Film Comment Selects 2008 At Lincoln Center
FILM COMMENT SELECTS
2008 AT LINCOLN CENTER
Manohla Dargis' description is quoted (no doubt with pride) on the FSLC poster and publicity for this series:
Quote:
A self-consciously punk kid alternative to the New York Film Festival.
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It is true that the NYFF is staid. With only 28 or so official selections and a desire to present the year's best, it does not venture into extremely avant-gard material. And the FSLC in house magazine Film Comment does bring a formidably knowledgeable and occasionally more daring range of tastes to bear in making its selections for its own series. I won't comment on this year as a whole. I will refer you to Nich Pinkerton's Villege Voice overview And also to Nathan Lee's piece on one FCS choice for The Village Voice. His description didn't make me want to rush uptown to see "the truly and spectacularly horrifying Inside" (a French horror movie); and I'd already seen Romeros' new Diary of the Dead and commented on it. I had also seen Jacques Nolot's elegant, chilly self-starred film about a French HIV-positive gay man approaching 60, Before I Forget. I figured since Chop Shop, Boarding Gate, and The Duchess of Langeais were about to have theatrical distribution I could skip them. I chose four films to see:
Fatih Akin: THE EDGE OF HEAVEN
Andrei Zvyagintsev: THE BANISHMENT
Philippe Garrel: J'ENTENDS PLUS LA GUITARE (1991)
Lucas Moodysson: CONTAINER.
I will post reviews of these four in this thread and also of a fifth FCS film that I saw at the IFC Center:
Jacques Rivette: THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS
Fatih akin: The edge of heaven (2007)
FATIH AKIN: THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (2007)
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Reaching for great themes, and telling a good story
The Edge of Heaven (actual title Auf der anderen Seite, "On the Other Side"), Fatih Akin’s new movie, doesn’t have a marvelous character in it like the feisty, moody Cahit, played by the feisty, moody Birol Ünel in Akin’s stunning 2004 directing/writing effort, Head-On (Gegan die Wand), a compulsively watchable cross-cultural saga that won the grand prize at the Berlin Festival. But this one has Hanna Schygulla, magnificent as the bereaved mother of a young woman who goes astray for love. And instead of two people with wildly disorganized lives, it has six people, who come in pairs, whose lives criss-cross unawares. All go back and forth between Germany and Turkey—as they must, because Akin is himself a man partly German and partly Turkish.
Akin's scenario is ingenious enough to have won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes and like Head On's, isn't short on turbulent and surprising events. It unfolds like a collection of neatly intertwined short stories. An old man in Bremen, who's Turkish (Tuncel Kurtiz), goes to a prostitute in a blonde wig (the appealing Nursel Köse). She turns out to be Turkish herself. He revisits her and persuades her to give up the oldest profession and come and live with him; he promises to pay her as much as she's been making as a "woman of easy virtue." He has a nice place with an enclosed garden where one can dine and enjoy the vines and tomato plants. And he's a good cook. But he's crude and reckless. He wins and loses at the races. He's also a drunken brawler and on his first night with the lady in his house his overindulgence brings on a heart attack. She sticks with him, but when he's back from the hospital, still smoking and drinking, he fights her and accidentally kills her. His son, Nejat (Baki Davrak), is a professor of German. We see him in a lecture citing Goethe's disapproval of revolution. We don't know it yet, but at that very moment a young Turkish woman, who's a revolutionary on the run (Nurgül Yesilçay), is sleeping in the lecture hall. The prostitute has a daughter in Turkey and after she dies, Nejat, as recompense, goes back to Istanbul to try to find her. Maybe eventually he meets her. But the markers of the screenplay are the deaths of the prostitute and of the young German woman called Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska) whose mother is Hanna Schygulla.
You can organize all that happens in your mind in various ways—as a study in contrasts and parallelisms of generations; as an examination (like Head On) of conflicts between cultures and between inner moral law and external social pressures; as an ingenious depiction of that modern sense that everybody is connected, yet also doomed to isolation. Or you can just say it means people do the damnedest things. What’s certain is that even with our attention divided among more central characters this time, Akin still knows how to make us care about them. We have to because they feel complex and unpredictable and their relationships are fresh and explosive. His images are open and his movement is wonderfully fluid. One scene slides into the next with such smoothness and inevitability that it’s only later you may feel like these dovetailing moments (though how they’re filmed is nifty) are a little too pat—even as the ways relationships are constantly reshaped alternatively through luck, coincidence or unbridled emotion are curiously moving. Akin has caught something of Kielslowski and also of Haneke. And the way people shift identities may even owe something to the Antonioni of The Passenger. Like these big boys of European cinema he reaches for great themes, but he also tells a good story. There’s something for everyone here, though some in the audience may not know what to make of it all. This is the kind of movie, like Head On, you want to see more than once.
Shown as part of the series Film Comment Selects at Lincoln Center, New York, February 23, 2008, this will go into limited release in the US May 21, 2008.
Jacques rivette: The duchess of langeais (2007)
JACQUES RIVETTE: THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS (2007)
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Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu in The Duchess of Langeais
Passion vs. the rules
Jacques Rivette, the grand old late-bloomer of the French New Wave, is a sacred cow. You must either worship him or turn on him and shatter an idol. It's no use calling this new film "dull," though Armond White and Andrew Sarris have emphatically done so. That will make the cinephile fans call you stupid and impatient and without finesse or taste. It will only signal that you lacked patience. Had you endured the film's considerable longueurs with more fortitude, you would be proud and wear your multiple viewings as a banner of accomplishment, of authenticity. No, don't fall into the obvious trap of calling this film "dull." But on the other hand, it's only jumping on a fashionable little bandwagon to call it a "masterpiece." It's more appropriate to describe it as a reexamination of history and culture--a film more to be studied than enjoyed. Though it does offer some pleasures. It's not hard to look at. Its authentic period interiors and rich costumes are beautiful and presented with an austerity than only enhances them. It has moments that bring Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle to mind (though it's set later)--the recreation of a period through male-female sparring that's so starkly emotional it almost becomes contemporary (because we subconsciously think of historical people, especially famous or rich ones, as lacking raw emotions). The crackly fires and creaky floors and flickering candles might seem clichés, but handled with a sure, unadorned European touch they seem fresh, like the Brechtian vérité of Versailles in Rossellini's stunning 1966 La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV.
Bu there are basic problems. Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu, who play the sparring love-withholding lovers, the Duchesse Antoinette de Langeais and General Armand Marquis de Montriveau, just are not cool. The fact that they never make love and only toy with each other only brings out the fact that these two actors haven't much presence on screen or chemistry with each other. Balibar is thin and long-necked enough to wear her Empire dresses well, but she's no beauty and has no spirit and alas, her voice is a bit whiny. Depardieu, the terribly overshadowed son of the famous father, as Armond White in his review writes is a "former dreamboat...hidden behind acne and unkempt facial hair." Supposedly playing the hero of a desert campaign, Depardieu actually limps from a car accident and (despite good hair and profile) has a face that when seen dead-on seems to disintegrate as from depression or drug abuse or both. That may do for the shattered war hero look, but there isn't much about Guillaume that suggests officer material.
These ill-fitted, unmagical actors are brought together to play two neurotic characters, who, in an unusually focused and formally scripted work for this director, seem like the characters in Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress (2007), people trying to live the lives of eighteenth-century rakes but overcome by nineteenth-century romantic emotions, and in this case a kind of Victorian guilt alternating with the temptation to commit perversion. The colonel has the duchess kidnapped and threatens to brand her. Earlier she's said he's looking at her at a ball as if he had an ax in his hand; the French title is Ne touchez pas la hache, "Don't touch the ax," referring to a superstition about the ax that killed Charles I of England.
She welcomes being branded. So of course he has the hot iron taken away. Isn't this the essence of S&M--to provide the most exquisite torment by withholding torment? Armond White says "Rivette sticks to the melodrama of manners, as if observing a war of social proprieties. Each rendezvous--or missed meeting--of the would-be lovers becomes a game of one-upsmanship. These people are trapped in conventions that they adhere to more than anybody else. They're tragic 19th-century fools--figures from an unfamiliar age who test a modern audience's patience." They do that no doubt, but Rivette deliberately exaggerates the constricting conventions to go beyond naturalism or historical accuracy and make this almost a conceptual piece--and hence not really "Masterpiece Theater" at all (despite Nathan Lee) but something different and more intense and more like Gabrielle---though lacking Gabrielle's excitement.
And without context. Gabrielle's emotional intensity is achieved by great acting and casting (Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory have a kind of high-octane negative chemistry) and by the vividly conveyed sense of a surrounding society that is shocked, even as it looks the other way. In The Duchess of Langeais we see only a few relatives, soldiers, and pals, mere appendages, so that despite all their adherence to constricting conventions the protagonists seem isolated and free--living in their own invented hell. We don't know what the world thinks about them of if it even cares. That's much more a modern idea. Beware a historical film that feels authentic; it's probably even more anachronistic than a conventional one. Despite the duchess' allegedly constant attendance at balls and a couple of dance scenes with nice music, little sense of a rule-imposing society is evoked.
Though she's enamored of Armond or of his love for her, the duchess won't give in to him because she deems it undignified to become his mistress. But why? We need to learn more about the rule book she's following; you can't have a real sense of passion till you know the rules are that it makes people want to break.But despite plenty of cards and letters (most of the latter unopened however), a plethora of chronological intertitles and a few moments of voice-over, this is one of those times where a film from a book (or in this case a Balzac novella) is direly lacking in verbiage to make sense out of what's going on. You can't say nothing happens--besides the kidnapping there's an attempt to storm a convent. But the story is all about the withholding--and we need to know more about its inner repercussions. Despite Rivette's self control and ability to tease, this is a literary adaptation that doesn't quite work cinematically.
Shown as the opening night presentation of Film Comments Selects 2008 (Feb. 15); also showing at the IFC Center, NYC.
Andrei zvyagintsev: The banishment (2007)
ANDREI ZVYAGINTSEV: THE BANISHMENT (2007)
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A long haunting puzzle that's never quite asembled
Not as strong as Zvyagintsev's haunting 2003 debut The Return/Vozvrashcheniye (grand prize at Venice--I reviewed it the following year), this adaptation of William Saroyan's 1953 novella, "The Laughing Matter," is recognizable for its intense, slow-paced style and beautiful cinematography (by Mikhail Krichman). Izgnanie (the Russian title) takes us out to a remote country house where there are thin roads, grassy fields over gentle hills, herds of sheep, and old friends, because this is the childhood home of the protagonist Alex (Konstantin Lavronenko), who's brought his family out there for summer vacation. But before that (and a signal of a certain disjointedness of the whole film) we observe Mark (Alexander Baluev), Alex's obviously gangsterish brother, getting him to remove a bullet from his arm. this is also the first of a series of failures to seek adequate medical treatment. Now we move to Alex with his wife Vera (Maria Bonnevie) taking their young son Kir (Maxim Shibaev) and younger daughter Eva (Katya Kulkina) out to the country by car.
Zvagintsev certainly takes his time with every action of the film. It's as if he thought he was writing a 500-page novel rather than making a movie. The effect is not so much a sense of completeness as a kind of hypnotic trance. Everything is marked by the fine clear light, the frequent use of long shots, and the pale blue filters that give everything a distinctive look. Some of the long landscape shots are absolutely stunning, and the interior light and the way shadows gently caress the faces are almost too good to be true.
When another family comes into the picture and they all spend a day outdoors, the sense of familiarity, summer listlessness, and vague unease made me think of a play by William Inge or Tennessee Williams. That may seem odd for a Russian movie, but the names are only partly Russian, the location is deliberately indeterminate, and Saroyan's source story is set in a long-ago California, not in Russia. Zvyagintsev doesn't seem to work in the real world but in some kind of super-real netherland. Whether it is unforgettable or simply off-putting seems to vary. In The Return it as the one; here it is the other.
Vera drops a bombshell, when she announces she's pregnant and that the child isn't his. The tragedy that slowly but inexorably follows arises from a derangement in the wife and a misunderstanding by the husband. To deal with the problem Alex wants the children out of the way and he is happy to have them stay at the friends' house, where they're putting together a large jigsaw puzzle of Leonardo da Vinci's painting, The Annunciation. I'm indebted to Jay Weissberg's review in Variety for this identification; Weissberg adds, "That... isn't the only piece of heavy-handed religious imagery on offer. There's Alex washing his brother's blood off his hands, Eva/Eve offered an apple, and a Bible recitation from 1 Corinthians about love ("It does not insist on its own way"), handily set apart by a bookmark depicting Masaccio's The Expulsion From the Garden of Eden. OK, we get it, but that doesn't mean the parallels offer a doorway into personalities who offer little emotional residue on their own." And he is right: Zvyagintsev's fascination with Italian painting, and here also with the Bible, doesn't change the fact that the characters nonetheless remain, this time, troublingly opaque. Mark is an adviser and stimulus to action for Alex. Robert (Dmitry Ulianov) is a third brother who enters the picture later. I will not go into the details because the chief interest of the film is its slow revelations.
And yet the revelations don't quite convince, because for one thing they do not fully explain. The wife's behavior remains unaccountable. And a long flashback in the latter part of the film seems to come too late, and to explain too much, yet without explaining enough. None of this is the fault of the actors, who are fine, including the children.
Zvyagintsev's second film, then, is a disappointment and a puzzlement. I began to think after a while that the whole thing would be much more effective if it were done in a very simple style, with simply workmanlike photography, in a film trimmed of all externals, down to the bone, something noirish like Robert Siodmak's The Killers or Kubrick's The Killing. We are left to figure things out anyway, so why all the flourishes? Yet Zvyagintsev's style is nonetheless beautiful, and one only hopes he finds material that works better for him next time. I was thrilled with The Return and wrote "This stunning debut features exceptional performances by the talented young actors, brilliant storytelling in a fable-like tale that's as resonant as it is specific, and exquisite cinematography not quite like any one's ever seen before. " This excitement is why the new one is such a let-down.
Shown as part of the FSLC series Film Comment Selects 2008 (February 25).
Philippe garrel: J'entends plus la guitare (1991)
PHILIPPE GARREL: J'ENTENDS PLUS LA GUITARE (1991)
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A post-New Wave love journal that hasn't lost its freshness
Philippe Garrel is a French director of cult status whose work has not been much seen in the US. Interest among film buffs certainly must have grown with the showing of Garrel's wonderfully atmospheric evocation of 1968-69 Regular Lovers/Les amants reguliers (2005) at the New York Film Festival, with a brief New York theatrical showing two years later. After re-watching Regular Lovers last year I wrote that it is " the kind of film that burns itself into your memory and keeps coming back."
And this is a French cinematic dynasty. Philippe's brother Thierry is a producer; his father Maurice is a veteran actor with well over a hundred credits (recent notable ones: The Red and the Black, Dercourt's My Children Are Different, Kings and Queen, and Regular Lovers); and his son Louis, the young poet and central character of Regular Lovers, is the hottest young French screen actor in more senses than one. Americans saw Louis with Eva Green and Michael Pitt in Bertolucci's 2003 The Dreamers. But what are Philippe Garrel's important films? I don't know; the promoters of the Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center say J'entends plus la guitare ("I No Longer Hear the Guitar") is "arguably Philippe Garrel's masterpiece."
Masterpiece or not, this film (which won the Silver Lion in Venice) is a complete contrast to the over-three-hours-long, epic-feeling black and white Regular Lovers--and yet memorable in its own way. It's quieter and more intimate and more obviously autobiographical--almost like a loose compendium of fragmentary diary entries from a man who had many lovers and one good friend, a painter (Martin, Yann Collette, a veteran actor who happens to have a sunken and blind left eye). The man is Gerard (Benoit Regent). One of the women is Aline (Brigitte Sy, mother of Louis Garrel). But most important in Gerard/Philippe's life is Marianne (Johanna ter Steege), a luminous exotic Nordic lady drawn to drugs and dirty longhairs (unseen in the film but described with distaste by Gerard) who say "Yeah man!" and "cool."
The film begins with Marianne and Gerard in Positano, on the Italian Riviera, with Martin and his friend Lola (Mireille Perrier). They go back to Paris where Gerard spends every evening smoking hashish at Martin's place and talking about Marianne. Gerard's fascination with her is obvious, but there are no love scenes. One day Marianne meets another man and wanders off.
Marianne is, as is well-known, the stand-in for Nico (stage name of Christa Paffgen) the singer of the Velvet Underground and Warhol "superstar" with whom Philippe Garrel had an ongoing relationship for over a decade. In the person of ter Steege, Nico/Marianne's appeal is obvious. Nico herself was in seven of Garrel's films in the Seventies. This one was made three years after her death--and Marianne like Nico is described as dying while riding a bicycle.Gerard meets Linda (Adelaide Blasquez) Aline (Brigitte Sy), and then Adrienne (Anouk Grinberg), but Marianne remains in Gerard's world, the love of his life.
Scenes of J'entends plus la guitare over twenty years later still evoke the Sixties and Seventies in content and style. They are so simply staged they're arresting. A woman comes to the door and says she's a friend of someone else. Apparently she moves in, just like that. The next thing you know Gerard is in the bath and this new woman brings him a plate of food which he forks down hungrily. He gets up, hastily towels off, puts on a shirt while still wet. The woman spreads two sheets on the bed. They get under them, clothed, and propped up on their elbows lie looking into each other's eyes. This is how the beginning of a new relationship is described--not quite realistically in conventional film terms, but with telegraphic immediacy.
When Gerard's girlfriend has a baby, they eat at a table with a whole family, but nobody's identified. Closeup of a young teenage boy looking on with eager happiness as the food is dished out. Most of the scenes are one-on-one conversations (unlike much of Regular Lovers, which is more collective and symphonic). This is like an autobiographical meditation, verging, the FCS blurb suggests, on "psychodrama." Garrel is an heir to the Nouvelle Vague who captures life in the raw with lovely cinematography and interesting and attractive people but not very sophisticated or self-conscious technique. His films (so far as I've seen them so far) can be irritating and slow but are curiously endearing. Think Warhol, but without the titillation and voyeurism, and with a European straight male sensibility, particularly here. Even without the presence of Louis (who was around eight when this was made) this is still a fresh, youthful kind of filmmaking. It may seem self-indulgent, but it doesn't age.
Shown as part of the series, Film Comment Selects, at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, New York (February 25, 2008).
Lucas moodysson: Contaner (2007)
LUCAS MOODYSSON: CONTAINER (2007)
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If you loved 'A Hole in My Heart,' you'll adore 'Container'
Lucas Moodysson is best known for his wry 2000 feature about Seventies Swedish communes, Together, and the stark and heartbreaking 2002 depiction of a Russian girl exploited for prostitution, Lilya 4-Ever. He's also made a film about a man shooting a porn movie in a shabby apartment while watched by his young son (A Hole in My Heart, 2004), a much-praised study of teenage girls (Fucking Amal/Show Me Love, 1998; Ingmar Bergman called it "a young master's first masterpiece"), and a documentary (Terrorists: The Kids They Sentenced , 2003) about anti-globalization demonstrators at Gothenberg. This may give some idea of his orientation, which is very political and takes on a variety of social issues.
Container is a venture--not a very accomplished one--into the avant-garde. With a continual murmured voice-over by the young American actress Jena Malone (who at one point identifies herself and says she's never been to Sweden before), in grainy black and white, the film seems mostly to depict a young overweight man who's a cross-dresser, though it's hinted at one point that the man "playing" this role is nothing of the kind. This person, sometimes in dress and wig, plays with clippings and all kinds of only half-identifiable junk, rolls around on the floor, and, in the voice-over, which is not particularly coordinated with any onscreen action, describes himself as continually fantasizing about being a celebrity, about being in contact with tabloid film stars like the Spice Girls and the porn queen Savannah. Sometimes these references are funny, and they give the otherwise often mournful or deranged chatter a cozier note. Sometimes he/she also refers to Jesus and pregnancy and virgin birth. Gradually a sense is conveyed that this person is a metaphor, though mixed with other things, for a twentieth-century media-overloaded public. He's fat because he's a "container" for all the detritus of corporate over-production, the junk of life that can never be disposed because there's nowhere left for it to go. The "consumer" consumes all, and becomes puffed up with garbage. We are the detritus of our collective consumer lives.
Another description of the film reminds one that the protagonist "carries an Asian woman, piggyback, through a garbage-filled landscape." There are also sequences that seem to be in a hospital, wandering from corridor to corridor; and still others in a trashy abandoned house with peeling walls and debris everywhere. The film was shot in Chernobyl, Transylvania and in Sweden's Film i Vast studios in Trollhattan.
While obviously Moodysson has been capable of warm humanism, this is more an effort at thumbing his nose at the audience, and follows upon A Hole in My Heart, which has been described as nauseating. Clocking in at 75 minutes, Container is so uninteresting and repetitious that it seems much, much longer and only sheer maschism and an overriding sense of duty kept me from walking out before it was over. Films of this kind are never easy to watch, because they don't have a "hook" of character, chronology, or visual touchstones to keep one watching. One might add that a barely mumbling, depressed-sounding young woman's voice is not much of an addition to the cinematic effect. Compare things like Koyanasqaatsi, which while also meandering and repetitous and lacking in narrative content, engages with visual beauty and hypnotic music. Obviously Moodysson eschews the slickness of such work; and why not? But though surreal and rife with mysterious and strange goings on Container all too evidently lacks the visual flair of work by similarly avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakage or Kenneth Anger. Container ultimately is very clearly better to talk about than to watch. Where Moodysson's career is going now is hard to say. One reviewer, perhaps appropriately self-styled as "Movie Martyr: Suffering for your cinema," describes this as the next step in Moodysson's "spectacular career immolation following his first few features" and concludes that "those who still might be willing to give the director the benefit of doubt, and especially those who appreciated A Hole in My Heart, should be encouraged to seek out Container." Others can rely on second-hand accounts.
Shown as part of Film Comment Selects at Lincoln Center, February 26, 2008.
