multiple reasons, apparently. As a youth in Champaign, Illinois he made a homemade movie that we glimpse called Archangel Blues, with other kids as the actors. He was also known as the source of humor in the family, it turned out from letters revealed now that he had not felt he belonged where he grew up, or perhaps the US in general. "I hate the fat, stupid, bourgeois people and the materialism," he said in one letter.

But there obviously was more to it than that in Jimmy's decision to go back to Vietnam. It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, he had secrets. The telegram informing the family of his death gave infection and heroin addiction as causes.

Brother Peter went back to Saigon a long time after that. Without knowing Vietnamese. He went back again later, knowing much more, including some of the language.

But before we learn much about that venture, Peter describes family dynamics, then his own gay sexuality, whose central relevance gradually emerges. The McDowells were a large, comfortable middle-class Catholic family (their big suburban house is often shown) in Champaign, Illinois. There were six kids. Their mother, who is much a part of this film, as are at times the remaining grownup sisters and brothers, and she speaks very comfortably on camera at two different times of her life (wearing stylish thin red glasses frames). Jimmy, the eldest, she says probably thought there were too many, so he didn't get the attention he wanted.

Jimmy just laughed when she asked him as a teenager if he liked girls or boys. Maybe he didn't know, she says. But Peter explains here that he himself was well aware early on of his own gayness. He came out to his mother when he was only sixteen, and describes the sweet, intimate moment. She rejected the idea. She thought it impossible Peter could be gay, believing such people were alcoholic, miserable losers (a not unusual image of the fifties, when she grew up). Peter being "president of his class" and a happy, smiling individual as shown in photos of that time, couldn't be "like that," she thought. But he was sure he was. He didn't need therapy, she did, he says he told her. (Their father, who died of Alzheimer's and is not heard from here, was a music teacher who knew gay people and got it.). "To her credit," he says, his mother did go to therapy, and over time became "a really loving ally and a vocal gay rights advocate."

This is the framework Peter chooses for moving into his investigation of his brother's story. And this framework is a valid one, though arguably, since he takes nearly a quarter of the film's runtime to get here, he has been, in cinematic terms, a bit coy about it. But Jimmy too obviously was coy, or, as his mother says, "protective of his privacy." He told them in letters some things, not others. He said he was working for a law firm that defended American soldiers in trouble, while writing some columns for the Overseas Weekly.

Pages of typed letters home, not reported on in full detail, suggest that Jimmy was a literate and articulate young man. Though he conceals a lot, he does report that he has "the shits," for which he says opium was "the only cure," and that now he's addicted. Describing a predicted future lifetime of wide international travel, he says he expects to return at the end to Vietnam, that letter ends, "to die with my opium pipe and harem of concubines."

On his first trip, Peter goes to Paris to meet Yves Bletzacker, a journalist who we are told was a good friend of Jim's in Saigon. AS an example of the film's adept blend of live and archival materials, we see both Peter talking to Yves, in English and in French, and the detailed letter Yves penned in French to the family after his young friend's death. He had lived in a Saigon loft with a panoramic city view that his American friend later breifly moved into, then moving out to a remote, poor neighborhood to live with a big Vietnamese family. In that family was "Lily," Luyen, who he had suggested was a romantic interest. But she, in a letter (in Vietnamese) later denied that, explaining Jimmy's friend was not she but her brother Dũng (pronounced "Dyung"), who was heartbroken when Jim died and shattered to be forbidden to visit his body in the Saigon American hospital, which, with breathtaking wisdom, forbad Vietnamese visitors. That is all Yves knows... Peter also goes to a small town in France to see Diep, Yves' Vietnamese ex-wife, who also knew Jim, and tells more. She speaks a lot about how "fragile" he was; you wanted to protect him, she says, but Vietnam was a hard place to protect people.

At last Peter goes to Saigon, 44 years after his elder brother's death there. He likes it right away, but, going around with an interpreter, winds up having a very hard time at this remove of time finding anyone who knew Luyen or Dũng. But he does find where Jim lived with them, and the very house, desite a different numbering system. Later he visits the beach where Jim posed for a photo with the one who may have been the love of his life. The American was 24, the Vietnamese guy 18. That photo appears again and again. It's enshrined by Peter and Jim's mother, as later multiple photos of Jim are enshrined next to ones of Dũng by the latter's sister "so he will not be alone."At

In the US Peter sees Dr. Robert Carolan, Jim's doctor in Vietnam, who says his death of a staph infection from a boil on his backside was tragic because it could have been prevented, had it been treated earlier. He doesn't even think his heroin use had been heavy. A friend of that time says it was.

After eight years' search on the internet, Peter finds Luyen, who immigrated to the US in the nineties, and comes to see her in Des Moines. At last she explains that yes, Jim and Dyung were in love and lived together (not with her), and they had already met when Jim was in the Army and Dyung was a moto driver. But they denied being gay because of prejudices in the country. Dyung died very young, at 40, a heavy drinker and smoker, perhaps sent into a tailspin by Jim's untimely death. And perhaps by the repression. Luyen has said the Vietnamese spit on gays. It turns out her letters to the McDowell family after Jim's death were really written by Dyung and signed with her name, as cover.

Jimmy in Saigon is at once an elegy to the lost brother and the record of a patient exploration that reveals the filmmaker's own identity, not only his gayness, but his love of family and his dedication to the task of exploring it and recording the esploration on film., The film leaves one with a sad feeling of the short life, the tragic bereived lover, and the doctor has called Jim's death "tragic." But did Jim not live his dream and his love to the hilt, leaving behind the country he found unsympathetic for one whose sensuous pleasures he embraced? "One can do a lot of living in a short time," Jim ends one letter.

For himself, Peter says he feels lightened by his research because it has removed dark secrets, casting a purifying light on them. Their mother might not agree so easily, but the impressive work of discovery around a close blood tie reminded me of that great, and personallyl healing 2003 film of family exploration by Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect: A Son's Journey (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=222), the "bastard" son's posthumous discovery of, and connection with, his famous father, the great architect Louis Kahn. In Peter McDowell's case, the filmmaker has sought to lift a cloud that hovered over his whole family, while as a gay man he has searched for lost kinship with his mysterous brother. This is a worthy effort that will resonate also with queer people wishing to understand repressive social attitudes toward sexuality that hopefully are fading, but still leave their traces everywhere. In learning about the fraught, semi-hidden gay love, I even thought of Brokeback Mountain. (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=503)

Jimmy in Saigon, 89 mins., debuted as mentioned at BFI Flare Mar. 19, 2022, showing also in over a dozen LGBTQ+ festivals in 2022 the US and abroad including Frameline (San Francisco) and Newfest (New York). Theatrical release in New York April 25, 2025 and in Los Angeles May 8, 2025.

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JAMES MCDOWELL AND TRAN KHANH DUNG IN JIMMY IN SAIGON

[Chris Knipp]

CAAMFEST May 8-11, 2025 Berkeley Three Muslim and Palestinian related films

PALESTINIAN LANDSCAPES
Palestinian Landscapes brings together two powerful films exploring empire, ecology, and resistance. Razan Alsalah’s A Stone’s Throw evokes dreamlike cycles of displacement and return across fragmented geographies shaped by resource and labor economies. In Foragers, Jumana Manna traces the criminalization of foraging in Palestine, revealing how colonial legal systems regulate access to land and tradition.

A Stone’s Throw, directed by Razan AlSalah
Sunday, May 11, 5:00 pm | Roxie
Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice, from land and labor, from Haifa to Beirut to a Gulf offshore oil platform. A Stone’s Throw rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.

Director Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher
*Screener available
Foragers, directed by Jumana Manna
Sunday, May 11, 5:00 pm | Roxie
Elderly Palestinians are caught between their right to forage their own land and the harsh restrictions imposed by their occupiers on the basis of preservation.
Director/Producer/Co-Editor Jumana Manna is a Palestinian visual artist

AGAINST AMNESIA: Screening & Seminar
This program, in partnership with the Berkeley-based Islamic Scholarship Fund, explores the intertwined histories and ongoing realities of displacement, colonial violence, and resistance in Palestine and Bangladesh. Through a narrative short about a Palestinian grandmother uprooted from her home and a documentary on the forgotten 1970s genocide in Bangladesh, the program highlights the the ways in which historical violence shapes mundane aspects of everyday life. A facilitated discussion will follow.

Bengal Memory, directed by Fahim Hamid
Sunday, May 11, 3:00 p.m. | AMC Kabuki 3
A Bangladeshi American explores his father’s memories of a forgotten genocide in their
native country and uncovers the controversial role the U.S. played in it.
Director/Producer/Editor Fahim Hamid was born in Bangladesh
*Screener available

Maqluba, directed by Mike Elsherif
Sunday, May 11, 3:00 p.m. | AMC Kabuki 3
Laila, a Palestinian-American drummer, visits her grandmother in her new apartment during a powerful storm under the guise of helping her unpack. But her nefarious goals slowly unfold as they delve deeper into the mystical fateful night.
Writer/Director/Producer Mike Elsherif is a Palestinian-American filmmaker
*Screener available


SHORT
Billo Rani, directed by Angbeen Saleem
Part of the Shorts Program: Centerpiece Shorts
Sunday, May 11, 12:00pm | Roxie
When Hafsa, a sparkly and impulsive 12-year-old girl, is made aware of her unibrow at Islamic Sunday School in a lesson on “cleanliness”, her eyebrows come alive and begin to speak to her.
The film is set in an Islamic Sunday School and centers around a South Asian Muslim girl
Director/Writer/Producer Angbeen Saleem is a Pakistani Muslim artist
*Screener Available


A Stone's Throw
https://vimeo.com/868181676
pw: 7aifa

Bengal Memory
https://gumlet.tv/watch/67dc1999982f3b096493d238
pw: DOC1971!

Maqluba
https://vimeo.com/998772961?ts=0&share=copy
pw: teta

Billo Rani
https://vimeo.com/1019601428?share=copy
pw: threaded
--

[Chris Knipp]

JOANNA HOGG: THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER (2022)

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TILDA SWINTON IN THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER

A trip north

The Eternal Daughter may be categorized as a film of horror or the supernatural, but devotees of either will doubtless be disappointed. Numerous critics describe it as "a distinctly minor work" by the director, whose 2019 The Souvenir (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4646-THE-SOUVENIR-(Joanna-Hogg-2019)&p=37644#post37644)brought her to wide attention, and to mine. It's worth going back and watching all her three earlier features, Unrelated, Archipelago and Exhibition: they're not fun watches, but the unfun-ness is distinctly her own, uppermiddleclass British constraints and torments that will seem to grow out of, not lead into, the autobiographical film student with the unfortunate posh boyfriend of The Souvenir. The underimpressed critics also say The Eternal Daughter, which serves as a sequel to The Souvenir II, the end of a trilogy, that it is "slooow."

Well, The Eternal Daughter is unique, and while I'd agree it has its longeurs, and is almost Beckettian in its uneventfulness. It's also subtle and beautiful, and the performance at the center of it by Tilda Swinton as both Julie Hart, a filmmaker, and Rosalind Hart, her mother, whom the hyper-attentive Julie takes to a big old, apparently empty hotel for her birthday, is remarkable. The double performance is not just a stunt. It's also a brilliant idea central to the film's themes and ideas, which magnify and unfold over time like the old Japanese paper flowers that grew when you dipped them in water. And all this isn't just cleverness. It serves to deliver hard emotional honesty that characterizes Hogg's best moments in the other films. After the slow passages, as I watched, the emotion grew, and at the end I was devastated with a still unfolding sense of sorrow too deep for tears.

Hogg makes much use of the horror vibe and genre ticks throughout - a pale face in a window; knocks in the night; Rosalind's setter Louis (the canine companion an important character in many a family), brought along, disappearing and then popping up back in the room; the odd, unfriendly "staff;" the confounding corridors and rooms; the fog outside - and all these events and things allow for the general feeling we have that something strange is going on. Many will doubtless guess the film's secret early on. That's unimportant. It's all in the very distinctive nuance of the film and the interchanges between Julie and Rosalind. It's very important that until the end, a two-shot doesn't occur. You see Julie saying something, then you see - or will you see? You never know - Rosalind. And yes, you're very aware that both are Tilda Swinton in two different sorts of drag. The Rosalind drag includes peculiarly subtle aging makeup. She's not made to look very old. (A very old woman is seen toward the end, in a kind of coda and subtly spooky jolt.) You're marveling at the costumer's and makeup artist's art and the acting, but you're very aware that you're watching Tilda Swinton.

And all this is kind of creepy, if not what you'd call "horrible." Or maybe it is; maybe you can anticipate a Hitchcockian shock coming. It's not like that. It's more like the air goes out of the tire. (Or tyre.) The more overt horror-supernatural vibe comes from the great aristocratic house in Wales that Julie and Rosalind are staying at. It is a place, then in private hands, where Rosalind, as a young girl, was sent with other family members to escape the bombing during the War. But Julie doesn't know much about this. She has devoted much of her life to caring about and loving her mother - she has a husband, but no children - but her mother remains largely a mystery to her. Other later visits to the house turn out to have occurred later, and things happened, not happy memories, that Julie didn't know about. The place is beautiful, in a mournful way. The accoutrements of the rooms, even the keys at the front desk, are handsome. the ornate, formal landscaping outside, shrouded often in cinematic fog, is beautiful in its layers of green. The exterior shots look like subtle color lithographs.

The place isn't particularly friendly. Julie and Rosalind are greeted by a grumpy receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies), who also reappears as the waitress at the dining room (and there are only four dishes on the menu). Is Harold Pinter an influence? This is in some ways like a magnificently visually expanded play, a chamber drama, a drama in the head. A warmer character is a groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell) who talks to Julie a few times and comforts and shares an understanding of loss. He says his wife died a year ago.

Julie is here to celebrate Rosalind's birthday - or is she? The birthday celebration turns out to be grotesque and sad, family happiness gone wrong, though a a bottle of champagne is uncorked and poured from and a birthday cake is brought in. Julie chooses to bring it in herself. But whenever Julie and Rosalind are seated talking together at meals, Julie surreptitiously sets her smartphone out to record the conversation. Early on she's said she's here to work, on a new film presumably, and she goes to a special place to do so, but she can't sleep, she's uncomfortable, and she goes day after day without getting any work done. The other use of the smartphone is to try to talk to her husband. This she has to do out in front of the hotel pacing about near a hedge trying to get reception, which isn't good. And the wi-fi is patchy in the building as well.

These descriptions sound ordinary enough. But in Joanna Hogg's skilled hands and the meticulous, complicated interchanges of Tilda and Tilda, they resonate with meanings you go on pondering long after the film is over. The heart of the matter is the confrontation of lives and family relationships, the permanent, difficult, mysterious, inescapable ones. The daughter is "eternal" because filial relationships never end. Imagine making a movie about your mother and its turning out to be a sort of horror film. Others would make a story that's joyous and celebratory. But where is the truth? I remember the priest who Malraux talks about in his Anti-Memoirs who, questioned on what he had learned about people from thirty years of hearing confession, gave two ideas; there is no such thing as a grownup person; and people are much less happy than they appear. But the scenes we have watched have been an expiation. And the end Julie has come thorough and is typing away on her laptop: the new film has come to her. This one.

If any of this sounds intriguing, you are urged to see The Eternal Daughter. It's a marvelous film, a study of grief, memory and family relationships that cuts to the bone. A minor work? Remember the little Fragonard painting in the Wallace Collection in The Souvenir. That whole film grows out of it.

The Eternal Daughter, 96 mins., debuted Sept. 6, 2022 at Venice, showing at nine or more other international festivals, including Toronto, Zurich, London, New York (Main Slate), Vienna, Seville, AFI, Thessaloniki and Marrakech. Limited US theatrical release and on itnernet Dec. 2, 2022. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-eternal-daughter) rating: 79%.

[Chris Knipp]

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DANIEL MINAHAN: ON SWIFT HORSES (2024)

A feast that leeaves one a little hungry

This glamorous, bold, and almost-wonderful novel adaptation blends dual romance with film noir. One of the most favorable reviews (Hollywood Reporter) (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/on-swift-horses-review-jacob-elordi-and-daisy-edgar-jones-1235994968/)) starts with saying they don't make movies like this any more. And this is one way of approaching the experience of watching it. You imagine entering a dark movie house, sitting through a couple of hours of drama, color, glamour, emotion. And then you walk out into the afternoon feeling hung-over, and vaguely let down.

The music, the photography, the scenery, the five main actors are enough to sweep you away. But something goes a little wrong. Not too much, because those rewards keep paying off. The trouble is these two storylines. This is a bold mainstream gay movie that takes place at a time when it wasn't safe to be gay. This is a movie you couldn't make till Brokeback Mountain came along twenty years ago. But On Swift Horses throws that possibility away. It catches the physicality of homosexuality but not the emotion.

Of course you can't really say they don't make them like this anymore, because they never made glamorous starry stories where beautiful main characters had secret, intense gay lives. That did not happen.

There are five main characters. There are two brothers and a woman. She marries one of the brothers, who is back from the Korean war. The other, a wild, mysterious type the woman is plainly attracted to, wanders off, teasing her and his brother with a promise of coming back to share there new life in California. She goes on to have a secret lesbian affair and the wayward brother acquires a male latin lover. They have another secret: he gambles and she plays the horses. He just gets into a lot of danger, but she plays the game very, very well. She begins working at a lunchroom heavily patronized by racetrack insiders with big mouths, and she takes notes, which pays off, big time.

The two brothers are Lee, played by Will Poulter, and Julius, played by Jacob Elordi. The lady is Muriel: that's Daisy Edgar Jones, who one critic claims is a ringer for Elizabeth Taylor. She doesn't have Liz's lush beauty, or her presence and acting skill, but she is very good and is done up to look nice. She looks in the mirror and likes what she sees. These are great roles for all three. Will Poulter has never looked so sexy, or so astonishingly elegant. When he is sitting on the floor, desolated by what he has learned about Muriel, his slacks and shirt are just so. His brown suede shoes and shining white socks make you long for a return to Fifties men's styles. (This is a great looking mnovie.). Did men have bleach-blushed hair back then? Never mind: Will was meant to wear that pompadour and to speak in that American accent. The long, tall, dark, riply-chested Elordi always looks good, but here there is a mixture of risk and sadness that is truly touching. When Diego Calva told old Variety that he and Jacob Elordi have some "pretty hot scenes" he wasn't exaggerating.

The trouble is that once Julius (I never quite bought into that name) goes off on his own, the movie splits (desite the literary device of their secret correspondence) into two plotlines, his and Muriel's. It's quite fun in the first third of the movie when he is gambling, then working in a casino, while she is sneaking off all dolled up to win at the racetrack. The racetracks themselves are filmed to look bright and stylish. In Vegas Julius meets Henry, played by Diego Calva (of Narcos: Mexico and Babylon). Henry goes for Julius in a big way and Julius responds completely. In fact he is the one who wants to stay and have Henry as his anchor, a surprise coming from this rakish actor. The note Henry eventually leaves when he runs off is "Couldn't wait."

Meanwhile Muriel is having a fun time of her own, namely Sandra (Sasha Calle). (I should have known about Sasha Calle but I just didn't remember her from The Flash.). It all starts with a jar of olives. If a girl teaches a girl how to eat an olive ("It has a pit."), well, the rest just follows, doesn't it? There is somthing feisty and self-contained in Sasha Calle that sets off Daisy Edgar-Jones' doe-eyed innocence-in-love look. (Tough at the racetrack, she's a softie at the girl-love.)

These two secret lovers, Calva and Calle, are fine. I'd like to try Sasha Calle's olives, and maybe her eggs too. It's good that Diego Calva has an authentically heavy Mexican accent, even if it's hard to understand at times. The trouble is that the filmmakers don't manage well the part in the end when Shannon Pufahl's 2019 source novel teasingly almost-reunites Julius and Muriel.

Even this soft failure is almost covered up by an unsually pleasing, lush, sonorous score so warm and comforting it makes you more than willing to sit through the credits to the end. The composer Mark Orton is a master at putting classical-quality music to cinematic use. This is not a film that drags. It keeps the attention by the eventually unsatisfying flips from Muriel-world to Julius-world, with the transitions sliding seamlessly from Daisy in bed with her lover to Jacob in bed with his, and back again, or so it seems.

On Swift Horses is a beautiful movie and one that really ought to be seen on a big screen. The sixth glamorous star is the director of photography, Luc Montpellier. This is a great looking film that's fun to watch, a treat for queer audiences, and a fine showpiece for its actors that isn't doing very well with the critics and with this timing hasn't got much chance at the Oscars, but see it anyway; there's not much out there to see as good as this right now.

On Swift Horses, 117 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2024, showing also at SXSW , Sonoma, Martha's Vinyard, Phoenix, Miami and a handful of other US festivals, and it opens theatrically in the US by Sony Pictures Classics on Apr. 25, 2025. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/on-swift-horses/) rating: 66%.

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WILL AND DAISY IN ON SWIFT HORSES. BUT THIS CLIP CUTS OFF HIS SHOES AND SOCKS!

[Chris Knipp]

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DÉSIRÉ MIA IN ABSOLUTE DOMINION

LEXI ALEXANDER: ABSOLUTE DOMINION (2025)

TRAILER (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_O1X_NDWL8&ab_channel=IGNMovieTrailers)

Abs dom

This tale of a contest to end a future state of global religous conflict draws on Star Wars and perhaps The Hunger Games and has some nice ideas and a cool new young star. With a director who is part Palestinian, we get some conversation in Aabic and more awareness of other languages and cultures than usual for an American film, and that's a good thing. Isn't it nice also to think world conflict might be resolved with a single hand-to-hand combat encounter? This is billed as "a radical new form of diplomacy."

It's the future and many of the world's major cities have been trashed in what has become a global holy war, multiple religions fighting for dominance. A jokey, F-word-talking Patton Oswalt character called Fix Huntley, talking on a cheap camera in a van somehow gets worldwide attention when he proposes a martial arts competition, in which the winner's religion will become the dominant one, to resolve this chaos. A competition Fix Huntley proposes, known as The Battle of Absolute Dominion, will be held and the winner's religion will be the dominant one.

Sagan Bruno (newcomer Désiré Mia) emerges as the unknown top dog in the tournament. If he indeed wins, his religion will be the dominant one. He is 6'3", 190 lbs., has a reach of 80", fights "transvait" style, and easily wins his 12 prelims for qualifiers who are unranked, each of which we rapidly glimpse. He comes from IHS, the Institute of Humanism and Science, so, not a religion at all.

Star Désiré Mia is a tall, loose-limbed fashion model with a German mother and an Ivorian father. He is a 25-year-old social media creator with 220,000 Instagram followers whose parents wish he had finished school. What works about him is that, apart from the smooth, lithe way he fights, with those looks it makes sense when it emerges that Sagan was genetically engineered from donors with this kind of competition in mind. Sagan reportedy has an IQ of 180 and speaks eight languages. He doesn't have to write down phone numbers he needs to remember, just glance at them. His fighting style is balletic: he seems more like a dancer than pugilist and all the "pro" fighters who are matched with him look clunky by comparison, like they'e trying too hard. There is a calm, pleasant air about him that is appealing, perhaps a little otherworldly.

As the movie gets talkier, one of the genetic donors comes in, Sagan's scientist "mother" Satara (Oluniké Adeliyi), a Rhodes Scholar and former world champion gymnast who's also a srhink. This emerges in a chat between the tall, bearded coach and the short female security specialist assigned to Sagan. The father is there too and the picture develops these relationships so that despite being genetically modified, Sagan is loving and loved, like anybody else. The screenplay delves interestingly into a subplot about maintaining security for Sagan in this violent, hostile world, which becomes much riskier after he emerges as a potential winner.

Beside the jokey Patton Oswalt character, the frontal figure for the world's communication is also comedic, a very campy one with heavy eye makeup, a dark five-o'clock-shadow beard, pink hair, a succession of wild outfits, and talk that is in the "Miss Thing" style.

They hash over the fact that Sagan's toughest opponent so far in the Shalom Stadium prelims, a Dari (perhaps meaning Zoroastrian) person, wants to fight to the death even when pinned, and Sagan won't kill him. He eventually "taps out," and competition officials want to figure out by studying tapes how Sagan accomplished this.

Another opponent is a giant Sumo type Sagan beats by climbing around on him like an acrobat. He concludes: "when your opponent is a bull, be a muleta. If he is a muleta, be a bull. Just don't be a matador." Certainly an original metaphor.

When in the midst of finally fighting his first official top-50 opponent, Sagan appears to produce a weapon, and proceedings are halted. It's a misunderstanding, which is frequent with Sagan because his special skills are so unexpected. Eventuallly he becomes justified and recognized and goes on to win a decisive victory when badly injured. But the drama of this is lessened because he doesn't seem to feel the pain. The other combatants have by now begun to see him as a "prophet" because everyone now knows that he hears God talking to him, a development that changes his status as the "athiest" fighter, though this interesting development isn't fully resolved.

This is a different, intelligent kind of martial arts picture even if it fall short of top ranking in both the intellectual and the martial arts categories and doesn't quite achieve the powerful and suspenseful finale the genre demands. Deesiré Mia is an interesting new entry into the martial arts movie roster. At one point it appears that he speaks fluent Portuguese. On an Instagram self-interview he says he has no hidden talents but in this movie he already reveals abilities that are unusual, so that statement seems over-modest.

Other important cast members, somewhat hard to pin to character names, are Alex Winter (Bill and Ted Face the Music), Julie Ann Emery (Preacher), June Carryl (Helstrom), Oluniké Adeliyi (The Expanse), Regan Gomez (Queen Sugar) and Andy Allo (Upload). Also included are Andy Allo, Mario D’Leon, Alex Winter, Junes Zahdi, Alok Vaid-Menon, and John Siciliano. Philip Tan, who’s had a long stunt career that includes work in Inception and Minority Report, oversaw fight choreography, which is not too shabby. According to a Las Vegas Review Journal piece from earlier this month, as a setting the filmmakers used a closed casino called Terrible’s in a small town in Nevada, and a lot of the tournament action appears to be at a hotel. The film makes good use of its very minimal production design with music, sound effects, and a lively cast. People of color are well represented.

During post-production Netflix and Blumhouse departed from the project ( Variety (https://variety.com/2022/film/news/netflix-blumhouse-exit-absolute-dominion-1235423741/) reported), but it was picked up for US and internatonal distribution by Giant Pictures and is available online in the US now.

Director and writer Lexi Alexander is a German-Palestinian filmmaker and martial artist who is known for her work on films such as Johnny Flynton (2002), Green Street Hooligans (2005), Punisher: War Zone (2008) and Lifted (2010).

Absolute Dominion, 100 mins., opens in theaters and online starting May 9, 2025.