New York Film Festival 2012

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LIFE OF PI, Ang Lee, opening night

New York Film Festival 2012
September. 28 - October. 14, 2012


Welcome to Filmleaf's Festival Coverage thread for the 51st New York Film Festival, Sept. 28 - Oct. 14, 2012. The Nyff is a presentation of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York. Filmleaf's General Film Forum discussion thread for the NYFF begins here.

INDEX OF LINKS TO REVIEWS

Amour (Michael Heneke 2012)
Araf/Somewhere in Between (Yeşim Ustaoğlu 2012)
Barbara (Christian Petzold 2012)
Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu 2012)
Bwakaw (Jun Lana 2012)
Camille Rewinds (Noémie Lvovsky 2012)
Caesar Must Die (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani 2012)
Dead Man and Being Happy, The (Javier Rebollo 2012)
Fill the Void (Rana Burshtein 2012)
First Cousin Once Removed (Alan Berliner 2012)
Flight (Robert Zemeckis 2012)
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach 2012)
Gatekeepers, The (Dror Moreh 2012)
Ginger & Rosa (Sally Potter 2012)
Here and There (Antonio Méndez Esparza 2012)
Holy Motors (Leos Carax 2012)
Hyde Park on Hudson (Roger Mitchell 2012)
Kinshasa Kids (Marc-Henri Wajnberg 2012)
Last Time I Saw Macao, The (João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata 2012)
Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Peravel 2012)
Life of Pi (Ang Lee 2012)
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami 2012)
Lines of Wellington (Valeria Sarmiento 2012)
Memories Look at Me (Song Fang 2012)
Night Across the Street (Raul Ruiz 2012)
No (Pablo Larraín 2012)
Not Fade Away (David Chase 2012)
Our Children (Joachim Lafosse 2012)
Paperboy, The (Lee Daniels 20120
Passion (Brian De Palma 2012)
Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas 2012)
Tabu (Migues Gomes 2012)
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet (Alain Resnais 2012)

These reviews have also been published on Flickfeast.uk.

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NYFF50 SIGNAGE ON FRONT WINDOWS OF RENOVATED ALICE TULLY HALL (photo by CK)

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P&I SCREENING SCHEDULE

All screenings and press conferences will take place in the Walter Reade Theater, (165 West 65th Street) unless otherwise noted. (Main slate films in bold.)

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM NOON - 5PM
NO PRESS AND INDUSTRY SCREENINGS

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 13
10AM THE SAVOY KING: CHICK WEBB & THE MUSIC THAT CHANGED AMERICA (90 min) (ON THE ARTS Sidebar)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR JEFF KAUFMAN
12:30PM INGRID CAVEN: VOICE AND MUSIC (95 min) (ON THE ARTS Sidebar)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE WITH DIRECTOR BERTRAND BONELLO
3:00PM BECOMING TRAVIATA (108 min) (ON THE ARTS Sidebar)

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 14
10AM THE WAR OF THE VOLCANOES (52 min) (CINEMA REFLECTED Sidebar)
Screening with: 101 (20 min)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE WITH THE WAR OF THE VOLCANOES DIRECTOR FRANCESCO PATIERNO
12:15PM THE ROLLING STONES: CHARLIE IS MY DARLING – IRELAND ’65 (60 min)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR MICK GOCHANOUR AND PRODUCER ROBIN KLEIN
2:15PM CASTING BY (94 min) (CINEMA REFLECTED Sidebar)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR TOM DONAHUE

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 17
10AM HERE AND THERE (Antonio Méndez Esparza, Spain/US/Mexico, 110 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERNCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR ANTONIO MENDEZ VIA SKYPE
12:45PM CAMILLE REWINDS (Noémie Lvovsky, France, 110 min) (MAIN SLATE)
3:30PM BERBARIAN SOUND STUDIO (92 min) (MIDNIGHT MOVIES)

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 18
10AM PASSION (Brian de Palma, France/Germany, 100 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERNCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR BRIAN DE PALMA
12:30PM THE BAY (84 min) (MIDNIGHT MOVIES)
2:30PM ROMAN POLANSKI: ODD MAN OUT (88 min) (CINEMA REFLECTED Sidebar)
**PRESS CONFERNCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE WITH DIRECTOR MARINA ZENOVICH

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 19
10:00AM BARBARA (Christian Petzold, Germany, 105 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE WITH DIRECTOR CHRISTIAN PETZOLD
12:45PM HYDE PARK ON HUDSON (Roger Michell, USA/UK, 95 min) (MAIN SLATE)
2:45PM LIV AND INGMAR (82 min) (CINEMA REFLECTED Sidebar)

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20
10AM ARAF ( ((Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Turkey/France/Germany, 124 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE WITH DIRECTOR YEŞIM USTAOĞLU
1:00PM FRANCES HA (Noah Baumbach, USA, 86 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR NOAH BAUMBACH
3:30PM YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET (Alain Resnais, France, 115 min) (MAIN SLATE)

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 21
9:30AM BEYOND THE HILLS (Cristian Mungiu, Romania, 150 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE WITH DIRECTOR CRISTIAN MUNGUI
1:00PM PUNK IN AFRICA (82 min) (ON THE ARTS Sidebar)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE WITH DIRECTOR DEON MAAS
3:15PM JOHN CASSAVETES (50 min) (OPENING NIGHT OF CINEASTES)
4:10PM LANG/GODARD: THE DINOSAUR (61 min) (CINEASTES)

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
10AM ONCE EVERY DAY (66 min) (SPECIAL SCREENINGS)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR RICHARD FOREMAN
12PM DOWNPOUR (128 min) (MASTERWORKS)
2:30PM BWAKAW (Jun Robles Lana, The Philippines, 110 min) (MAIN SLATE)

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
10AM SHORTS PROGRAM #1 (91 min)
12PM CELLULOID MAN (164 min) (CINEMA REFLECTED Sidebar)
3:00PM TO BE ANNOUNCED: VIEWS FROM THE AVANT- GARDE
PLEASE NOTE LOCATION:
ELINOR BUNIN MUNROE FILM CENTER, 144 WEST 65 TH STREET
3:15PM FINAL CUT – LADIES AND GENTLEMAN (85 min) (CINEMA REFLECTED Sidebar)

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26
9:30AM LINES OF WELLINGTON (Valeria Sarmiento, France/Portugal, 151 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE WITH DIRECTOR VALERIA SARMIENTO
1:00PM MEMORIES LOOK AT ME (Song Fang, Chin, 91 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE WITH DIRECTOR SONG FANG
3:30PM SHORTS PROGRAM # 2 (96 min)

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27
10AM CAESAR MUST DIE (Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, Italy, 76 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTORS PAOLO AND VITTORIO TAVIAN1
2:15PM NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET (Raul Ruiz, Chile/France, 107 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE
3:00PM ROOM 237 (102 min) (CINEMA REFLECTED Sidebar)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE WITH DIRECTOR RODNEY ASCHER AND PRODUCER TIM KIRK

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 28
10:00AM LIFE OF PI (Ang Lee, USA, 120 min)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW
1:00PM LEVIATHAN (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, USA, 87 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTORS LUCIEN CASTAING –TAYLOR AND VERENA PARAVEL
3:15PM DECEPTIVE PRACTICE: THE MYSTERIES AND MENTORS OF RICKY JAY (85 min) (ON THE ARTS Sidebar)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTORS MOLLY BERNSTEIN AND ALAN EDELSTEIN

MONDAY OCTOBER 1
10AM TABU (Miguel Gomes, Portugal, 118 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE WITH DIRECTOR MIGUEL GOMES
1:00PM BEYOND THE HILLS (150 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR CRISTIAN MUNGUI
3:00PM KINSHASA KIDS (Marc-Henri Wajnberg, Belgium/France, 85 min) (MAIN SLATE)

TUESDAY OCTOBER 2
10AM FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED (Alan Berliner, USA, 78 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR ALAN BERLINER
12:15PM FILL THE VOID (Rama Burshtein, Israel, 90 min) (MAIN SLATE)
3:30PM TO BE ANNOUNCED: VIEWS FROM THE AVANT-GARDE
PLEASE NOTE LOCATION:
ELINOR BUNIN MUNROE FILM CENTER, 144 WEST 65 TH STREET

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 3
1:00AM OUR CHILDREN (Joachim Lafosse, Belgium, 111 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW VIA SKYPE WITH DIRECTOR JOACHIM LAFOSSE
2:00PM THE PAPERBOY (Lee Daniels, USA, 107 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW

THURSDAY OCTOBER 4
10AM LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE (Abbas Kiarostami, Japan/Iran/France, 109 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR ABBAS KIAROSTAMI
1:00PM THE LAST TIME I SAW MACAO (João Pedro Rodrigues, 85 min) (MAIN SLATE)
3:15PM SOMETHING IN THE AIR (Olivier Assayas, France, 122 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR OLIVIER ASSAYAS

FRIDAY OCTOBER 5
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
10AM NOT FADE AWAY (112 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW
1:00PM AMOUR (Michael Haneke, Austria/France/Germany, 127 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR MICHAEL HANEKE
4:00PM OUTRAGE BEYOND (112 min) (MIDNIGHT MOVEIS)

MONDAY OCTOBER 8
10AM GINGER AND ROSA (Sally Potter, UK, 89 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR SALLY POTTER
PLEASE NOTE LOCATION:
ELINOR BUNIN MUNROE FILM CENTER, 144 WEST 65 TH STREET

TUESDAY OCTOBER 9
10AM HOLY MOTORS (Léos Carax, France, 115 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW
1:00PM THE GATEKEEPERS (Dror Moreh, Israel/France/Germany/Belgium, 97 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW
3:30PM COUSIN JULES (91 min)
(MASTERWORKS)

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 10
10AM THE DEAD MAN AND BEING HAPPY (Javier Rebollo, Spain/Argentina, 94 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW WITH DIRECTOR JAVIER REBOLLO

THURSDAY OCTOBER 11
NO SCREENINGS

FRIDAY OCTOBER 12
10AM No (Pablo Larraín, Chile/US, 110 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW

SATURDAY OCTOBER 13
NO SCREENINGS

SUNDAY OCTOBER 14
9AM FLIGHT (Robert Zemeckis, USA, 138 min) (MAIN SLATE)
**PRESS CONFERENCE TO FOLLOW

ANTONIO MÉNDEZ ESPARZA: HERE AND THERE (2012)

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Back and forth

The plight of a migrant worker is the burden of a coldly documentary-style first feature by young Mexican filmmaker Antoinio Méndez Esparza. Espara blends vérité-style editing and casting methods with artistic ellipsis in telling what happens when his rather apathetic protagonist Pedro (Pedro de los Santos) returns home to his remote mountain village in the province of Guerrero after years of working at odd jobs in the States. The storytelling is too free to appeal to a conventional audience; this is neorealism drained of its former energy an deadened by a sense of hopelessness much more 21st century than post-WWII.

"Allá" ("there") in the title refers to the USs. Why Pedro comes back home from there isn't specified, presumably missing his family and wanting to be back home. His 30-year-old wife Teresa (Teresa Ramirez Aguirre) seems as apathetic as he is, and suspecting he'd have had girlfriends in the States, is withholding at first. His two schoolgirl daughters Heidi (Heidi Laura Solano Espinoza) and Lorena (Lorena Guadalupe Pantaleon Vazquez) are giggly and distant. In one of the most telling scenes, Pedro takes Heidi and Lorena to a lake he's long dreamed of visiting with them. But the visit, like much else, is flat. His efforts to start a band -- he's a singer and guitarist -- are also lackluster. Performing is obviously the most fun Pedro has in his life, but his "Copa Kings" group gets him deep in debt for equipment and work draws members away.

That's the introductory section. The second one,"Aquí ("Here"), is a grim sequence in which Teresa has a medical crisis during pregnancy, and the baby girl, their third daughter, almost dies after a caesarian birth while Teresa, weakened from loss of blood, is consequently forced to lie for days in the hospital without seeing her newborn. The hospital stay -- for which he must supply medicines and blood donors -- gets Pedro further in debt. The result: day labor.

In a third chapter, "Horizonte" ("Horizon"), the film follows Pedro's continuing tough life in Mexico and also visits Nestor (Nestor Tepetate Medina), a youth who wants to migrate to El Norte and practices break dancing -- his life perhaps destined to parallel Pedro's. Pedro is seen applying for work at multiple construction sites, work options apparently running dry. Part three is both depressing and desultory, studiously avoiding definite outcomes.

The conclusion is nonetheless obvious. In the final section, "Allá" ("there") -- Pedro is forced to return to the US, where he can at least find work even if it doesn't pay very well. The film doesn't show Pedro in the US; when he leaves, the point of view stays in Guerrero province. Esparza cheats a bit in this rushed last chapter, unless it's meant as an epilogue. Esparza stages a perfunctory conversation between Heidi and Lorena about whether, or how much, they miss their now again absent father. Then the film shows a sound-only tape from a scene of Pedro performing songs at home with his family, while showing footage of the town Pedro himself no longer in sight.

The documentary style makes it hard to tell how much the family members are meant to be apathetic or how much the non-actor cast members, lacking forceful direction, are merely to shy and inexperienced to project emotion. One may correspondingly ask at times if the omission of narrative links is sophistication or directorial clumsiness. Dialogue is often crudely expository. Characters say exactly what they are meant to be feeling, or what we're supposed to learn. With his ethnographically exact settings and people, Esparza would be presenting a shatteringly strong picture of the fragmentation of families and banishing of hopes for the Mexican migrant poor. But the prevailing listlessness makes it hard for a viewer to respond. Esparza has not drawn satisfying performances from his indigenous cast, whose dialogue often seems the mere mouthing of a scene outline. The effect is often quite unconvincing. Esparza's methods show a debt to Carlos Reygadas, but he lacks Reygadas' bold vision and skill with non-actors.

Aquí y allá nonetheless did well at Cannes, winning the top prize of the 2012 Critics' Week series, which will guarantee further festival exposure and help the director pursue further projects. Those who admire the film see it as beautifully understated, its lack of resolution helping to highlight Es[arza's themes. Barbu Balasoiu's camera work has drawn praise for nice color and light, though its neutrality underscores the flatness of most scenes.

Screened as part of the New York Film Festival 2012, at Lincoln Center.

NOÉMIE LVOVSKY: CAMILLE REWINDS (2012)

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INDIA NAIR, JUDITH CHEMLA, NOÉMIE LVOVSKY, AND JULIE FAURE IN CAMILLE REWINDS

Peggy Sue, in French

The prolific Noémy Lvovsky, who writes, directs, and frequently acts, stars in this buoyant, colorful French fantasy (which she directed and co-scripted) about a middle-aged woman in crisis. Camille (Lvovsky) is an actress who can't get much work. Her latest job consists of screaming while she gets her throat cut in bed and spurts fake blood. She is a heavy drinker and tokes on a bottle even on the Métro going home. There, things are getting packed up because she and her husband are divorcing. It's New Year's Eve and she goes to a wild party. In the aftermath she falls into a deep sleep in which she returns to her high school years -- and tries to change things. It's a French take on the kind of theme that's familiar from Hollywood movies and sci-fi. In fact this is more or less a free remake of Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married. It's rather amusing to see it done with French actors, including some prestigious and sophisticated ones like Matthieu Amalric and Denis Podalydès, with none other than Jean-Pierre Léaud as a histrionic watchmaker and the great Yolande Moreau as Lvovsky's mother. The whole effort may seem to add only a few new touches to the stereotypes; subtleties will be more perceptible to the Gallic audience than Stateside, but this is an enterprise notable for its energy and enthusiasm throughout and shows Lvovsky's fluidity as an actress and fluency as a director.

To give you an idea: Lvovsky has performed in 97 films. Just recently she played the Madam is Bertrand Bonello's justly admired 2011 House of Tolerance, and then switched from the turn of the century to the French Revolution to play an important member of Marie Antoinette's entourage in Benoît Jacquot's Farewell, My Queen. She's far from an actress who can't get work: she's indispensable. She doesn't need to write and direct movies, and we might see Camille redouble as something of a vanity piece. She does stage some witty changes though. When Camille finds herself back at home with her parents going to the lycée and falling in love with her future, presently estranged, husband Éric (Samir Guesmi), they both play themselves, at their present age. Nobody seems to notice.

The usual stuff follows. Camille does all she can to avoid getting inovolved with Éric, knowing that the resulting marriage is going to end badly. She connects with a much older man, a physics prof (Podalydès), to whom she confides the time-travel thing that's gong on and seeks his help as a connection when for she returns to the Obama era. She also knows that shortly after her sixteenth birthday, when she has gotten pregnant by Éric (who's madly in love with her) her mother is going to die of a heart attack, and she seeks to prevent that. Spoiler alert: she fails. Things do seem to change between her and Éric, in a feel-good sort of way.

I'm not going to claim that this movie is uperior to its Hollywood equivalents -- it's just French, and it's interesting to see how Lvovsky has reshaped the theme to her own sensibility and preoccupations. It's fun for French film fans to see Matthieu Amalric done up as a particularly dorky high schoo teacher whose authoritarian manner touches off a student revolt. Lvivsky and Guesmi are personable and lithe enough to make their momentary return to lycée-age occasionally believable, despite their keeping their adult shape. Guesmi, particularly, looks youthful, till you see his face up close. Lvovsky's mature woman's body comes in for some funny comments when the other girls at a gym class do an impromptu eval of her body part by body part. But what's particularly French is the willingness to put middle-aged actors in the role of adolescents and not be ashamed at the contrast. Lvovsky has a warm, appealing mistress-of-the-revels sort of personality and easily plays a woman able to handle time travel with suppleness and good humor. Camille Rewinds is also a way of showing Lvovsky's warm sympathy toward adolescence, as well as her belief in giving marriages a second chance. On a superficial level, the film moves along with energy, the scenes (handsomely shot by Jean-Marc Fabré) are bright-colored, the Eighties clothes and music are fun and played for sympathy rather than caricature, and the party and dance sequences further liven things up. The only trouble is what Justin Chang noted in his Variety review at Cannes: it goes on a bit too long: the 115 minute runtime could lose a quarter of an hour or so. But this does show that the French filmmaking machine is in working order, and can do almost anything.

Camille redouble received the Prix SACD 2012 prize at the Cannes Directors Fortnight series. It opened in Paris September 12 (last Wednesday) to very good reviews (Allociné press rating: 4.2) Watched at the 2012 New York Film Festival press screenings.

BRIAN DE PALMA: PASSION (2012)

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NOOMI RAPACE AND RACHEL MCADAMS IN PASSION

De Palma being De Palma doing Corneau

Brian De Palma's Passion will please his ardent fans but this close but uninvolving remake of the late Alain Corneau's last film Love Crime (RV 2011) is just eye candy. Its slight variations on the already far-fetched original and its new casting do not impress. Corneau was making a sort of Hitchcock thriller. It's an old school film noir that set itself a problem: how about getting away with the perfect crime by first making yourself look guilty? The already dated quality of Corneau's movie may have been what De Palma liked. He has added a kind of Almodovar-esque gloss (with some pointless split-screen ballet images and cross-cutting that may owe something, with the bright color, to the Spanish director). He has made an even less realistic movie and tried to make the emotions more extreme and the hi-tech touches more numerous. Though his addition of Skype calls, cell-phone videos and security cameras adds a suggestive modern touch, none of these additions to Corneau's version really work. This is such a decadent effort, even the perfect crime theme gets submerged in the obsession with baroque beauty and campy style.

One is in the awkward position here of trying to show how a movie fails to live up to the standards of another one that was not that great to begin with. But however much De Palma outdoes himself this time, he loses the good qualities Corneau's movie had. In Corneau's 2010 version (and Love Crime/Crime d'amour is a better title than Passion, by the way), Kristen Scott Thomas was Christine, the chilly, dominant CEO of a European corporation, and Ludivine Sagnier was Isabelle, her admiring, manipulated surrogate whose jealousy and anger lead her to homicide. Rachel McAdams is far less effective as Christine, and much younger. It's hard to see her as a CEO. Scott Thomas' haughty elegance and fluency in French and English and her age put her in another category altogether. As Isabelle, Sagnier gave one of her best performances, full of insecurity and eagerness. Noomi Rapace, who has disappointed in her new Hollywood star status so far, is too mousy and strange looking to be someone a powerful female CEO would take on and even pretend to consider as a lover. De Palma predictably hits the lesbian theme far harder, as part of generally upping the camp level of the film, also predictable. The original idea was that Isabelle didn't quite know where she stood with Christine. Despite the luridness of Rapace's and McAdams smooches and more lip-locking with Dani (Karoline Herfurth), Isabelle's German assistant, who's not only a female but an intense lesbian in this new version, De Palma generates less intensity overall than Corneau did because of the lack of psychological realism.

The subtlety of Corneau's movie (which disappears in its hokey post-crime segment) is in how it shows the cruel manipulations of the corporate world, the greed, jealousy and ambition. These work well because Scott Thomas, Sagnier, and Patrick Mille as Philippe, a suave, attractive male employee whom the two women share and whom Christine blackmails, fit so well together. Again the casting fails De Palma because the English actor Paul Anderson is a caricature who seems stressed out and over-the-top from when he first appears. Corneau's office scenes are more believable. He is better at conveying the sense of high-powered business dealings going on. De Palma's reliance on a trendy video as Isabelle's springboard to success makes the material too trivial and media-based. De Palma's actors just seem to be posing in the big corporate spaces; Corneau's inhabit them naturally.

It might have been better to play up Rapace's mousiness. It might have made her seem so inadequate that her feelings would be warped and she would be overcome by jealousy, humiliation, and resentment as soon as she realized Christine was manipulating her. In Corneau's version, with Ludivine Sagnier in the role, Isabelle is a slow burn, resisting anger as long as she can because of the power she's had a taste of. It's not clear what's happening to Rapace's character.

After the crime, nothing makes sense in either movie. While Corneau's Love Crime was an entertaining psychological study, it fell apart as a police procedural. De Palma's Passion doen't work in either genre. The images by Jose Luis Alcaine are such gorgeous eye candy that they may stop registering as anything but artwork after a while. Likewise Pino Donaggio's lush score, which underlines the suspenseful bits in a Bernard Hermann mode, makes the movie even more Hitchcockian and even more artificial.

Passion debuted at Venice, with showings at Toronto and the New York Film Festival swiftly following in September 2012. Screened for this review as part of the NYFF at Lincoln Center, at which time time it had not yet acquired a US distributor. French, German and Dutch releases (the film is set in Berlin in place of Corneau's La Défence, Paris location) are scheduled for February 2012.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD: BARBARA (2012)

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NINA HOSS AND RONALD ZEHRFELD IN BARBARA

The feeling of repression

There's a lot going on under the surface in Christian Petzold's slow-burning Barbara, the story of a woman doctor banished from Berlin to the provinces in 1980 East Germany. This winner of several important German film awards (including the number two director prize at Berlin), owes everything to the impeccable cool of of Nina Hoss, in the title role here, and collaborating with Petzold for the fifth time. This is another example of how emotionally subtle and intense the chilly perfection of the new German or "Berlin" school of filmmaking can be.

When Barbara (Hoss) shows up at the rural hospital she keeps "separate," refusing to share a lunch table with colleagues, but Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), the warm and soulful head doctor, is persistent. Pretty quickly we understand Barbara's reserve, even hostility: she is being watched, and even Andre is probably reporting on her. If the story he tells her is true, a major fuckup at Berlin Charité that he was responsible for led to his being exiled here, and he's only allowed to keep practicing as a doctor in exchange for aiding the security system. But both he and Barbara are serious about their work and caring toward their patients. Hoss' slow warming up is an impressive example of her subtle control as an actor.

Slowly plot elements accumulate. Barbara has a boyfriend in West Germany (Mark Waschke) who sneaks in occasionally to visit (leaving telltale quality cigarettes with her) and is planning to get her out of the GDR and into Denmark as soon as possible. This is the time bomb that makes every scene quietly suspenseful. Two young people show up in the hospital as patients who are examples of the brutality of the government. Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer) ran away from a work camp and contracted meningitis hiding in the fields; she is also pregnant. Similarly oppressed is young Mario (Jannik Schumann), who jumped out of a building in a suicide attempt and may have brain damage. Barbara bonds with Stella closely; it's Andre who's most concerned with Mario. One wonders at times if Barbara will shift her loyalties from her boyfriend to Andre, since it seems also at times that her duty to her patients might override the escape schedule.

The country setting, with its quiet, its greenery, its excellent vegetables and its healthy air, helps Petzold to keep his picture of GDR repression subtly understated so that we absorb it inwardly and feel it better than happens with more conventional or obvious depictions. Without the more obvious trademark images of Soviet era shabbiness, the omnipresent propaganda, the conspicuously missing luxuries, the dictatorial bureaucracy or the overt cruelty, the viewer is encouraged to internalize a sense of the world without freedom, one that grows out of simply observing Barbara's face and her interactions with Andre and others. There is no mistaking the spartan nature of her assigned apartment or the Stassi agents who show up now and then for strip searches and the man who keeps parking his little car outside (Rainer Bock), but this is lean and mean filmmaking where everything counts and nothing is overdrawn.

In a pared down style more extreme than the director's memorable 2008 Postman Always Rings Twice remake Jerichow, Barbara (FCS 2009) is so minimal it feels a little tight, and at the end is anticlimactic. Mike D'Angelo noted in a Toronto tweet review that it's "exquisitely made," but said he was "disappointed" when a "conventional shape" eventually appeared "beneath layers of subtle misdirection." The film has to go somewhere, and when it does, it loses some of the pushes and pullls that kept us on the edige of our seats. Nonetheless Petzold seems close to the top of his game and his sense of the communist world is almost thrillingly uncluttered and fresh and his writing shows a gift for quietly making the social and political shine out cllearly through the personal.

Since its February 2012 Berlinale debut Barbara has been released in over a dozen countries, mostly European. A UK release is set for September 28, limited US release December 21. 2012. Watched for this review at the press screenings of the New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center.

ROGER MITCHELL: HYDE PARK ON HUDSON (2012)

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LAURA LINNEY AND BILL MURRAY IN HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

Monarch and president: just folks, insecure and naughty

In this cuddly and blunt-spoken romp in 20th-century American history we visit FDR & Co (including wife and three lovers) in the Thirties, before the war, at the estate he liked to summer at, owned by his mother (Elizabeth Wilson). We arrive at this location for the comically momentous occasion when the King and Queen of England come to visit, seeking financial aid and promises of military support in the coming war, and receiving in return cocktails and hot dogs. This could very well be a play, despite the rollicking drives on grassy country roads in an open car by Roosevelt (Bill Murray), driving his latest "companion" and sixth cousin Daisy Stuckley (Laura Linley), but the cars and the houses and the accoutrements bring things to glossy life. Like The King's Speech, of which it could be seen as a marketable if minor extension, this is a portrait of the English royals (as well as the elected Yank version) that balances unflattering with appealing. FDR may be a philanderer and a drunkard, but he's honest and funny and brave in dealing with his disability. And "Bertie" and the Queen may be bumbling and insecure, but they're plucky and flexible. This movie, however, is just an anecdote, lacking the grandeur, fluency, or triumph-over-adversity appeal that made The King's Speech a big winner at the box office and awards ceremonies.

A key for audiences will be how well they accept the gimmick casting of tongue-in-cheek actor Bill Murray in the historical role of FDR. And this versatile comedian-actor performs well. Though the excuse is that this is a private FDR and not the public one, there is none of the resonance and authority of FDR the world leader. Nor has Olivia Williams the oddity and conviction of Eleanor. As the stuttering King George VI, Samuel West (the son of Prunnella Scales) is rather good, again like Colin Firth, but without the charisma, managing to convey the sense of being a stutterer while still delivering a goodly number of lines. Another key is whether Daisy, whose voiceover narration runs through the whole thing, is an appealing enough character, despite the fact that the royal visit, the semi-catastrophic dinner, and the comical picnic the next day overwhelm her personal story. One of the interests of the screenplay by Richard Nelson for modern audiences, particularly young ones if any show up for this movie, is to see a vastly different presidency, where the head of state could wave the Secret Service car away and drive off with his new girlfriend to get a blowjob in a field seen only by the birds and the bees, and he could be carried around from room to room or hobble on crutches and never have that shown by photographers (just as they never delved into his extra-marital affairs or his wife's lesbian tendencies). Hyde on Hudson is a good, if blatant, depiction of the safe disconnect in those freer, more privacy-respecting days between private secret and public façade.

Though this tale is made for screen not stage, there is a sometimes excessive reliance on business -- cigarette holders (and the lighting and passing around of cigarettes), cocktails and cocktail shakers, magnifying glass and stamp collection, and cars. The royals are English so, okay, they must arrive in a long black Rolls (I guess the official royal car, the Daimler, wasn't available stateside?), but how many times must we pile back into FDR's sporty convertible? it seems at times that nobody has anything of importance to say, except to reassure each other that it's all going to go alright. This is, in part, a dramatization of Americans' and Englishmen's mutual uneasiness, particularly with regard to the monarchy, its trappings, and its terms of exaggerated respect, which Franklin's mother is keen on and Eleanor snubs. In the end this is no more interesting than the Queen's and King's confidential debate about whether being served hot dogs is an insult or just a convenient thing to have when eating out of doors.

Murray performs creditably with restraint, but the fact that he has performed in films by the likes of Sofia Coppola, Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson reminds us that he can be used to far subtler effect than happens with the Notting Hill director Roger Michell, who as Peter Debruge says in his Variety review "has made a career blending high class with coarse elements," so that "same off-color tendency creeps into what might have been a broad comedy of manners." Hyde Park on Hudson serves "coarser motives." That's the truth of the matter: there's something icky about it, and it's neither witty nor profound.

Hyde Park on Hudson, whose excuse for being included in the New York Film Festival may have to be attributed to its association with New York, got its debut at Telluride and got an additional springboard at Toronto. It's a broad audience-pleaser if without the wide appeal or depth of The King's Speech. It gets Dec. 7, 2012 US release and Feb. 1, 2013 in the UK and Feb. 27 in France.

YEŞIM USTAĞLU: ARAF/SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN

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BARIS HACIHAN AND NESLIHAN ATAGÜL IN ARAF

By the wayside

Debuted at Venice, the Turkish female director Yeşim Ustaoğlu's fifth feature Araf is about a teenage girl working at a highway restaurant who falls for an older man who'se a truck driver, who gets her pregnant, then fades out of the picture. A young coworker is in love with her and eventually they get together, but under unusual circumstances. It may be unusual even to have a female filmmaker in Turkey, and Ustaoğlu has chosen a bold theme, which she develops with excruciating, drawn-out realism. There are surprises. Things seem depressing, yet there's almost a feel-good ending: the outcome for the young woman, Zehra (Neslihan Atagül) and her disenchanted beau Olgun (Baris Hacihan) is still hanging "somewhere in between" -- and the Turkish word araf means limbo, or even purgatory -- but the lovely classical Turkish orchestral piece that accompanies the closing credits is full of warmth and hope. Events are excruciatingly slow to unfold; the 128-minute runtime might have been reduced by 20 minutes. But the editing is assured, and the widescreen color cinematography by Michael Hammon is almost distractingly beautiful. The images and wintry setting expressionistically underline the themes and situation. A lot here has class, but there's serious misjudgment in the drawn-out, disgusting miserable lives (poisoned dogs, drunkenness, spousal abuse, a too-vivid miscarriage), the feel-good finale is gratuitous and tacked-on, and most of the film meanders aimlessly. Can one recommend this film? Certainly not. Do the director and her young actors Atagül and Hacihan have talent? Definitly yes.

When the attractive Zehra first sees the grizzled Mahur (Ozcan Deniz) pulll up in his big truck she is fascinated. She knows Olgun, a young man with a sensual face, is interested in her, but she rebuffs him. Both Zehra and Olgun are paired with best friends. When Olgun's, who trawls websites with him looking for sex, announces that he's being drafted into the army, they speculate about how they will survive without each other's company, but Olgun shows his sensitivity, or romanticism, by declaring that their friendship is a love he carries deep in his heart. Zehra's best pal is her older but handsome-looking co-worker Delya (Nihal Yalcin). Delya too surfs the Internet with Zehra, urging her to consider better jobs and the possibility of dating men beyond their little area in the Caucasus, which is not prosperous.

A major scene is a wedding arty that Zehra sneaks off to with Delya, against the wishes of her stolid mother. For whatever reason, all the principals are there, and Zehra dances up close to Mahur, while Olgun dances close by, but outside Zehra's interest range. For some reason Ustaoğlu chooses to keep the encounters between Zehra and Mahur almost completley wordless, except for Zehra's plea, "Take me with you." It's not heeded. While Zehra is finding out she's pregnant by Mahur, and Delya gradually reveals that she'd gone through something similar and gave up the baby for adoption, Olgun is flying into a furious rage with his mother, who goes off, and his father, who is a drunken pig. His actions lead to prison.

Araf/Somewhere in Between debuted at Venice. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

NOAH BAUMBACH: FRANCES HA (2012)

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GRETA GERWIG IN FRANCES HA]

Defining twenty-somethings

Frances Ha is a vehicle for Baubach girlfriend and mumlecore queen Greta Gerwig. Gerwig is a charmer who is appealing, humorous, and authentic and has a kind of glow about her on screen. Recent appearances (does her IMDb CV only go back to 2006?) in Baumbach's own Greenberg, No Strings Attached, and Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress, a virtuoso verbal performance for her, she her increased mastery and an inching toward the mainstream. But Frances Ha is like a more pro-quality mumblecore film, a reaffirmation of indie loyalties by both Gerwig and Baumbach. Frances Ha, which is in black and white and largely set in Brooklyn, is a return to Baumbach's New York origins after his California digression. It isn't really about anything, as a whole. It's organized by addresses, at least half a dozen of them, mostly in New York City (with a penultimate period of exile), and the best, early, part of it is about the interaction for Frances and her twenty-something cohorts between job, relationship, career ambitions, and apartment. The funniest, smartest, and most original scenes and dialogue show how who you're sleeping with relates to your rent, your address, and whether you can pursue your ambitions or have to stick to a day job. If this movie succeeds, and its shapelessness makes that uncertain, it could redefine how young urban Americans are shown on film and move forward Baumbach's and Gerwig's careers. Or it might just be a video classic, like Baumbach's obsucre debut film Kicking and Screaming, which is in the Criterion Collection and which in some ways this film is closer to than to any of his subsequent efforts. The topic of both is that neverland between college and Life.

Some of the guys are quick-witted and funny, but they are unreliable and they change. Connecting thread turns out to be Frances' bgf Sophie, played by the English actress Mickey Sumner (daughter of the singer Sting). Sophie wears nerdie glasses, but has a good job and a fiance, a banker called Patch (Patrick Heusinger), a good old boy who says things like "I'm goin' to take a leak." Till Patch came into the picture, Frances and Sophie were clearly not thinking of marriage and saw themselves as living together "like an old lesbian couple that doesn't have sex." When on her own, Frances shares an apartment for awhile with two too-well-off "creative" young men who fail to see how privileged they are, one of whom calls her "undatable." She takes a Christmas trip to her parents in Sacramento to avoid her fracturing New York connections. Then after the Paris débâcle, she accepts not joining the dance troupe, perhaps, since she's at that definitive age of 27, the beginning of Life.

Frances Ha's dialogue is so specific and amusing and defines its young Williamsburg, Brooklyn subculture and generation so precisely, that there isn't really room for much to happen. And besides that there is the mumblecore generation's chronically vague commitment-averse quality. Frances wants to be a dander, though; but she has to settle for a desk job at the dance troupe she wanted to join, along with putting on a small dance event of her own that gets complimants from the troups'e leader -- but no contract. One of the defining (but typically directionless) sequences has Frances impulsively take a weekend in Paris, because people she knows offer her an apartment to stay in, but she can't connect with her frineds there and has to return to New York before she's recoverefd from jet lag.

In his admiring Telluride review for Variety Peter Debruge links Frances Ha with a class of "raggedy yet sincere semi-autobiographical films surfacing these days at Sundance, SXSW and other U.S. fests," but notes the important differennce of Baumbach's more mature and polished point of view, plus links with the French New Wave (to which there are conscious allusions), Woody Allen (with Allen's Manhattan an obvious link, since this too is in black and white) and "Andy Warhol's Factory films." All this Debruge asserts enables Baumbach to "capture a reality that has eluded him on his more polished dramedies." This is quite true. Baumbach was more mainstream and generic in most of his previous movies. Frances Ha also outdoes mumblecore by having a script, which Baumbach and Gerwig carefully crafted together.

Frances Ha seems only partly a breakthrough for Baumbach. It's a reviving and improving upon his roots, and it allows Gerwig to glow and be hilariously and winingly unpredictable and witty as only she can, but time and the box office will tell if the public will respond despite the plotlessness and the somewhat neutral grayish black and white. As Baumbach noted in a press Q&A for the New York Film Festival, it is almost impossible to shoot in traditional black and white any more, because you can't get the film processed. He was forced as others have been to shoot in digital color, and convert it to black and white, which is a little too metallic-looking for my taste here.

The film debuted at Telluride Sept. 1, then Toronto Sept. 7, and New York (Lincoln Center) Sept. 30. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival. Release by IFC Films in March 2012 is expected.

ALAIN RESNAIS: YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET (2012)

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Layers of memory, layers of performance

The 89-year-old perpetual experimenter Alain Resnais' latest film, Vous n'avez encore rien vu, more catchily rendered in English as You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, is a conceptual piece about classical theater and the way actors internalize key roles they have played. Call it meta-theater, if you will; like most of the veteran New Waver's more recent works, it eschews the cinematic in favor of the elegantly stagey. Everyone is well groomed and impecably dressed. There is one modern touch: a big flat-screen TV. In the opening credits sequence, thirteen well-known French actors are summoned (by their real names) to one of the many estates of a theater director, Antoine D'Anthac (Bruno Podalydès), whom they're informed has just died. When they get there the deceased's butler acts as master of ceremonies and clicks on the TV where a pre-recorded D'Anthac welcomes them and announces they will watch and comment on a new warehouse-staged production of Jean Anouilh's 1941 play Eurydice, which they have all played in. (That play is a source for the film, and also another play by Anouilh, Dear Antoine.) But when the younger cast goes into action, the thirteen veterans alternately take up their lines. What all this adds up to is anybody's guess. There's something soothing in the formality and artificiality of the proceedings. But their failure to go anywhere and the extreme repetitionsness of the film will keep it from playing well to a non-festival audince.

At first the actors, who include Resnais' wife and longtime muse Sabine Azéma, Michel Piccoli, and Matthieu Amalric as well as Lambert Wilson and Anne Consigny, are sitting around in big black armchairs. Then as the young actors speak, they begin not just mouthing lines with them but getting up to say them, and at times they are injected by green screen into the play's two main settings, a train station restaurant and a shabby hotel room. There are three sets or actors who have played the couple, Orpheus and Eurydice: present in the mansion for the ceremonial observance set up by the late director are Pierre Arditi+Sabine Azéma and Lambert Wilson+Anne Consigny; on screen in the youthful warehouse version, Sylvain Dieuaide+Vimala Pons.

The older actors sitting around in the mansion played Eurydice in the past, so their return to their roles may also evoke their own past, and perhaps ways in which their own lives and Anouilh's classical Greek characters are intertwined in their minds. Perhaps they're trying to return to their youth. With actors of this quality (and they are the best) and staging, filming, and editing on an equally high level, there is some pleasure in watching this business. But when the person nearest me at the screening dozed off I was not much surprised. As Peter Bradshaw wrote in the Guardian about the film when he saw it at Cannes, "despite its moments of charm and caprice, the film is prolix, inert, indulgent and often just plain dull."

Often but not always, and it would be foolish to watch this and find no meaning in it. Bradshaw note the obvious fact that the Greek theme of Orpheus refers to nostalgia, a thing an old artist might well be thinking much about. The theme of Orpheus partly means that "by looking back at her in the underworld, he loses her," as Bradshaw puts it, suggesting Resnais may be saying looking back is stifling and we must live in the present, no matter what. Mike D'Angelo in tweets from Cannes rated the film highly in his severe system, 73 (below Moonrise Kingdom though and well below Holy Motors) and called it Resnais' "fond farewell, ruminating on the end, his career and the nature of cinema and theater," adding that it seemed "So audacious in conception initially that it wasn't quite sustainable," adding cryptically that it was the film he'd wished Prairie Home Companion had been. You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet is interesting to think about, not so involving to watch.

Vous n'avez encore rien vu debuted at Cannes; it will be released in Belgium and France Sept. 26, 2012. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival.

CRISTIAN MUNGIU: BEYOND THE HILLS (2012)

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COSMINA STRATAN, CRISTINA FLUTUR IN BEYOND THE HILLS

Long takes, short life

Mungiu's griping, if one-note, new film comes from a 2005 news story that caused a big stir in Romania: a girl went to visit a friend at a remote nunnery and died while its members, led by the priest in charge, were performing an exorcism on her. But the director revised the story into his own style, taking the non-fiction novels of atiana Niculescu Bran as a starting point. Elaborate action sequences are shot in long widescreen takes, like Naranjo's Miss Bala; only this is nothing like Miss Bala: these are two girls and a group of nuns scurrying around up on a hill. What Mungiu also added was the history of a relationship, studiously not (quite) lesbian but certainly intimate and deeply loving, between the two girls when they were growing up in an orphanage. So the unfortunate visitor, Alina (Cristina Flutur), a somewhat mannish young woman who has been lonely in Germany without her friend and has lost touch with her foster parents, arrives at the nunnery with no one, hoping her beloved Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) will come away with her. But Voichita, who originally only came for a visit herself, has by now taken Jesus and the local priest's very austere, judgmental form of Eastern Orthodox Christianity as her new world and comfort, and she refuses to go away. This and the repressive environment, which she wants to adjust to but can't, cause Alina to freak out and she begins having fits of violence and anger. A trip to the hospital under restraints helps temporarily, but back with the nuns she soon has a fit again. Perhaps she is insane; but fundamentalist Christianity seems unable, officially anyway, to adjust to the idea of mental problems, and the priest, followed by his obedient flock of nuns, chooses to start saying the girl is possessed by Satan.

Mungiu himself is saying two things here, interpreting the actual events. First, contemporary Christianity in this strict Orthodox form provides ritual and belief and a long list of potential sins, but doesn't lead people to be kind to one another. Second, in a lastingly traumatized post-Soviet Eastern Europe too society is numbed and people are poor responders to personal human emergencies.

In describing its events the film seems to me much too drawn out and repetitious. The long handheld takes shot by Oleg Mutu are fine, their muted colors and dark shadows dramatized by the snowy exteriors of a severe winter, but there needs to be fewer of these takes. (Mungiu says that there was another half hour that he cut out with difficulty.) On the other hand, the acting and staging and writing are certainly good. One could just say this is Bressonian and leave it at that. A Man Escaped and Diary of a Country Priest are repetitious too. But they are Bresson, which Mungiu isn't. There is a drab ordinariness that gets in the way of the spiritual in a Romanian film. Mungius lacks a sense of the spiritual. Despite an effort at evenhandedness and avoidance of pointing blame, it is hard to appreciate that these nuns and their priest have any kind of spiritual life. We don't get any sense of the place's rituals or of the symmetry and peace they might bring. There aren't even scenes of group prayer or music. And though he may not be demonized, neither is the priest (Valeriu Andriuta) ever given a charismatic moment. Nor are the nuns indiidualized as the monks obviously were in Xavier Beauvois' 2010 Cannes Grand Prize winner, Of God and Men. So for all the 150 minutes and the self-consciously neutral, realistic approach, there's a lot left out of the picture.

I can't deny that Beyond the Hills is compulsively watchable. But despite showing the distressing downward spiral of a young woman who winds up literally chained to a wooden cross, it's more predictable than and not as emotionally disturbing and intense as Mungiu's previous 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), which won the Golden Palm at Cannes, putting him and Romanian cinema in general decisively on the international map.

Dupa dealuri (the original title) debuted at Cannes, where it won Best Actress (jointly for Stratan and Flutur) and Best Screenplay awards. Also shown at Toronto and Hamburg. French release secheduled for November 21, 2012. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

JUN LANA: BWAKAW (2012)

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ARMIDA SIGUION REYNA AND EDDIE GARCIA IN BWAKAW

Man, dog, and closet

An aging, long-in-the-closet gay man, a no-go love affair, and a dying dog make this touching film with veteran star Eddie Garcia whom director Lana has described as "the Clint Eastwood of the Philippines." Let's imagine for a minute Clint actually playing this role. It ain't happening. Let's also look at Mike D'Angelo's Toronto tweet review (I do not hide my admiration for D'Angelo's terse Twitter coverage). He gives it a 56, a creditable but not great score in his system, and says, "Bit of pathos overload—lonely aging gay protag coping with unrequited love and a dying dog. Honest & direct, which helps." What's admirable about Bwakaw is its peaceful, rambling accumulation of narrative details that also gradually build up a sense of slowly earned caring for Rene (Garcia) -- the character based on a real person the writer-director knew. And because Rene is a chilly, grumpy, downright hostile type, sentimentality is safely tamped down, despite the inevitable "pathos overload" of the story content.

In a post-screening discussion there was mention of Umberto D. I was reminded a little of the Roman screenwriter Gianni Di Gregorio's 2008 directorial debut Mid-August Lunch, which though distinctly different, seems a more interesting comparison. Di Gregorio's world is glossy, Mediterranean, and very Italian. His alter ego, Gianni, is not gay, and his mother is not dead. But he lives with her as Rene did with his. He like Rene he is essentially alone and has nothing to do. Rene's world is more primitive and Third World. But perhaps because of that, life pushes its way in a bit more, particularly in the person of Sol (Rez Cortez), the rough, gangsterish tricycle cab driver whom Rene at first hates, then bonds with, then hopelessly loves.

Rene by his own "honest & direct" declaration to his priest (whom he "confesses" to only to revise his will) has been a lifelong "coward." He strung along Alicia (Armida Siguion Reyna) for fifteen years pretending to love her as she loved him. Now he visits her at a retirement home, where she can't remember him, till in a moment of clarity she does and he can ask her forgiveness. It took him well into old age to own up to his homosexuality. And when he tries to kiss a sleeping Sol after they've gotten drunk together, it's to "see what it feels like." He's never even kissed a man. But the "pathos" of this avoids "overload" (at least fitfully, throughout) through humor, some of it macabre, like the coffin Rene has bought in a "summer sale' and must take possession of when the funeral home goes out of business. He tries it out at home and finds it more comfortable than he'd expected. Later to avoid a friend's (comically) twisted face in death he practices a fixed smile while laid out in faux-death. A folk religious note comes through a Jesus figurine his mother slept beside all her life, which is reputed to have healing powers. His hairdresser friends Zaldy (Soxie Topacio) and Tracy (Joey Paras) add a trashily camp gay note. Due presumably to his sudden interest in Sol, Rene yields to their dubious suggestion and gets a dye job that makes him look like an even prunier-faced Ronald Reagan.

The dog, Bwakaw, is a stray in the neighborhood Rene fed and semi-adopted, but never showed affection for. And like Uggie, the dog in Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist, Princess, the accomplished trained acting canine in this movie, becomes the co-protagonist. When she becomes ill she turns into Rene's main preoccupation, the Muguffin if you will that teaches him to feel and by releasing sadness enables him to embrace life again. He unwraps all the objects in the house he'd packed away after his mother's death and labeled for his handful of chosen "heirs," the gay hairdressers and coworkers at the post office, where he's been showing up every day to do chores even though he's retired, just to have something to do. The house looks radiant and Rene walks off into a lush winding forest road, shot from above.

Bwakaw is a little long (at 110 min.) and definitely episodic and its protagonist is slow to grow on you, but ultimately this is a movie that can appeal even to the hard-hearted, except that it sometimes doesn't, due to the off-putting title and the bleak plotline. In addition, thanks perhaps to the hurried shoot imposed by a low budget, there are some wrong notes. After the still quite young Bwawkaw has gotten sick and been diagnosed with cancer, she still seems awfully perky at times. (In truth simulating cancer may be too great a challenge for even the most talented canine.) When Minda (Luz Valdez), the post office friend, becomes ill, Rene steps out of his dour character a bit too much in giving her a pre-op party. Surely Rene's frequent visits to the handsome young priest Father Eddie (Gardo Versoza) reflect an attraction, but that's an aspect that's fudged on screen. The alterations in Rene's mood are a bit on the crude and abrupt side, the film's fault, not Eddie Garcia's. And despite the sociability of Filipino culture we don't feel a social context here as we do in the Italian films I've mentioned. But Bwakaw is a respectable and original effort. Rene is a genuinely memorable character, both unique and expressive of something basic in the human condition, that we are all alone, and we all must die.

Bwakaw debuted at the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent film festival in July 2012 and was also shown at Toronto in September; and at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center a month later. Screened for this review as part of the NYFF. It has been chosen to be the official entry of the Philippines to the Best Foreign Language Film competition at the 85th Academy Awards 2013. In a Skype Q&A director Lana reported the local release was brief but lucrative enough to break even on expenses. He also mentioned that Eddie Garcia very willingly took on the role, and that Princess has her own TV series and besides that is trained as a bomb-sniffing dog.

VALERIA SARMIENTO: LINES OF WELLINGTON (2012)

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Napoleon's forces chaotically routed in Portugal

Described as "An epic set in and around the Battle of Bussaco (1810)" and designed as a TV mini-series, this handsome-looking 151-minute costume piece, which has nice crowd scenes, is a meandering and episodic war story that recreates the chaos of Tolstoy's Battle of Waterloo without the grandeur and ultimate sense. There are many mini-plots, none of which catch lasting emotional hold. The film represents a project begun by the lat Raúl Ruíz, completed by his widow, Valeria Sarmiento. A cast almost absurdly rich in well-known names includes John Malkovich (as Wellington), Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Mathieu Amalric, Vincent Pérez, Marisa Paredes, Chiara Mastroianni, Melvil Poupaud, Michel Piccoli, Elsa Zylberstein, Christian Vadim. Vincent Lindon, and Malik Zidi. Malkovich is ageeably diseagreable as usual, and Amalric does a voice-over in French, but most of the others just appear in brief 'wow" cameos. Despite big festival showings (Venice, Toronto, New York) and a theatrical release, this isn't a film that has box office potential and may function best as a rainy day soporific.

There is barely any one thread (other than the fact of the war going on) that links the whole rambling thing together, or makes us care, and that includes the fortifications referred to as the Lines of Wellington. The atmosphere, and the historical events referred to, would be of special interest to Portuguese viewers, though as in Ruíz's previous work the confounding but rich Mysteries of Lisbon, there is dialogue in English, French, and Portuguese.

Jay Wsissberg sums things up in his Variety review thus: "Expectations were high, given Ruiz's pre-production input and the participation of "Mysteries of Lisbon" scripter Carlos Saboga, along with d.p. Andre Szankowski, but alas, "Wellington" is stringy beef. Aiming for a Tolstoyan vibe that personalizes history's great events, the pic is big, but not big enough; historical, but not exactly accurate; and the extra stuffing, which made "Mysteries" a treasure box of discoveries, here feels merely undigested."

Telling a story of masses of man and large events while focusing on the ordinary folk and still including scenes of major figures is a tricky balancing act, and this film does not perform it successfully, seeming indeed indifferent to the need for subordination and clear guidelines.

A wounded lieutenant, Pedro de Alencar (Carloto Cotta) is the closest thing to a linking figure. He appears repeatedly, first wounded on the battlefield, then in hospital, later escaping in hospital gown to be protected by an older lady, finally, recovered serving in a motley unit till he rejoins the platoon he commanded originally.

But if this is a "miniseries," maybe it was cut, and cut badly. The original intentions of Carlos Saboga may have been lost -- or never defined. An unfortunate aspect, for following the action in a feature film format, is the lack of intertitles and the frequency in which characters occur who speak both Portuguese and English and are of mixed origin. With a chaotic palette it would have helped to draw the lines carefully and clearly. It's not that difficult; but it's not that easy, either.

What we learn at the outset is that the Portuguese allied with the English are the local victors, but have to withdfaw because the French still outnumber them. The finale leaves us with a vague sense of victory for the Portuguese-British side, but without anything to rejoice over. The final text describes the country as ravaged for years to come by this warfare.

As Weissberg says, if you loved Mysteries of Lisbon (which does have its enchantments despite its being harder to follow) there may be some carry-over to liking Lines of Wellington. But not much, really.

Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

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YE YU-ZHU, SONG FANG IN MEMORIES LOOK AT ME

The mundanity of it all

In Oliver Glodsmith's 1760-61 pseudo-Chinese letters called The Citizen of the World, there's a moment when an Englishman expresses disappointment at the Asian visitor's talk. He'd been expecting exoticism and arcane wisdom, and all he is hearing, he says, is "mere chit-chat and common sense." That is the shortcoming of this new prizewinning feature from Song Fang. It is a cozy in-family celebration of Chinese matter-of-fact-ness so unwavering as to be numbing. There are fundamental truths about life here, but they are buried in the non-drama. As the Hollywood Reporter reviewer Stephen Dalton put it, only the "most serious art-house cinema" audience will warm to Song's "narrow focus and chilly film-school minimalism."

The young female director had full cooperation from her mother and father and other family members in shooting this docu-drama in which she comes for a visit and talks at length with her parents and particularly her mother about aging, her grandmother's death, and other day-to-day issues. The focus is on aging and on how memories link family members. There are links with the documentary fiction of the film's producer Jia Zhangke and also of the low keyed focus of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Song starred in Hou's Parisian-set Flight of the Red Balloon (NYFF 2007). Song's delicacy and the clean lines of her editing and cinematography (rudimentary equipment doesn't keep there from being some beautiful, simple images), plus the focus on humanistic concerns that are universal, won her the Best First Feature prize at Locarno.

However, a scene in whch Song's mom takes her dad's blood pressure and finds it at an all-time low provides a metaphor for the whole film: the claustrophobic indoor "action," which consists of sitting around and talking, is so delicate and matter-of fact that it will lower your blood pressure, and maybe even put you to sleep. How much do you really care when Song first went to middle school, or why she thought her mom looked older than other moms then? As the chit-chat and common sense spill calmly out of mouths, the humanism becomes hard to discern from the mundane detail, and Song's film does not sing. However, the film has a simplicity, purity, and natural flow that make one understand the Locarno jury's admiration. But then I think of Edward Yang's Yi Yi and this dwindles to a tiny scribble. Rigorous this may be, and economical it certainly is, but it also seems lazy, hugely unadventurous, and numbingly lacking in cinematic verve.

The transliterated Chinese title of Memories Look at Me is Ji Yi Wang Zhe Wo.

Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

PAOLO AND VITTORIO TAVIANI: CAESAR MUST DIE (2012)

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GIOVANNI ARCURI AS CAESAR IN CAESAR MUST DIE

Shakespeare in a Roman prison

The prolific Taviani brothers (of Padre, Padrone and Night of the Shooting Stars) focus on the theme of a prison theatrical production in this emotionally strong documentary that focuses on rehearsals, the performance, and the cast's return to their cells in the maximum security section of Rome's Rebibbia prison in Cesare deve morire/Caesar Must Die, winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin and a lot of prizes and nominations in Italy. Unfortunately in the effort to make a polished and performance-like film, certain details have been fudged and when the thrill has passed, the whole thing feels a little less profound and informative than it might have been. Details of the production, such as the fact that the director, Fabio Cavalli, has put on plays at Rebibbia for years and built up a semi-pro cast among the inmates, and how the final performance was actually staged, are left unexplained, and worst of all, every shot, even where the actors have conflicts, rebel, or speak personal asides, seem so obviously pre-rehearsed that one feels robbed of true insight into what went on.

We begin with an overview of what appear to be auditions, in which prisoners are asked to say their basic coordinates -- name, home town, address, and some throw in a lot more -- in two moods: one as if they are leaving their family, and the other as if they have been delayed by the bureaucracy and are angry. So, sad and angry. And from here on, one is gripped by the macho theatricality of the inmates, all of whom come up with strong emotion and some of whom are astonishingly inventive. Next we see a group called out who have been selected as the cast for a proeduction in Italian of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, which they are directed to perform in their own native dialects. The majority identify themselves as Neapolitan or Sicilian, though one says he has no dialect and just speaks Italian. Subtitles for the main cast members give their part and their sentence and the crimes for which they have been convicted -- drug trafficking, murder, organized crime activities -- for which some have already served many years and all will serve many.

Next the film shows the actors memorizing their lines and acting them out among themselves. The opening and closing segments are in color; all the rest, the shots in cells and in hallways and of rehearsals, is in strong, effective black and white (in contrast to the flat B&W digital transfer from color of Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha, also a part of the New York Film Festival). These guys are good, in the sense that they project well, speak clearly, summon up wellsprings of appropriate emotion, and have dramatic flair. On the other hand one may question whether some of them have the right faces to represent the Roman aristocracy. The use of dialects has an obvious value: the actors may thus speak their lines as home truths, the better to identify the betrayals, loss of freedom, resentments, and plotting with their own combined memory of present and pre-jail experiences. Moreover in a Q&A with the directors after this screening, they explained that each actor translated his own lines from standard Italian into his individual dialect, providing them with an intellectually stimulating activity that may bring out an urge to write. On the other hand, the various dialects can be distracting and would break up the unity of the original Shakespearean text. All of which reminds us that this is a novelty and a feat and not a work of art for general consumption, however fascinating it is to study jail performances, as we know from Beckett in prison decades ago.

Rehearsals -- with the mood flare-ups that seem artificial -- blend seamlessly into performance. But here is another place where the Tavianis have fudged and distorted. While it's obvious from the opening and closing sequences that the play was performed on a stage surrounded by large columns before an audience who came in from outside, in the film sequences are staged in hallways and a courtyard of the prison. As Jay Weissberg rightly points out in his Berlin review for Variety, these sequences staged by the directors only for the film distort the desired sense that this is a prison, that the inmates live constantly in small cells, and that they're only "free" in the director's rehearsal space and the final on-stage performance. In this misleading context, as Weissberg says, a shot of part of the play artificially set up with the sky all around above (as it never can be in Rebibbia) "turns the cells into a theatrical construct" when the prisoners are shown being let into them one by one in a sequence that bookends the film.

It's a shame that in the interests of evaluating the film fully as documentary material, one must focus so much on these various elisions and distortions. Caesar Must Die remains a theatrical-cinematic artifact of strong interest that can't fail to move you at certain points when you watch the inmate-actors in action and their skill and their ability to harness "emotional memory" in the Strasberg sense. The language may not mesh and the faces may not always be right, but the energy and fluency of the performances of everyone in the cast are impressive. (It would have been nice to see more instances where someone fumbled or forgot lines or got pointers from the director.) I have to point out another significant tweaking of the situation not acknowledged in the body of the film: the actor who plays Brutus, Salvatore Striano, was released six years ago and brought back to act in the production.

According to those credits the impressive and well-cast Giovanni Arcuri, who plays Caesar, has written a book about "freedom in prison," and the theme of inner vs. outer freedom is one the filmmakers seek to develop, though it would come through much better had they delved more deeply into the details of the play production process and been willing to move back and forth from slick performance to awkward reality. Instead it's all slick performance, even the ostensible off-text scenes.

Weissberg points out that sometimes to the "sharp-eared" or keenly observant the dialects and the prisoners' mafia connections give certain spoken lines an inappropriate or comic overtone, and he notes "distracting post-production dubbing" audible in the alteration of some speeches. On the other hand the fact that some of these men are murderers and have a violent past gives stabbing scenes a chilling double reality. The surging music by Vittorio's son Giuliano Taviani is sometimes derivative or repetitions, but has a generally strong unifying effect, underlining the throbbing emotion and adding to the distinctive look and feel of the film.

Cesare deve moriere debuted at Berlin, as mentioned, where it received the Silver Bear award. It was screened for this review as part of the 20012 New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it is showing Sept. 29 and 30 and Oct. 1 and 8. It already has been or soon will be released in over a dozen countries; no US distributor yet (as of Sept 27, 2012).

RAUL RUÍZ: NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET (2012)

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SANTIAGO FIGUEROA AND SERGIO SCHMIED IN NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET

A summation with a light touch

Raúl Ruiz is the Chilean auteur known for Time Regained (a symphonic riff on Proust) and his lush recent miniseries Mysteries of Lisbon (but director of more than 100 films if we include shorts and documentaries). Though he lived in exile ever since the dictator Pinochet came into power in 1973, he was reportedly greeted affectionately on the street in Chile as "Don Raulito." He died in France last year, shortly after his seventieth birthday, after a serious illness that had been temporarily reversed by a liber transplant, and after a celebrity funeral in Paris his body was returned home and a day of national mourning was declared. La noce de enfrente/Le nuit d'en face/Night Across the Street is an intentionally posthumous cinematic last testament. Ruiz told the younger crew members on the rapid shoot that it was his last film, but concealed this from friends and family and producer (and friend) François Margolin. The title could be translated as "the coming night" -- as it is at a key point in the film's English subtitles -- and thus mean the oncoming darkness, the approach of death. Conversely it's already being celebrated for its youthfulness, for being more like a first film than a final one. Indeed it is a lighthearted, amusing, playful and surreal film that slides around in time with a freedom that may baffle the first-timer. For that matter it may not be too clear on the fifth or sixth viewing -- if you haven't done your homework in between. This is a film for Ruiz aficionados and selected festival-goers.

But it's not like the film itself is a total, baffling mystery. Ruiz himself provides an excellent Night Across the Street for Dummies in the form of a brief Cannes Statement about the film. His starting point, he explains, is the Chilean writer Hernán del Solar (1900-1985), one of a group of Imagists who went against the naturalism that grew up in the Forties and Fifties. "In Del Solar's works," Ruiz writes, "daily life coexists with the dream world, with tenderness and cruelty, the literary evocations and the omnipresence of the universe of childhood." That tells you also what to expect in his film. Two of Del Solar's stories, Ruiz also tells us, are "Wooden Leg" and "The Night Across the Street." "Wooden Leg" is derived from Long John Silver of R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, of which Ruiz, whose father was a ship captain and who had a lifelong fascination with pirates, had done a screen adaptation. He's a character in the film, this Wooden Leg (Pedro Villagra) , and so is Beethoven (Sergio Schmied), or a Chilean child's imagined version of the German composer.

The film begins with an engaging scene of one Don Celso (Sergio Hernandez) sitting in a class taught by the writer Jean Giono (Christian Vadim), a provincial Frenchman whose daughter Ruiz, he tells us in his statement, once met. She told him how Giono, who feared even going to Paris, once announced to his family that he was going to move to Antofagasta, a port in the north of Chile, which he picked solely because he liked the name. In the film he is there, teching a class in French literature in which he asks students to close their eyes and meditate on his words.

The story of the film, Ruiz tells us in his statement, takes place in Antofagista in the present time, and there are modern buildings, as well as ones from the past; but the characters don't see the modern ones. The film, we could say, creates a limbo between past and present, real and fantasy, and lingers there, ready to shift back and forth at a moments notice.

Starting with the poetic classroom of Jean Giono, the film plays with various verbal motifs, particularly recurring to the word "rhododendron." The little boy in the story, the young Celso (Santiago Figueroa), is sometimes known as "Rodo." The old Don Celso works in an office and is about to retire; but the film often shows him in his imaginative boyhood, when he has conversations with Beethoven and Wooden Leg. Following what he considers an Imagist stye worthy of Hernán del Solar, Ruiz imagines the mature Don Celso likewise having conversations with Jean Giono, even though Giono is also a writer working in France. And Don Celso is also in a rooming house, where he expects someone is going to come and kill him. As Ruiz puts it, "the horror of an impending crime grows in importance." He also says this is "a weaving narrative, only half explicit, and a dark story of crime and treason."

This threatening plot element serves as a thread pointing toward a definite finale (the "coming night") and thus offsets the playful shifting back and forth between present and past, reality and fantasy, of the film's minute-to-minute texture. It's a Whodunit! Or almost. Several pistols are introduced, and they have to be used, except that we don't ever literally see them used; we only view corpses, and figures with red bullet wounds, who are alive. In the context of this film "Imagist" evidently means "surreal," and the mindset of Ruiz's film is certainly more surrealist than super realist. The ghost of Jorge Luis Borges (perhaps due to the affection for Stevenson) seems to hover somewhere, even though Borges was from Argentina and not Chile. Borges' dates are very close to Del Solars, 1899-1986.

Ruiz ends his film statement with a funny mistake -- confusing two utterly different modern artists. The "possible world" of Giono in Antofagasta that threads through Night Across the Street contrasts with the "real" world of the modern town that the characters "ignore and refuse." He says this is like the painting "of Matisse" that shows a pipe with underneath it the legent, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"). He meant Magritte, of course. But who knows: perhaps in this kind of auteurist cinematic world, "Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pipe" was painted by Matisse!

Justin Chang's Cannes review for Variety has a fine description of the film's modality. Mentioning the director's "smoothly panning camera movements and ingenious sense of staging" he goes on to say, "Ruiz has a way of positioning the protagonist both within and outside his own recollections, as though observing and participating at the same time. The director's frequent use of doorways and mirrors to frame and isolate his characters suggests many layers of (un)reality nestled within this curious dreamscape, whose transparent artifice is underscored by the film's intense level of stylization, especially apparent in the gold-burnished tones of d.p. Inti Briones' HD lensing." Prepare not only for a head trip but a sweet and dreamy visual experience, which may remind you of recent films by the now 103-year-old Manoel de Oliveira.

Night Across the Street is the quintessential justifiable festival film, much more so than the mainstream release titles, Story of Pi, Flight, and Hyde Park on Hudson, shamelessly included in the Main Slate of this supposedly "elite" and "highly selective" festival to sell tickets, not to mention arty but drab and uninspired titles like Memories Look at Me, Araf, or Here and There.. Richard Peña, the director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, has said that the New York Film Festival has chosen Ruiz films to be in the elite selection of its Main Slate, but never just any Ruiz film. This is hardly any Ruiz film, because though it may be hermetic and obscure it is also beautiful -- its delicate images in a lovely haze created by the yellow filter -- and as the final work of the great exiled Latin American auteur, it deserves a very special place. I didn't really very much enjoy watching it but I enjoy thinking about it, and I would probably enjoy watching it again.

La noche de enfrente debuted in Cannes' Director's Fortnight in May and has continued to a number of festivals including Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and New York. Watched at the NYFF press screenings for this review. It also opened in Paris in July receiving critical raves (Allocné 4.1).

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FRENCH FILM POSTER

ANG LEE: LIFE OF PI (2012)

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SURAJ SHARMA IN LIFE OF PI

Ang Lee films an unfilmable book, and does a pretty bang-up job of it

Ang Lee's film adaptation of Yann Martel's 2001 Booker-Prize-winning sea adventure of an Indian boy and a Bengal tiger is a winning combination of the narrative and the visual. Thanks to Suraj Sharma, the young actor who plays the oddly named Pi during the key period of his 227-day ordeal in a lifeboat, and to state-of-the-art CGI that makes a hyena, a zebra, a baboon and the tiger come to vivid life in 3D as they duke it out in the confines of the boat, this Life of Pi is a stunning experience. If it has shortcomings, they are those of the book. Despite the terror and the beauty, not to mention the considerable wit and invention, something is emotionally lacking. An initial description of the father's zoo in French Ponticherry, India and the boy's swimming lessons and spiritual explorations -- he is a hindu, but also joins the Catholic church and becomes a practicing Muslim -- sets things up and conceivably makes the long Jobian torment on the water seem like a testing of the soul. But that's an idea, not a passion or a spiritual truth. This inner shortcoming may not matter to many in the audience, because as in Crouching Tiger (this tiger does a lot more than crouch), Ang Lee provides stunning eye candy and lots of excitement too. Do we ever think Pi isn't going to make it? I don't think so. But Sharma, who carries off his long period on screen with flying colors, is being spoken of for an Oscar nomination. Dev Patel has a rival, one with more soul and warmth if less of a comedic edge, and a similar sports and martial arts background.

What is Life of Pi ultimately about? The frame story in which the mature Pi relates his experience to a writer in Canada seeking material (Rafe Spall is the writer, Irfan Khan the older Pi) tells us that he now teaches religion and philosophy. The focus returns to him when he describes how Richard Parker (the Bengal tiger's name), once they finally reach land on the coast of Mexico, simply walks off along the beach and disappears into the woods. Pi desperately wanted some closure, after that long time together. When he recounts this meaningless parting he weeps. He began terrified of Richard Parker, then managed, if not to tame, at least to train, him, so he didn't get killed, and finally, exhausted and starving together, they almost became loving companions.

I think the tiger is Pi's key to survival. Maybe the struggle with the tiger kept the struggle with hunger and the elements from being overwhelming. Ultimately Richard Parker was company: strange company, but he kept Pi from being alone. Or maybe Pi is the tiger, or the tiger is the inner demon in himself that Pi must tame (or train). There are hints -- stronger in the film than in the book, I think -- that all this may be invention. And then the animals in the boat may have an allegorical meaning, while the story becomes a study in the meaning of narrative itself. But this may be asking a bit much of a film that's so pretty and ultimately so light, adapted from a book that is so focused on physical events.

It's a good story. It's an old-fashioned story. In a way it's like Robinson Crusoe -- only without the island and without Friday, which takes away a lot, but adds novel creatures as well as natural phenomena which the film also stunningly recreates. Ang Lee's movie is a pleasure. But ultimately I'm not sure that it matters. However, though you never know how it will turn out when the selection is first made, it seems like a good choice for the New York Fim Festival's opening night premiere film, which it is -- well calculated to appeal to patrons who are not film buffs but might respond to an original tale beautifully told.

On the other hand, like Flight and Hyde Park on Hudson, two other selections, Life of Pi doesn't seem like the kind of film you need to include in an "elite" and "highly selective" event like the New York Film Festival, (whose Main Slate is honed down to only 33 films). But economic and box office reality mean that you need something that won't put off those patrons, and you need to sell tickets. Life of Pi is likely to sell plenty of tickets when it's released, as well.

The cinematography is pretty, but the music by Mychael Danna; is conventional. The screen adaptation by David Magee (of Finding Neverland) captures a lot of the book, but minus the grittier and more harrowing or grotesque details that would take us as deep into the ordeal as Martel does. Rafe Spall is probably a less interesting presence than Tobey McGuire, who was originally going to be the writer. For that matter Irfan Khan is not as winning as his younger avatars, and the narrative sessions between Khan and Spall are somewhat clunky and obtrusive. Ayush Tandon, on the other hand, is very appealing as the young Pi who first takes on the world's major religions. Gérard Depardieu seems wasted as the oily and repugnant ship's cook: one can't help feeling some of his footage wound up on the cutting room floor.

But to compensate for any shortcomings in detail or superficiality in the story, Lee provides virtuoso displays of old-fashioned cinematic skill embellished with state-of-the-art techniques, the CGI augmented by the use of the world's largest self-generating wave tank, where the smoothly circling camera builds astounding images of the shipwreck and the lifeboat at sea, with Sharma going through heroic and convcincing changes of weight and appearance and emotion in the course of Pi's shattering but triumphant ordeal.

Life of Pi, 127 mins., debuted at the NYFF. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, in which as mentioned it was the opening night film, and premiered, on September 28, 2012. It shows at Mill Valley Oct. 14. The US theatrical release date (Fox) is Nov. 21; the French one (as L'Odyssée de Pi) Dec. 19; and in the UK, the day is Dec. 21.

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LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR, VÉRÉNA PARAVEL: LEVIATHAN (2012)

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Into the net

From a Locarno debut, this grueling but beautiful documentary film by Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgass) about fishing on a big vessel with giant nets. The filmmakers had lost all their equipment and went back with tiny non-pro waterproof digital cameras and used them for fly-on-the-wall (or on the wave) shots that sometimes give the fish-eye view. Oppressive loud noise from engines and machines (and weather and water) both overwhelm and calm, as violence in Hollywood movies, now so familiar, can sometimes put one to sleep. There is a sense of a vast process going on over which nobody has very much control. Who are the fishermen and who or what is being caught? The small cameras produce raw, sometimes slightly fuzzy images and when the colors of the fish go garish -- ther is a lot of glossy white and a lot of red -- the paintings of Chaim Soutine and Oskar Kokoschka come to mind. iIt's that kind of lush beauty-in-ugliness photography. Seeing the film at Toronto, Mike D'Angelo in one of his puzzlingly-precise instant Twitter reviews gave it a (for him) very high score of 73, and commented only: "Still wish human beings were kept strictly on the periphery. Purely abstract imagery astounding." This is true, but he might consider that we as viewers are in fact "kept strictly on the periphery." It's just like watching as a child taken aboard for the day and not allowed to do or understand anything. No explanations. And no likelihood of mainstream interest. Another utterly justifiable festival film choice and one that keeps the New York Film Festival honest, eclectic, and still edgy and fresh. But there is not much to say because the honest reaction is to be left speechless.

If you do go on to question and discuss, up comes the issue of the politics of such a film. Are the fishermen and the industry being unjudgmentally embraced, or brutally caricatured? Or do the filmmakers really know? As the Variety review points out, in the first twenty-five minutes it's very hard even for the viewer to know what he or she is looking at. It's just confusing, loud, elemental, and scary, and that's surely intentional. This could be the novice or visitor's initial bafflement, or it could be the captured fish's helplessness. We as viewers are rendered as passive as the catch. The fishing trawler near New Bedford, Massachusetts is going to be followed "without any context or commentary." But it is not going to be made pretty (except for a few shots of seagulls flying across a pale sky, which it seems many have chosen, misleadingly, as an emblematic images of the film).

The cameras are used roughly, strapped to the fishermen's arms, set on a floor jammed with dying fish, floating on or stuck under water. And fish are gathered and sloshed around en masse, confusingly. It is often hard to recognize that they even are fish or what fish or what parts of them are in view. In a way this is a film about the gathering and preparing of food for humans. That's what's essentially going on. One thinks of another New York Film Festival film from 2005, Nikoilaus Geyrhalter's Our Daily Bread (NYFF 2006). That documentary too is wordless, with no explanation, except for some data at the end. But it's a comprehensive survey of various food factories in Germany, coldly, cleanly, and elegantly filmed. It's an alienating film, with a kind of smugness about it. Leviathon is the opposite in every way. It might make people angry too, but for sure it's not smug. There's a kind of mute passion in it.

But the British-born Castaing-Taylor, a Harvard ethnographer and filmmaker, may simply be trying to reflect the messiness of life. That's what he told the New York Times in an August 2012 interview: “If life is messy and unpredictable, and documentary is a reflection of life, should it not be digressive and open-ended too?” Castaing-Taylor's e Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard was responsible for both Sweetgrass (NYFF 2009) and the new film. Sweetgrass, with its vast open landscapes and grazing sheep and long silences, provides an utter contrast to the clangorous, wet, noisy, in-your-face Leviathon. And as Sweetgrass benefitted from special long-distance remote sound recording, Leviathon profits from its tiny portable waterproof cameras that seem able to wedge their way into anything. Castaing-Taylor and his partners are committed to tempering intense ethnographic research with post-shoot aesthetic reconsiderations. He eschews the information-heavy, didactic bent of most documentaries in favor of something completely different. And we do get tired sometimes of films that read like Power Point lectures. Much as we like being provided with memorizable and digestible information, the world is a very indigestible and confusing place, and enlightenment may best begin from the kind of sensory overload and challenging cinematic experience Leviathon provides.

Castaing-Taylor's collaborator this time, Véréna Paravel, worked with J. P. Sniadecki on the Iron Triangle doceuentary, Foreign Parts, shown as a Special Event in the 2010 New York Film Festival (I watched it with pleasure but did not review it).

As mentioned Leviathan debuted at Locarno and was shown at Toronto. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, September 2012. It was shown right after Life of Pi at the press and industry screenings. One was a little waterlogged by the time they were over.

MIGUEL GOMES: TABU (2012)

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CARLOTO COTTA AND ANA MOREIRA IN TABU
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Shooting back in time to an exotic forbidden love

The title the director Migues Gomes has given his third feature, Tabu, alludes to a fictitious mountain in an undesignated Portuguese African colony in the 1960's. It's also an allusion to F.W. Murnau's 1931 movie, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas . The second half of the new film, shot in 16mm. black and white film and converted to 35mm. in old fashioned square format (as is the lackluster first half) tells a story of doomed but passionate adulterous love between a dashing, mustachioed musician, Gian Luca Ventura (Carloto Cotta) and Aurora (Ana Moreira), the young wife of an equally young but less exotic tea plantation owner (Ivo Müller). The story like a Somerset Maugham short story without the punch line, or Hemingway one without the moral complexity. It's a bit shallow; but it's nonetheless beautiful, stylish, and inventive. Gomes' first half, centered on the adulterous lady as a tiresome senior citizen in Lisbon (Laura Soveral) who loses everything at a casino and then dies in hospital, is heavily scripted and featuring several drab, uninteresting older women. It's only when the former love, Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), still distinguished looking, appears after the funeral and begins telling the story that the good stuff begins. You could certainly argue that the first part is necessary to set up the long voiceover and semi-silent dumbshow of the adultery tale, but it doesn't need to be so long. One brief description in the Village Voice by Nick Pinnkerton calls this "a broke-back, diptych film," noticing that Murnau's Tabu is similarly split. As Pinkerton's word, "broke-back," suggests, there's something uneven and disabled about this film's construction.

When the filmmakers got to Mozambique they threw away the strict playbook they used for the first part and instead improvised their story's details from day to day. They got the cast to pretend to talk, but as we watch their many activities, including music by a depressing pool and a brief scene of surprisingly sexy lovemaking (given the period formality of much of the rest), we only hear the voiceover, and ambient sounds of nature, suggesting the place is still alive but the people are long gone; also alluding to silent film, though the date of the events is during the time of rock and roll, and the musician-lover is drummer in a band that plays and sings in English in an American rock-pop style. Gomes really does achieve a sense of time-travel with this mood and format.

While Gomes' film is flawed, it is evocative and very cinematic; even the name Aurora is a reference to Murnau's 1931 film, though in a Q&A after the NYFF press screening, the Portuguese director made clear that his memories and allusions to earlier films are vague and impressionistic -- and that the film isn't meant to be a comment on the Portuguese colonies that were freed in 1974 but rather a comment on movies (and stories?) about adulterous love affairs in this kind of setting. Ventura becomes guilty about the forbidden relationship and tries to end it. But many decades later the two lovers still pined for each other; Aurura's husband had died young but she had never remarried.

The music has an excellent period flavor. Gomes' dp Rui Pocas shot the Lisbon contemporary scenes in 35mm, the flashback ones in 16mm, contrasting a crisp look with a blurrier more vivid one. With his tan, sinewy slimness, and little mustache Carloto Cotta, as the young lover, has a deliciously seedy-sexy quality and the Variety reviewer Jay Weissberg, who saw the film at Berlin, is right to mention also that "he has the suave, captivating elegance of a young Errol Flynn." Cotta gives the doomed romance sequences their signature look. A part of the visual theme too is the cunningly old-fashioned way the starkly mountainous landscapes are shot, and the motival use of a small crocodile that Aurora's husband gives her as an eccentric present, but later disappears and winds up at Ventura's place -- twice.

Flawed, slim, Tabu is nonetheless memorable and a good choice for a film festival, but is also getting world releases. It's distributed in he US by the new label Adopt films (Jeff Lipsky), as is another NYFF Main Slate item, Christian Petzold's excellent Barbara. It debuted at Berlin and has shown at other international festivals, and will be released in the UK Sept. 7, in France Dec. 5 and the USA (NYC) Dec. 26, 2012. Watched for this review as part of the press & industry screenings of the 50th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Sept.-Oct. 2012.

Tabu begins a limited US release Dec. 26, 2012 at Film Forum, NYC.

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MARC-HENRI WAJNBERG: KINSHASA KIDS (2012)

Runaway child "witches" join a band

Kinshasa Kids is at least an admirable idea: to make a mixed-genre movie using the street kids of Congo's semi-wrecked capital. There are twenty-five or thirty thousand of them, mostly branded as "witches" by father's whose wives have left them or by second wives who don't want to raise somebody else's child. They are sent to churches for expensive (and terrifying) purification rituals (shown at the film's outset), but those don't keep the kids from being rejected and so they run away to live by stealing (the film follows one). The Belgian director Marc-Henri Wajnberg decided to make a sort of musical. Or at least the little group he narrowed down to his core cast of eight kids he groomed as a band. He found a local rapper called Bebson Elemba, dubbed in the movie "Bebson de la Rue" -- the local patois has a liberal mix of French in it and some of the street people -- a prostitute, for example -- can speak an approximate form of the Gallic tongue. Bebeon becomes the group's leader.

When Jose, the kid we follow from home to the streets and rooftops of Kinshasa, joins a group with one boy who befriends him, he's asked to sing, to justify inclusion among them. Bebson takes the boys and the one girl to a makeshift studio and "auditions" them and sees their potential marketability. His own as yet unrealized hope to make a CD is alluded to amid the rapid and chaotic dialogue that accompanies the camera's sweeps through the streets.

The result is colorful, alright. The Congolese and these kids in particular are warm and funny and full of life. But as filmmaking, despite nimble camerawork by Danny Elsen and Colin Houben that even follows a fast foot chase through the rubbish-strewn streets, is mediocre. This partly due to the editing: Wajnberg appears to have had too much footage to deal with. It's also due to his peculiar notion that documentary style is scarmbled and only semi-coherent as narrative. It seems Wajnberg is trying to do something like Marcel Camus' classic Black Orpheus -- without the mythological theme or the charismatic stars or the inspired filmmaking. But he can't bring out his gang of eight clearly enough from the surrounding crowds. There is a lot or funning around, squabbling, and chatter, and while the film uses fake cops to dramatize the constant demands for bribes (justified by the fact that the police had not been paid for many months), there's also a real car crash and real cops who rush in afterwards. There's all this stuff happening, and the kids' story half drowns.

You get a view of insanely overloaded train cars, people hanging out of every wondow and standing all over the roof; and insanely overloaded motorcycles. There's some snappy, hard-driving music from the little band; there's also a classical concert with orchestra and chorus performing Mozart's Sanctus that is supposed to inspire the kids to collaborate with Bebson in a public concert using borrowed or stolen audio equipment. Wajberg and his collaborators don't know how to get close enough to the individual kids for personalities to emerge, except one, Rachel, is a girl, and another, Mickael, who wears a tilted bowler and does a passable Moonwalk, aspires to be like Michael Jackson. Bebson wears these weird sunglasses. Wajnberg may have had a bang-up time, and his instant kid stars may have been lifted from Third World poverty and homelessness, but his flashy postcard falls flat. Wajnberg has made pure documentaries up to this. He doesn't seem to have quite understood how to morph his methods into a fictional story. A Screen Daily review from the Venice screening suggests this film "is most obviously a feel-good story in the long-running ‘society outcasts form a band and achieve success’ genre – and it’s here that it doesn’t quite deliver," for the reason that the trajectory is not convincingly followed. All the local color gets in the way. Fiction means telling a satisfying story, and for all its vivid material, that goal eludes Kinshasa Kids.

There is a throwaway appearance by Congalese musical superstar Papa Wemba. The core street kid group: Jose Mawanda, Rachel Mwanza, Emmanuel Fakoko, Gabi Bolenge, Gauthier Kiloko, Joel Eziegue, Mickael Fataki, Samy Molebe , plus Bebson De la Rue.

Kinshasa Kids debuted at Venice and also played at Toronto. Screened for this review as part of the Main Slate of the 50th New York Film Festival, at Lincoln Center, October 1, 2012.

ALAN BERLINER: FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED (2012)

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EDWIN HONIG IN FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED

"The mind can be blank and still be going: that's the trouble"

The ravages of Alzheimer's on a distinguished mind is the subject of this beautifully edited, well (if far from fully) contextualized study of Alan Berliner's cousin, the poet, translator, and professor Edwin Honig, who died last year at 91 with Alzheimer's disease. The film focuses on material gathered on regular visits over a five-year period and the steady deterioration of memory from confusion about who Berliner is to being unable to recall simple words and sequences of words, but with a great many variations in between, both awesome and troubling. At the end Honig is often making noises rather than talking. But all along Berliner stimulates him with photographs, memorabilia, and questions, and even in ruins this intellect is fascinating and remarkably poetic, at worst Lear and the Fool combined. He can suddenly utter a line of poetry or a keen observation about his situation. "Time now is what I do when I sit in this chair," he says. And he utters paradoxes like "Try to remember how to lose memory." Cuts from interviews with relatives, former students, and close friends fill in details about Honig in the role of father, teacher, and friend. The testimony of two sons and an ex-wife particularly underline that he could be a cruel and difficult man. He can't attach any meaning to the word love. This HBO documentary can be disturbing, especially to those in fear of what old age may bring (this didn't happen to Honig full-on till his mid-eighties). But in making the film, as Honig once suggests, Berliner is making a "poem," one that perceptively dissects and embodies themes like time, memory, and achievement.

The hard-heartedness of the man has its clear origins in an unloving mother and father. Honig's father was a cantor with an exalted sense of his own godliness and a low opinion of his son. As a boy of five, Honig ran out in the street and was followed by his three-year-old brother, and the brother was run over and killed. The father, devastated by grief, took refuge in forever blaming the boy. This terrible accident is the one thing from his life, Honig says, when asked, that he can't forget. The many books he published, the universities where he taught, the children and wives, the high honors bestowed by the Spanish and Portuguese governments for the translations of great literary classics of both countries -- all forgotten, or recalled only when his memory is jogged by Berliner. But not that terrible dash into the street and the cab that ran over his littler brother, or, no doubt, the cruel burden of blame bestowed by his father. That too he can recall.

In 2010, Berliner edited some footage he'd shot of Edwin Honig called “56 Ways of Saying 'I Don’t Remember'” and “Time and Again” (a title borrowed from an anthology of Edwin’s poems). Both of these were included in a more limited earlier recension called Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet's Alzheimer's (2010) that was shown as a a sidebar item of the 2010 New York Film Festival.* In the 2012 edits, Honig developed a use of repetition and quick cuts to give a layered sense of Honig's rapidly deteriorating memory and changed look and personality. In addition to adding the interviews for this new longer film, which considerably expands the sense of context, Berliner has also unified the film and given it a metaphorical context by using typewriter clack-sounds accompanying quick cuts. Thus sequences are pulled together and allusion is made to the quick mind, sudden revelations prompted by Berliner, or mental gaps. These effects blend with shots of the manual Hermes typewriter on which Honig did most of his writing as well as even more metaphorical images of a blackbird tapping on the keyboard with its beak -- suggesting one knows not what, perhaps the cruelty of Honig's pen or his brutal honesty.

A revelatory gesture on Berliner's part was his effort to interview the two young (adopted) sons of Honig's young second wife, who had been estranged from their father since childhood. He went to California to film the blond younger son who declined to revisit his declining father and who says that it's over now, that he forgives the man, but his only "problem" was that he was "an asshole." It rings true, and this must be balanced against others' testimony of love and admiration for Honig -- but understood in the context of early traumas that, the film suggests, Honig never managed to dealt with. A sweet touch is footage of Berliner's own very young son playing with the old man, whose love of music is fed by their sharing time on a wind instrument and a piano. These visits by the boy, non-judgmental, wholly in the present, show the ravaged Honig smiling and happy, even willing to say "I like you." But it is chilling to hear the words of Honig's former young wife, originally his very pretty student, who raised those two boys alone after Honig was asked to leave. She says that one lasting effect of her time with him is that she has never been able to read poetry since.

Since Berliner has included so much more about relationships in this fuller film sponsored by HBO on the basis of the earlier one, it's a shame he doesn't take more of a stab at explaining the disconnect between the love and admiration of some and the negative picture of Honig as husband and father. But the footage of Honig with Alzheimer's is perhaps still too much a main focus in this version to allow space for further analysis of the man, and much about his life goes unmentioned. Nor is this meant to be a full biography of someone who had a very rich working life.

Earlier films by Alan Berliner include Intimate Stranger (1991), a study of the double life of his maternal grandfather, an Egyptian Jew who went to live in Japan as a cotton merchant, and Nobody's Business (1996), an intimate study of his own father, Oscar Berliner. Berliner's exhaustive but also witty examination of his chronic insomnia, Wide Awake, was included in the 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival. This documentary, which will be shown on HBO, is part of the main slate of the 50th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Centeer, where it was screened for this review, and debuts there. In a Q&A Berliner said he had barely findished his editing, and might still be too close to the material to know fully how he feels about it and about his complex cousin.

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*I saw this earlier version but did not write about it.

RAMA BURSHTEIN: FILL THE VOID (2012)

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YIFTACH KLEIN AND HADAS HARON IN FILL THE VOID

Jane Austen with Rabbis

An 18-year-old girl in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Israel wavers about marrying a man when her sister dies and leaves him a widower in this film made in part for television. This will be an intensive introduction to its unusual community for some viewers; at the same time, the claustrophobic, slightly romanticized and simplified account, shot with closeups and soft focus, goes into little depth except about its one topic. There's none of the boldness and excitement of Haim Tabakman's 2009 Eyes Wide Open, a powerful movie set in Jerusalem about a married ultra-Orthodox butcher who falls in love with a handsome young man -- or Holy Rollers (2010) a film based on fact in which Jesse Eisenberg plays a New York ultra-Orthodox Jewish youth who becomes a drug mule. Fill the Void feels like a publicity film for Jewish Orthodoxy, if an odd one. Along with the soft focus, and the handsome lead couple, there is pretty music, notably a sweet choral setting for the lines beginning "If I forget you, O Jerusalem," which is played no less than three times.

A whole lot of davening -- the Jewish swaying to accompany relligious recitation -- goes on in Fill the Void. Women daven when just sitting taling. Shira (Hadas Yaron), the eventual bride, davens even when she sits in her white gown waiting to be married. Before the davening, Shira does a lot of wavering. Unlike the heroine of a Jane Austen novel, which arguably considers the same series of false starts and reconsiderations before a young woman joins with a young man, this movie has a very slow intensity, but lacks subtlety or complexity, as well as a larger social context of status or work. These people appear prosperous, to judge by their clothes and their well-appointed kitchens and the prospective groom's nice Volvo. What doee he do? As we see them, these are people who only marry, have babies, and meet with their religious leaders. In the end, it becomes clear that people of the Haredim or ultra-Orthodox community lives in a less advanced and democratic world than that of Jane Aussten's Hampshire in the early nineteenth century. And yet according to Jay Weissberg's Variety review written at Venice, Austen is Burstein's "stated influence."

But if Fill the Void is essentially shallow, and its simplicities and shallow focus imagery mark it as best suitefd for TV, even as a promotional film, it is a gorgeous, almost spiritually mesmerizing kind of film too. Its problem is that it's an insider's view of a community whose values and approaches (particularly its sense that a woman's goal in life is to marry and have children) are hard for modern viewers to sympathize with.

In the story, Shira is one of three daughters of the prosperous Rabbi Aharon (Chaim Sharir). Her sister Esther (Renana Raz) dies in childbirth leaving a baby, Mordechai, and her husband, Yochay (Yiftach Klein), in need of a new wife to care for the child. Indeed Shira does function like a Jane Austen heroine, in the sense that she is headstrong and resists the urging of her mother Rifka (Irit Sheleg) to agree to marry Yochay, who at first resists himself, then is taken with the young and pretty Shira, and humiliated when she lets him declare his attraction and then says she isn't interested and wants a marriage of virgin with virgin, as Yochay had with Esther. When other things don't work out, and the older sister Yocay isn't interested in finds a husband, Shira reverses her position, but not before she has been repeatedly stubborn with everyone on the issue. It is like Jane Austen, and it isn't: the final decision seems en emotional giving in to pressure, to "fill the void," rather than something that happens through growing up and learning moral lessons.

The fact is, as Weissberg notes, that despite the accomplishment of this film, its bias toward an extreme religous sub-group will be off-putting for many. However while the director is ultra-Orthodox, the actors are secular. Fill the Void debuted at Venice, and was shown at Toronto, where Mike D'Angelo gave it a disapproving 43 (I'm tempted to agree), with the Tweet review: "41. Like watching a film about freed slaves who opt to remain on the plantation for the good of the white family." I think he means Shira frees herself, by refusing Yochay initially, and her reversal and decision to marry him is like opting "to remain on the plantation for the good of the white family." I do not fully understand Hebrew, but my ability to follow it with the help of subtitles made me wonder if the dialogue here had much complexity. Notable is the repetition of the verbally identical formulas at all key moments in people's lives, and the very simple sentence structure of the dialogue. Jane Austen, with her wit and irony, this is absolutely not. Despite the richness of Jewish humor, this community as shown is not one favoring subtlety. Which is okay; but how primitive can you be in Tel Aviv (where this is set)?

The film debuted at the Jerusalem Film Festival, and reportedly "wowed" the audience at Venice, when it showed several months later there, and Hadas Yaron got the Best Actress award. The film has gotten good reviews in each festival venue, including New York and Toronto; perhaps somewhat less so when shown at the London Film Festival. Scheduled to be Israel's entry in the 2013 "Best Foreign Film" Oscar competition. Screened for this review as part of the main slate of the 50th (2012) New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2012. The film has been bought for US release by Sony Pictures Classics.

JOACHIM LAFOSSE: OUR CHILDREN (2012)

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NIELS ARESTRUP AND TAHAR RAHIM IN OUR CHILDREN

Letting things go too far

Our Children/À perdre la raison, starring Émile Duquesne, Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup is the slow-burning story of a family that gradually descends into hell. Elements of colonialism, gender roles, and psychological conflict are blended in a screenplay freely based on a news story from Lafosse's native Belgium known as "L'Affaire Geneviève Lhermitte." Viewers can debate what actually happens, but the trouble all begins when a wealthy doctor raises a young Moroccan, who falls in love and marries, and the couple live with him as his dependents. Lafosse seems to trade in unhealthy relationships and adults that are irresponsible. That was the case in Private Property, in which Isabelle Huppert is a mother more interested in affairs than raising her sons, and in Private Lessons, where thirty-somethings become unnaturally close to an adolescent boy whom they teach about sex. In fact having seen these two films helps one understand what's going on in All the Children. Lafosse is interested in boundaries, and what results when they're not respected or properly established within a claustrophobic hothouse environment. He takes his time with this one. It's interesting to see Niels Arestrup and Tahar Rahim, who played the Corsican mafia boss and his Moghrebin prison prottégé in Audiard's A prophet, back together again in a very different father-son relationship as the Belgian doctor and his boyish Moroccan immigrant dependent. For the initially vibrant young woman Rahim's character marries, who deteriorates in a situation that destroys her self-worth, Lafosse chose Émilie Duquenne, the Cannes award-winner from the Dardenne brother's Rosetta, who is the one who brings the drama to its muted but disturbing climax.

The film begins with four small coffins shipped to Morocco, so we know what happens, but for most of the time that is not thought of, though Morocco is a constant indirect presence. Mounir (Rahim) is like a pampered adopted son to André Pinget, the doctor who has raised him at his home. But as the action gets started Mounir has just failed a medical training program, and André takes him into his office as a kind of secretary. This weakness or the young man, and the older man's affectionate and protective relationship with him, leads to Mounir's staying on with André after he marries Murielle (Duquesne), a schoolteacher. And then the children begin, one after another in rapid succession, three girls and finally a boy.

The three main actors are fine, and Lafosse's scenes count not so much for what happens as for the atmosphere and the gradual feeling about the situation, a smile, a hug, a moment of congratulation that feels off. It's cozy and nice, full of affection. André is so generous he gives the baby and Murielle jewelry and Mounir a valuable watch when it's born. Rahim, the innocent protégé who becomes a powerful boss, seems spoiled and weak here, but also sweet, innocent, and happy. Murielle is harder to figure out. Eventually she will crumble, and her final deterioration comes through Morocco, which is also where André shows his dominance and colonialism. After moving to a house, which Mounir is given major ownership of but André also lives in, the Murielle feels just as stifled. The doctor is even Murielle's primary care physician. It seems the "our" in "our children" means André's and Mounir's. Slowly there are hints of nastiness from André. Murielle and Mounir want to be independent of him, but however they may try to do it, they can't risk André's threat of cutting them off completely. It's a situation that Mounir always thrived on. But Murielle is psychologically fragile. Ever since the time when her negligence causes one of their young children to fall down some stairs, she has a morbid fear of harming them. After the living situation becomes oppressive she deteriorates mentally, taking a leave from teaching and having trouble dealing with the kids.

Lafosse obviously wants to take on various topics, the status of immigrants in Belgium, how many kids one should have, the risk of non-traditional families, the treatment of mental problems. There is no one explanation in the film for Murielle's decline or for her tragic action, but contributing factors obviously are the claustrophobic living situation, the pressures of raising four small children at once, her husband's and her nebulous status, and André's controlling tendencies. Or she may just be inherently unstable. (It's all pulled together by recurring music from Scarlatti's operas, at once comforting and haunting.) What's interesting is the way Lafosse shows the slightly strange dynamics of the household, the push and pull between the doctor's kindness and his will to dominate. This is where the director excels. In this more multi-layered narrative, he proves not so good a storyteller, even with the collaboration of Thomas Bidegain of A Prophet. However this is a richer film than the previous ones, glossier, more complex, covering a period of years, and with a powerhouse cast; hence this new film is a real step forward for a director who's building up a coherent body of work but so far has not been known in the US.

After debuting in the Un Certain Regard series at Cannes in May 2012, Our Children/À perdre la raison opened in Paris in August, to generally good reviews (Allociné critics rating: 3.7). its first American appearance is in the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review.

LEE DANIELS: THE PAPERBOY (2012)

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EFRON, MCCONAUGHEY, KIDMAN AND OYELOWO IN THE PAPERBOY

Humid investigation

The Paperboy is an enjoyably lurid southern noir set in the mid-Sixties from Pete Dexter (who collaborated on the screenplay) with additional touches added by the director of Precious, who has a taste for the highly colored ant the shocking. If you want to see Nicole Kidman pee on a half-naked Zac Efron this is your movie. But Kidman is excellent as the tacky bleach-blonde Barbie Doll death row groupie and Efron (Jack Jansen) is vulnerable and sweet as the younger brother of Miami newsman Matthew McConaughey (Ward Jansen), who comes with Yardley, a black colleague apparently from London (David Oyelowo) to investigate a murder case. The sleazy, odious inmate is played by John Cusack (Hillary Van Wetter). Of course in this Florida town in this year a black colleague is provocative enough; and it's Daniels' touch, not in the Dexter novel, that he should be black. The peeing scene has a therapeutic purpose: it's to counteract toxins from a jellyfish Jack (Zac) has met up with while swimming. Daniels' finest touch is his use of the excellent Macy Gray as Anita Chester, the Jansen family maid, who also does the voice-over narration, and the best scenes are ones of familial intimacy between Anita and Jack. Everybody is good, McConaughey doing his Good Old Boy drawl, Oyelowo infuriatingly cocky as the British-accented colored man, Cusack a scary piece of swamp muck Hilary's family comes from the swamp and lives by gutting alligators to sell for shoes and handbags). Daniels at times tries to evoke Seventies B-pictures. I don't think you can take all this seriously, despite the strong hints at many turns of Sixties South racism, but there's something unique about it, and it entertains.

Charlotte gets the "paperboys" to come following a romantic correspondence with Hillary, and when they come into town comes wearing a tight dress and bearing big boxes of research into the case. But the newsmen seem distracted, and not very interested in finding out the truth. Jack, a former swimming star kicked out of college who's not doing much but delivering papers, is enlisted to be the reporters' driver, and he falls madly in love with Charlotte and moons for her or sexes for her till finally he gets her "Okay, but just once." Meanwhile there is Anita's humorous voiceover narration, and the present-time Anita's many cozy little scenes with Jack, while unexpected or not so unexpected truths emerge concerning Ward, Hillary, and Yardley.

The movie is great in individual scenes, but doesn't move so well from one to the next. For a noir, The Paperboy lacks urgency or narrative drive. This won't convince anybody it has contemporary relevance as did Lee Daniels' previous film, the 2009 Precious, but again there may be some Oscar mentions. Along with condemnations: the critics are not joining up to praise The Paperboy. Rex Reed has launced one of his diatribes against it: '"This raunchy dreck, cut from the same disposable toilet tissue as the recent trailer-trash creepfest "Killer Joe," is a leap downhill from "Precious,"' he intones. Indeed McConaughey is also featured with Zac Efron in Killer Joe, but that's Tracy Lett, and that's a different kettle of rancid catfish.

The Paperboy debuted at Cannes and was also shown at Toronto. Like Precious, it's included in the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. It begins a limited US release October 5, 2012.

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE (2012)

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TADASHI OKUNO, RIN TAKANASHI, AND RYO KASE IN LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE

Changed perceptions

Sometimes a director transplanted to another culture might lose his identity but Abbas Kiarostomi does very well in Like Someone in Love, his study of fantasies and miscalculations shot in Japan. Notably, he combines an inexperienced actor and a real pro with a third principal who never played a lead in decades as an extra, and the effect is thoroughly fascinating. Like Someone -- the Ella Fitzgerald standard -- but nobody really in love, here. What we have is three people, at least one of whom is being taken for a ride. If you see this as alternate couples, maybe there's a link with the director's previous prizewinner, Certified Copy. Both films are about people who are not what the seem. But this new one doesn't have the Mediterranean gloss, pretty settings and enjoyable intellectual identity puzzle. . No Pirandello here, only a girl, a student from the country who moonlights as an escort, spending an apparently platonic evening with an old man, and a young man who thinks he's her fiancé, or who is, but is unaware of her side job, and when he finds out about it, is enraged. This is a rueful look at humanity's foibles and follies, not a pretty puzzler. It has less audience appeal. It shows Kiarostami as a master of the car scenes he loves to do and of bland, repetitive dialogue, but despite the mark of the director's style and polished execution, it's a bit difficult to ferret out a point here, in part because of the shallowness with which the characters are presented.

When the film begins Akiko, the student/escort (Rin Takanashi), is talking to someone in a little nightclub. It's Nagisa (Reiko Mori), her boyfriend, but we don't know that yet and we don't even know at first who's talkng. Kiarostami playfully withholds information and keeps the viewer at one remove from the characters. She is here to receive her assignment, which is to see retired sociology professor Takashi Watanabe (Tadashi Okuno). On the long cab ride, she listens to her phone messages. These consist mainly of a series of progressively more sad calls from her sweet country grandmother, who has come to town to see her, but only for the day, and at the end is about to take the train home after ten p.m. After the last message, when grandma reports she is still sitting near a gate waiting, Akiko has the cabbie circle the station. A pointed irony is that in the station grandma has seen one of the little flyers Akiko put around on her first forays in the escort business, and it says "Akiko" and has her picture, but grandma innocently says it's just a coincidence, and can't be her. This flyer comes up later, because one of the workers in Nagisa's garage has shown it to him.

When Akiko gets to the professor's, he wants to entertain her rather than have sex, though she goes to bed, after a conversation about a painting -- and she's very tired and just wants to sleep. The two are totally at cross purposes. The next morning Watanabe offers to drive Akiko anywhere she wants to go, obviously eager to spend more time with her, and she has him chauffeur her to an exam at school. There she runs into Nagisa, who's angry, it turns out because she hasn't answered her cell all night - doubtless a frequent occurrence. Nagisa sees Watanabe, and eventaully gets into his car and has a conversation about Akiko; he assumes Watanabe is her grandfather. Watanabe keeps his identity vague, but advises Nagisa not to marry Akiko, but merely to enjoy her -- while she lasts, as it were.

We are to think that probably Nagisa's time at his garage with the chap who has the flyer and a frank chat with Akiko when they meet afterward for lunch leads to a fracas, and Akiko summons Watanabe from his flat to pick her up, nursing a swollen jaw, shaken, and shortly pursued by a furious Nagisa, whom, however, we hear but do not see again.

This little tale with its slow revelations to us and to the characters (or Nagisa, anyway) is done with much subtlety, but it also has a chilly, pointless quality, and again leads this reviewer to say yes, Abbas Kiarostami is a master, but of what? and what does it matter, if this is all? This film is intricate and clever, but also somehow inconsequential. Like other Kiarostami films, it is a short-short story on acid, its tiny details blown up and drawn out.

There's no faulting the craft here, the elegant night photography, the skill with which the intimacy (and loneliness) of a car interior is exploited, and the acting. Tadashi is pretty , and in Japanese style, maddeningly tempting and aloof. Okuno is the long-time movie extra, who was tricked into playing a starring role by not revealing the extent of his performance. Probably no one else could have been better, more humble and natural, as this sweet, befuddled old man. Kase, a veteran of many roles, is strong in the only role that requires strength, because Nagisa has values, hopes, and desires and the will to see them through -- though while he thinks Akiko is naive (one of Kiarostami's many little ironies), he is the one who's been tricked.

Like Someone in Love, in Japonese, 109min, debuted at Cannes; had a theatrical release in Japan Sept. 15; debuted Oct. 4 in the US at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review; opens in France Oct. 15. Critical reception in France was fair (Allociné press rating 3.3) but some of the most sophisticated publications praised it the most highly (Les Inrockuptibles, L'Humanité, Libération, Cahiers du Cinéma). The US opening is Feb. 15, 2013, which follows an Abbas Kiarostami retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center from February 8-14.

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: SOMETHING IN THE AIR (2012)

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LOLA CRÉTON AND CLÉMENT MÉTÉYER IN SOMETHING IN THE AIR

After Carlos: Assayas does himself in the Seventies

A couple years ago Olivier Assyas impressed the world with his dashing mini-seires biopic about Carlos the Jackel, Carlos, a tale of radical agit-prop and sabotage in the Seventies by a leftist master of mayhem. But despite the success of Carlos it didn't enable Assayas to show his own role in this period, so he made Something in the Air -- original title Après mai, "After May" -- where an alter ego experiences the moment more as the writer-director himself did. This time there are some explosions, but nothing as spectacular as the radical acts in Carlos, though there is vandalism and Molotov cocktails and a blown-up car. The opening political stunts are carried out by lyçée students. Après mai has nothing to do with radical terrorism. It's a story of art and politics, music and love affairs, and how for a 16-20-year-old, they're all mixed up together. If Carlos was Assayas' ultra-cool-terrorist-in-the-Seventies movie, this is his talented-but-confused-French-youth-in-the Seventies movie, and it takes decidedly second place. The content of this second movie is no match for that of the first. Moreover though I know Garrel's film is about 1968 and its immediate aftermath rather than the early Seventies, it was hard not to think of his deeply romantic and compulsively gloomy black and white film Regular Lovers while watching this. And though the newcomer Clément Métayer, who plays Gilles, is engaging and soulful in his sallow, long-faced way, he is no match for Louis Garrel (though he's more like a real French teenager and less like the profile on a Byronic Roman coin). And despite her classic face neither can Lola Créton, who plays Gilles' girlfriend Christine, compete with the subtle charms of Clotilde Hesme. Assayas' new film is beautiful, detailed, and accomplished, almost too rich in splashy details. It might have been move evocative with a lower budget. Nonetheless the chops Assayas built up as a vibrant film historian in Carlos are still evident here, so although no match for the previous film, this is still impressive work with richer detail than most other films of this genre.

Something in the Air is a fumbling and unhelpful title. The actual one, "After May," states the movie's real theme: the disillusion and long search for meaning that followed the heady times of the Sixties. These high school students are a little like the much later Italian ones in Gabriele Muccino's appealing (and swift and economical) debut Come te nessuno mai/Forever in My Mind, who envy their parents' Sixty-Eight activism and start a school revolt, with all the trappings, to relive those days. But Muccino's film knows where the boys' minds are: for them politics is an excuse to lose their virginity. Assayas' world is more complex, and Après mai has a lot of serious discussions of revolutionary theory and political strategy. These kids are older and more serious than Muccino's younger brother, Silvio, with his little earring and his urgent desire to get laid. Gilles is a serious artist, with, like Assayas' own, a father in the movie and writing business; they work together some, and argue about how good or slapdash Gilles' father's screenwriting or Simenon's Maigret novels are. Gilles is leftist in spirit, but art is the stronger calling, and he sticks with it, after the early activism and the continuing friendships with guys who make movies about labor unions in Italy or go to Afghanistan or Nepal, or somewhere.

Assayas gives Gilles/Clément a lot of face time, but he's largely a vehicle for a travelogue of European youth in the early Seventies, and there are some great vinyl rock anthems, various pairings-off and those ardent political discussions. But most of all the director relies on big scenes, climaxing in a summertime visit to the family mansion in the country of Gilles' first failed romance Laure (Carole Combes), when a spectacular hippie drug party is going on, complete with acres of candles, haystack bonfires, and finally a fire that invades part of the house, forcing Laure to leap from an upstairs window (that's all of her for a while). This is a flashier, period version of the party at the end of the director's Summer Hours, a simpler film but a more fully achieved one because it knows what it's doing. But though Après mai/AKA/Something in the Air is a big sprawling shambles, it evokes the Seventies in multifarious and true ways. I think I would watch it again. After all, it's in French, and the French do this sort of thing, the politics, the art, the angst, the clothes, so well.

Something in the Air/Après mai , in French with some English, 122 min., debuted at Venice and was shown at Toronto. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was also included as part of the preferred group of the Main Slate. Released in France, Belgium and Switzerland Nov. 14, 2012, and in NYC and LA May 3, 2013. The French critical reception was generally very positive: Allociné press rating 3.8. based on 24 reviews.

DAVID CHASE: NOT FADE AWAY (2012)

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Growing up in a band that doesn't make it big

David Chase, who created the super-successful and groundbreaking HBO series "The Sopranos," has chosen a nostalgic Sixties picture about a garage band for his debut as a movie director. It is a nice little film and has some sharp dialogue, but it trods familiar ground. The one thing that makes it stand out is that this one band for a change belongs to the vast majority that do not go on to become famous, like the Rolling Stones whose songs they covered at first. Instead they basically do fade away. They prove to be not ambitious and hard-working enough to pay their dues at cheap clubs like their idols (or the Beatles in Hamburg), their dissolution sealed with several dropouts and a lead singer who goes to California to study film.

This is an interesting and valid topic but of course runs the risk of being less interesting than the dramatic success stories. Not Fade Away itself fades when compared to a film like Anton Corbijn's 2007 Control, about Joy Division and Ian Curtis, the lead singer who committed suicide just when the band was becoming known (played by Sam Riley in the film). Chase's protagonist, Douglas (John Magaro), is a sometime ditch digger at a golf course semi-obsessed by "The Twilight Zone" who becomes the lead singer of the band. He's no Ian Curtis. He can sing surprisingly well and has also got a nice East Coast edge to his voice when he speaks, but he's just menat to be an Italian-American guy from New Jersey, and to prove it his father Pat, manager of a Pet Boys shop, is played by James Gandolfini, Chase's "Sopranos" star. But that Douglas isn't a future rock idol is the point. Instead the Jersey boys of Chase's movie serve as touchstones for a review of the early Sixties, the period from their late teens to early twenties, through a variety of hair styles and outfits, at a time when Kennedy was assassinated, Vietnam heated up, and rock and roll took on the importance it still has today.

Like the cast of Control, this one learned to play their instruments and sing and perform the music they're seen performing in the scenes. That's a plus. A minus is the extent to which Chase piggy-backs into the period and a sense of the music the same way the characters do, by using clips at key moments. The movie opens with a clip of a Fifties salt-'n-pepper rock and roll band. And when the young band performs one of their covers the sound is spectacular. -- too spectacular. Little discernible effort seems to have been made to duplicate the sound of primitive, limited amplification equipment and instruments.

The other cast members are not bad. Will Brill plays a rich, obnoxious guitarist and Jack Huston is touching as Eugene, the would-be lead singer who can't quite cut it. Bella Heathcote is cute and serviceable as Douglas' girlfriend Grace, who's always liked him and moves in when he becomes visible as a musician. There are mixed messages but at different points she tells him "time is on his side" (echoing the Stones) and she believes in him. Dominique Mcelliogott provides necessary period color as her nutty, drug-damaged sister, whose parents have her committed.

Part of the period portrait is of course the cultural and generational conflicts, Grace's parents with her dysfunctional sister, and Douglas with his dad. There is the obligatory moment when a teenage girl tells the adults at a barbecue that "coloreds" are now to be called "African Americans" (historically inaccurate) and that "fag" is a term that's "unfair to the homosexual community" and should be replaced by "gay" But this sort of thing and the slight references to car culture are secondary. Chase's main object is to declare that he loves rock and roll (with the sui generis sound track of his own personal favorites to prove it) and that the music was the heart of the era and of coming of age for his generation.

It is the essence and distinction of the story that for this band there is no big break, only the usual moments of conflict among band members over roles and direction. There are few original scenes. One memorable one occurs when Douglas' dad (Gandalfini), who has lymphatic cancer (barely acknowledged in the plot except for him mentioning it), takes his son to an Italian seafood restaurant so they can have a "serous talk" about what it might be like for him to take over the family with his father gone. The conversation isn't very memorable, but the moment is. The climactic scene comes when the boys perform for a music producer, and he talks to him afterward. That they'd get a contract is their fantasy. They really aren't that good. And they have, so far, only one original song. He tells them to go and perform in dive bars seven nights a week, to get the experience. Though in the somewhat patchy screenplay it's not openly stated, but they're really not as a group willing or able to do this, and so this is a pivotal moment between rock and roll dreams and everyday reality.

The original song was composed by Steven Van Zandt, a "Sopranos" cast member and the musical guru for the film, who helped the actors develop into a band and even got a drum coach for Magaro who played with the Beatles. Working together for three or four months before the sixty-day shoot, the core cast of guys became friends, and their camaraderie no doubt contributes to the spirit of the film, which is very positive. But it's hard to say -- is this movie a success? I'd say not so much, but it is what you make of it, since it's riddled with pop touchstones and standard rocker coming of age scenes.

Prodouced by Paramount and distributed by the Weinstein Company, Not Fade Away is scheduled for a limited US release December 21. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it premieres and is one of the Main Slate films.

MICHAEL HANEKE: AMOUR (2012)

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JEAN-LOUIS TRINTIGNANT AND EMANUELLE RIVA IN AMOUR

[S P O I L E R S]

Loyalty to the end

In Amour Michael Haneke has delivered another masterpiece, notable this time for its humanity and sweetness as well as austerity. The latter is a kind of respect, because nobody is allowed to matter in this movie but a dying old woman and the man who cares for her. There are no phone calls, appointments, doctors, or really any scenes outside the couple's big, comfortable, elegant old Paris apartment, after the first scene. Though this is a grueling and painful watch, it's also uplifting. "Amour," love, really is the subject, the ultimate test and ultimate proof of what love is. As Mike D'Angelo puts it in the excellent review he wrote for AV Club from Cannes, where this won the Palme d'Or, this film "movingly illustrates the pragmatic sentiment that Terence Davies inserted into his recent adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, viz. that true love isn’t candy hearts and flowers but wiping someone’s ass when they can no longer do it themselves." That's what happens to Anne (Emanuelle Riva), and her husband of many years, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is the person who does the job.

It happens after a concert by Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud), focused on Schubert, and he turns out to have been a former student of Anne's, she and Georges both music teachers, now retired. When they come home, someone has tried to jimmy the lock of their front door -- a Haneke-esque clue to impending danger, a reminder perhaps that since they're both eighty-something, the protective shell outside their existence is eggshell-thin. The next morning at breakfast Anne has a sudden period of catatonia. Tests (we don't see them) reveal the need for an operation, but it's not successful, and when she returns from the hospital, begging Georges never to let her go back, she is paralyzed on one side from a stroke and in a wheel chair. Things will go downhill from there. At first Anne's hair is still beautifully styled, and she can sit up and eat, and talk normally. She asks for photo books and looks at their personal and family record. "It's beautiful, she says. This long life."

The specific incidents and scenes are important of course, but it won't convey much to describe them here. What this is really about is the way Georges remains present, taking on as his one duty caring for his wife, whatever happens. This isn't only the ultimate test but also beyond him; nurses have to come in part-time. Georges is very nice but he can be mean sometimes, Anne remarks. He is harsh with her once, when she has reached an almost ultimate state of decline and refuses to eat or drink. All Georges is trying to do is to protect Anne from being put in a hospital, or a nursing home, or a hospice, keeping her at home, with him.

It's also Haneke-esque how harshly others are judged. One caregiver is okay, but the other is deemed worthless. Their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) is well-meaning in her way, but just an annoyance. Other family members are to be avoided. The pianist student who visits and sends a note is found wanting because, not unlike Eva, he fusses improperly. Haneke-esque too is the noble but drastic solution of euthanasia Georges resorts to, to end Anne's suffering. After another stroke she can't speak and simple moans "It hurts" all the time, up all night, sleeping mostly during the day. Nothing to be done. Beckett would understand.

Riva's performance is largely a mechanical one, reproducing the effects of paralysis and mental degeneratioin. To Trintignant, who is 82 and considered himself retired since he did Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train for Patrice Chéreau in 1998, falls the burden of depicting the bravery, the endurance, the steadfastness, the sanity, and the love of this husband. And this the great actor of My Night at Maude's can do. His own age plays a key part: the actor himself has some difficulty walking, making Georges' lifting Anne the more heroic.

Amour is realistic, perhaps, compared to Beckett, but stylized, in its choice of this naturally-lit grand appartement bourgeois, in the exclusion of outside annoyances, or locations outside the narrow confines. There are a few depatures: several brief haunting dream sequences and a hallucination; a beautiful opening-up through a series of shots of landscape paintings in the apartment. There is a symbolic stray pigeon that comes in a window from the courtyard, twice. The austerity is a beauty that makes the painfully difficult experience watchable.

This is unmistakeably Haneke, but as D'Angelo notes for the first hour seems unlike him in its sweetness; but then becomes "Haneke-grueling." The whole film's tenderness and intimacy are the more striking coming from this director. And though there have been many movies about accidents, illnesses, old age, and death, no one has told this story before, following the experience of the spouse-caregiver through to the end -- though the film's final end, typically for this director, is kept somewhat mysterious. As the Variety reviewer Peter Debruge points out, what happens here is not unlike Haneke's 1989 debut, The Seventh Continent, but the "unforgiving nihilism" of the earlier film has been replaced "by a sense of deep concern."

Amour, 127min, debuted at Cannes, has been in other festivals, and was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Oct. 2012. It opens in France Oct. 24, the UK Nov. 16, US (limited) Dec. 19.

SALLY POTTER: GINGER & ROSA (2012)

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ALICE ENGLERT AND ELLE FANNING IN GINGER & ROSA

Red hair and tears

Sally Potter's Ginger & Rosa is a movie that's both ambitious and narrow. It primarily focuses on the quite limited lives, momentous only to them, of two teenage girls. But Potter chooses to stage her dual, feminine coming-of-age story in the England in 1962 for a reason. It's self-consciously a moment of transition -- on the cusp between the tail end of the Fifties, when the Brits were still struggling and haunted by the War, and the full-on Swinging Sixties, with their war protests, miniskirts, and Beatlemania. Can the vivid and luminously photographed story -- whose nice handheld camerawork (by Andrea Arnold dp Robbie Ryan), earth colors, and intense closeups are a pleasure to look at -- bear the weight of social commentary? Not so well, it turns out. Despite the distinctive visuals, nice (if inexplicable) jazz music, and accomplished acting, Ginger & Rosa is both claustrophobic and sappy. Its point that radical thinkers can make unreliable husbands and fathers is made in a trite and obvious way. Its constant harping on peace marches, nuclear terror, and the Cuban Missile Crisis hardly provides a rounded sense of the period. And it's a most peculiar movie about schoolgirls that never shows them really looking at boys, listening to pop music, or even going to school. Is all this what's meant by "auteur" -- a filmmaker who's willful and blind? Ginger & Rosa is a stylish visual poem, pretty and very personal, but also very limited.

After a while the eyes of Ginger (the young American actress Elle Fanning, blond hair dyed scarlet) seem to run with tears in nearly every scene. And for good reason. Her father, Roland (Alessandro Nivola, another Yank playing Brit), a pacifist professor formerly jailed for war resistance, is not so moral in his private life. He is mean to her mother Natalie (Christina Hendricks, the super-busty Joan of "Mad Men") and then leaves her, and gets Ginger's best friend Rosa pregnant. (Rosa is played by Alice Englert, the beautiful daughter of Jane Campion, but doesn't make much of an impression). Ginger, a redhead like her mother, joins a youth nuclear disarmament group . She also wants to be a poet; she reads T.S. Eliot. When Roland is having sex with Rosa she recites from "The Hollow Men": "This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." Or maybe with both? No pun intended, one assumes, but it's an awkward moment.

Perhaps the self-centeredness of the girls is realistic for their age, but it further narrows the film's scope. Roland is a potentially more interesting character. He is noble, but an ass, and Nivola plays him sympathetically, though he still winds up seeming thoroughly despicable. He glows in the false light of Ginger's need for a father and the sublimated sexuality of Rosa's "admiration" of him. Roland conveniently has a boat on which the girlfriend and the father can get it on. Protest marches and meetings exist for the girls to be impressed by a vibrant young radical student leader (Andrew Hawley). Ginger is sure the world is about to end -- because she thinks so. An American leftist lady her father knows, Bella (Annette Benning, wasted and her character's role undefined) points out she has said the world as they know it "might" end, not that it "will" end.

There are a couple of other characters, Ginger's gay-couple godparents Mark and Mark (Oliver Platt and Timothy Spall). Platt plants a chaste kiss on Spall's forehead to indicate their relationship. In the film's rather sketchy structure, Mark and Mark hover nearby at moments of crisis to expand the movie's sense of a non-traditional family. When Roland starts sleeping with Rosa things get a bit too non-traditional, more like borderline illegal and almost incestuous. But again this being all about a girl's self-centeredness, the main point is that this relationship upsets Ginger. For once Rosa has struck out on her own. Most of these people are silly and superficial, and even when they take a valid stand, they do it in a self-centered way. If this is a feminist film, it doesn't make its case very well.

Ginger & Rosa, 90min., debuted at Telluride and played at Toronto and also in the 50th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review Oct. 8; it comes to the London Film Festival Oct. 13, and releases in the UK Oct. 19, 2012.

DROR MOREH: THE GATEKEEPERS (2012)

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AVI AVALON, SHIN BET HEAD 1996-2000, IN THE GATEKEEPERS

Security chiefs explain why Israel's not secure

First-time filmmaker's compelling documentary feature focused on six of Israel's latter-day Shin Bet security heads reveals the extent of the nation's violent preemptive or retaliatory actions against Palestinian "terrorists," who as one of them points out, are always somebody's "freedom fighters." This makes a good companion piece to Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's The Law in These Parts (2011; SFIFF '12), which focuses on a group of Israeli judges who sentenced Palestinians, coaxed into revealing a similar degree of moral queasiness about their work. Warning, though: both these films are relentless unreelings of talking-heads-plus-archival-footage. The speakers get challenged more in The Law, in part due to ingenious staging that makes the judges look like they'r on trial, partly because they are more prone to stonewallng and the interviewer is more aggressive in challenging them. The Gatekeepers comes across as less manipulative, its interviewees more cooparative. Moreh deseres credit for getting the six men to speak very freely, though they're not immune to the occasional question-dodging or fake memory lapse more frequently observable in The Law.

The reason for this freedom on the six Shin Bet retirees' part is an idea also expressed by the judges -- here Avraham Shalom (Shin Bet head from 1980-86) says it most bluntly: they do not trust the politicians and often look on themselves as the victims of their policies. One of them says the Occupation was a mistake, and ought to have been ended early on. From the immediate post-1967 War period, Gaza and the West Bank became breeding grounds of Palestinian resistance. Israeli security didn't know how to deal with the situation. Shalom says this and Avi Dichter (2000-06) confirms it. Eventually Shin Bet became an efficient operation. But the question arises: how much good could it do anyway? Both the cold-blooded 1996 assassination of the Hamas engineer and chief bomb maker Yahya Ayyash by an exploding telephone, "clean," quiet, killing only him, and the one-ton bomb on a populous neighborhood that killed a dozen or more innocent people, equally caused public outrage and motivated acts of retaliation by Palestinians. The failure of the ill-fated 1993-1995 Oslo Accords is mentioned as another factor leading to violence on both sides.

Another angle the Shin Bet heads bring out is the dangerous, essentially irresistible power of the Israeli right wing and orthodox rabbis, responsible for the 1995 assassination of the conciliatory prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (which caused a Shin Bet shakeup). Shin Bet was efficient enough to block a right wing plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque, but because the plotters all had powerful connections, they were very soon out of jail and back in the community with positions of honor. A similar problem the film addresses, even more sweeping, is that of the settlements, which one Israeli prime minister after another has chosen to ignore and allow, covertly even boastful of increases of settlers on their watch.

Shalom describes the IDF, the Israeli army today as “a brutal occupation force that is similar to the Germans in World War II." Another says the country has become "cruel" and "a police state." Needless to say such statements on screen will inflame the Israeli right or Zionist hard liners, but underline that even today as the Jewish state drifts toward rightward, it still permits more criticism of Israeli policy than can be heard from US politicians or mainstream American Jews. The Shin Bet heads are insiders. They have seen where the Israeli security structure has worked and where it has failed. They never had any power to change the direction in which the country has been moving. They also are freer to adopt a liberal, critical stance than they were when in office.

The Gatekeepers gains more action-picture atmosphere than The Law in These Parts could, jazzing up shots of the 300 Bus hijacking and the capture and killing of its Palestinian hijackers with fast edits and sound effects and using computer simulations of security assaults on moving targets with an ominous soundtrack. Crowd sounds have been used to bring to live old still footage. But all this works only if the subject matter interests you intensely enough to overlook the familiar mix of talking heads and old footage.

The film's speakers -- and this is what makes it interesting -- are morally ambiguous and hard to judge. They take pride in ruthless targeted assassinations (though acknowledging that the power involved in such arbitrary decisions is questionable). But they are also as noted, highly critical of policies by which Israeli has created a constant state of war on itself. Four of the six retired security heads, Ami Ayalon, Avraham Shalom, Yaakov Peri and Carmi Gillon, gave a joint 2003 interview warning there would be a "catastrophe" if the country did not opt quickly for a two-state solution. Of course this has not happened, and they are no less concerned. Their voices need to be heard and, again, this is a good companion piece to The Law in These Parts' depiction of the legal double standard Israel has applied to Jews and Arabs. Note: both these films are excellent and deeply question Israeli policies. But they are from an Israeli, not a Palestinian, point of view. P.s.: Calling the Shin Bet "gatekeepers" seems to bear little relation to its counter-terrorist and retaliatory functions. Nonetheless: for any student of the Israel-Palestine issue, this is required viewing. The film's website gives bios of each of the six interviewees

The Gatekeepers, 96min., debuted at Jerusalem and showed also at Telluride and Toronto; it is a Main Slate selection of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. Released in the US by Sony Pictures Classics, the documentary opened November 26, 2012 in NYC at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, Broadway at 62nd Street.

LEOS CARAX: HOLY MOTORS (2012)

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DENIS LAVANT IN HOLY MOTORS

Merde, etc.

Holy Motors is a phantasmagoric, eccentric and wonderful trip film that depicts the course of a single long day in the life of Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), who travels around Paris by white stretch limo for a series of "appointments." He is a kind of actor who transforms into different characters each time, eleven in all. The interior of the limo is a dressing room, as elaborately equipped as young financier Eric Packer's nearly identical white limo in Cronenberg's (also one-day-spanning) Cosmopolis, (also shown first in competition at Cannes) and this film too ends with the limo drawing into a vast garage. Oscar is picked up from a mansion in the country by Céline (Édith Scob), his faithful chauffeur of the sad, elegant face, who calls his attention to the folders on his seat for each successive assignment. He begins the day disguised (only while in the back of the limo) as a wealthy banker ("Le banquier") -- perhaps who he "is"? His first "appointment" is as an aged crone ("La mendiante") who begs for change on a Paris bridge. We see him begin to put on his disguises, wigs, makeup, clothes. The next assignment (L'OS de Motion-Capture") is at a digital production studio where he dons motion laser-readable tights and does acrobatics.

This is followed by the most eccentric impersonation, an extraordinary troglodyte who or which steals a fashion model from Père Lachaise cemetery and takes her to his cave in the Paris sewers. This grows out of a 2008 short film Lavant and Carax did for the collection Tokyo!, is arguably the weirdest bit and was the starting point of the whole amazing film.

It's not clear (to me, anyway) whether the next "appointment" (le Père") even is one, or just life, it's so everyday-seeming and natural: Oscar gets himself up to look like an average dad and picks up his daughter from a party and drops her off at home. The next job, another rapid virtuoso display of changes ("Le tueur"), is a double assassination, and the one after that is a shooting on the sidewalk. Following this Carax goes into melodrama gear for a death scene influenced by Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. He's run through a panoply of genres by now, noir, actioner, meller, family drama, surreal fantasy, and there's musical romance and more to come -- a beautiful, touching sequence in the empty Samaritaine department store, with Australian singer Kylie Minogue, and a tragic ending.

I will not tell you about Oscar's last trip, to his "home" and "family" (" L'homme au foyer") except to say there has been a species change. I omitted one vibrant short sequence, after "Le Père," the Entr'acte/Interval/Intermission in which Oscar marches and sings and plays the accorion in a band ("L'accordéoniste "). But to fullly describe this film with all its allusions, its jokes, its surprises, its secrets, would take a volume.

And what are we to make of all this? The amusements of an insanely idle rich man? Multiple personality disorder, caused by some trauma? "The next evolution in entertainment," (as indicated in a conversation with a shadowy boss figure played by Michel Piccoli)? Or "a bizarre fantasy of movie-making" as suggested by the intro featuring a sleepy Carax himself crawling from bed into a crowded cinema, as Rob Nelson of Variety points out? Or -- why not simply "pure pleasure," as the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw decides? Anyway Holy Motors is extraordinary, a cinephile's delight (and a conventional movie-goer's annoyance or nightmare), and whether endlessly fascinating or just quite nutty, certainly a hilarious and audacious, authentically and deeply surreal, highly allusive and highly cinematic genre-busting original of a film. It's never quite defined what Monsieur Oscar's "work" means, but he seems to be blending acting with life, in a wildly more beautiful version of what goes on in Giorgos Lanthimos' relatively humorless and flat 2011 film Alps (SFIFF '12).

From Cannes, the AV Club correspondent Mike D'Angelo tweeted a, for him, astronomical score for Holy Motors of 88. His runners-up were Haneke's Amour (77) and Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (75), followed by, further down the scale, Ursula Meier (Sister), Matteo Garrone (Reality) and Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone). Next to Carax's 88 in D'Angelo's Tweet review was just a two-word comment, "Holy shit," which can be read as an expression of balls-out awe or a sly reference to the film's origins in the Tokyo! "Merde" episode, maybe both. Seeeing all those powerful films at Cannes in close proximity, D'Angelo rated Carax highest. It's a cinematic mindblower. D'Angelo correctly predicted that it wouldn't win a top prize (Haneke and Garrone got those), he thought because the jury just wasn't daring enough, but he was disregarding that some viewers really hate this film. He predicted it would be the film Cannes 2012 will be remembered for. It did win a prize at Cannes, the Prix de Jeunesse (awarded by a jury of 18 to 25-year-olds).

In the Q&A at the New York Film Festival press screening, Carax said his theme was the question "whether we still want to experience stuff, do action." He has also commented that stretch limos strike him as interesting anachronisms, out of date, depicting "the end of an era, the era of large, visible machines." Other themes are cinema, acting, life, transformation, the protean nature of existence -- and a homage to the protean abilities of Denis Lavant, whom Carax says he does not know, is not friends with, and has barely ever talked to in real life, but who is obviously a remarkable collaborator and essential to this film. These cryptic, intentionally unrevealing details actually reveal something: an intuitive and original filmmaker who has some deep thoughts about what acting and cinema do, though the film can be read as nothing but a series of eccentric riffs -- till you start thinking about it. Whether this is a masterpiece or a curio is worth mulling over. But it strikes me as I'd expected: as a standout title in the Main Slate of the 2012 New York Film Festival.

Holy Motors, 116 min., debuted at Cannes, opened in France July 4, where it received a galaxy of critical raves (Allociné 4.3) but a lukewarm Allociné spectator response (2.9) indicative that this adventurous watch is a hard box office sell. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. It opens in New York Oct. 17; US national release Nov. 9.

JAVIER REBOLLO: THE DEAD MAN AND BEING HAPPY (2012)

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JOSÉ SACRISTÁN IN THE DEAD MAN AND BEING HAPPY

Touring back road Argentina with a dying hit man

For his third film Spanish director Javier Rebollo want to Argentina and logged 25,000 kilometers with his cast and crew making a road movie about a dying hit man and a 40-something woman estranged from her family, whom he picks up at a gas station. El muerto y ser feliz (the Spanish title) has qualities to recommend it to film festival audiences, such as a quirky plot-line, an inventive sound design, and vivid 16mm. film images, but Rebollo's movie winds up being flat and unmemorable. There are a lot of road movies, and this one's improvisational story hasn't much discernible shape. This isn't competition for, say, Carlos Sorín's charming little films set in Patagonia. Sorín knows the territory better and his humanism is clearer.

Rebollo starts out well with a scene of lively banter between his protagonist, Santos (Spanish veteran actor José Sacristán) and a young nurse (Valeria Alonso), sitting in a sunny park in a raincoat with his pajamas and slippers. Santos is a character out of Pablo Larraín: he probably worked for Perón, and then for the military, and now for the highest bidder. Now he is ridden with cancer, carrying three tumors, and his negotiation with the nurse is for a portable ice chest full of morphine vials. He's using money he's received for a last hit, which he has little intention of carrying out. As played by Sacristán, Santos has an aura of mystery and menace that is, however, neutralized by his dire condition. He's an interesting hcaracter, but he has nowhere to go, and hints of a beady-eyed man who hired the hit Jorge Jellinek, Federico Veiroj's A Useful Life), haunting him at various locations don't create any suspense. Nor does his relationship with Érika (Roxana Blanco), the woman he picks up, develop. They get close enough to sleep in the same room (but separate beds) and for her to give him his morphine injections, but there's not much emotion. A constant, often competition voiceover, by two different people, strives to make up for the lack of action on screen, and serves as a vehicle for Rebollo's aggressively intellectual style and ever-present irony, but can be annoying, particularly when it competes with and contradicts the loud dialogue simultaneously spoken by the actors. This contradition is the point, of course, but Rebollo's self-conscious cleverness may work for some but will be a turnoff for many.

Perhaps the ultimate interest of The Dead Man is the literal accuracy of the film's observations along its meandering path. Highlights include a ruined resort area a narrator calls “a strange mix of paradise and apocalypse” (which could go for the whole narrative) and the Cordoba resort town of La Cumbrecita (with its dwindling population of elderly Germans, clearly ex-Nazis, later followed by an extended visit to the desolate northern province of Santiago del Estero. Desolation, boredom, and a kind of zen peace blend, even though Santos is packing heat and threatens to use it, for something, such as to put a dog they've accidentally run over out of its misery. Dogs are a running theme in this offbeat travalogue. Derelict mutts are found at every gas station, and the head of Érika's family (Carlos Lecuona), whom they visit, a return to a fairly posh country home for her after a seven-year absence, is a dog breeder pledged to developing (with Nazi inspiration?) a unified master race of superior canines, while eliminating all the dogs with any defect.

The relationship between Santos and Érika could have become moving, and the trip does become more intense toward the end with the use of an ironic folksong about fables vs. realities composed by the director, but the tricks and ironies that were fun initially are, after so many miles, now threadbare and one would have preferred some stronger payoff than riding off into the sunset in an old Ford Falcon station wagon. The occasional switch of sound angle and cutoff of sound to silence are stylistic devices that are interesting artistically, but, like the dueling voiceovers, undercut the kind of gentle humanity that Sorín has drawn out of Argentina's desolate spaces.

Lola Mayo collaborated on the improvised script; she worked also on the director's 2006 What I Know About Lola, set in Paris. Salvador Roselli also collaborated. Roselli worked on the scripts o f those other Argentine road movies, Bombon El Perro (2004), Liverpool (2008) and Las Acacias (2011), with Carlos Sorín, LIsandro Alonso, and Pablo Giorgelli, respectiely. Santiago Racaj's 16mm. cinematography makes the most of the loales and the film's vibrant grainy look.

The Dead Man and Being Happy, 94min., debuted at San Sebastiaán, where José Sacristán won the Best Actor award. Rebollo's 2009 Madrid nocturne Woman Without Piano won him the Best Director prize at the same festival. The film is included in the Main Slate of the 50th New York Film Festival (Oct. 2012), where it was screened for this review. The rich sound design by Pelayo Gutiérrez and Dani Fontrodona was brilliantly if overbearingly on display in the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, which the director in a Q&A confirmed is an unbeatable venue. For sound and image, the Walter Reade, still ably managed by Glenn Raucher, is indeed peerless.

JOÃO PEDRO RODRIGUES, JOÃO GUERRA DA MATA: THE LAST TIME I SAW MACAO (2012)

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Hokey plotline undermines doc footage

Lots of pretty (buit coldly digital) cinematography cannot compensate for the clumsiness of a tacked-on noir plot with hokey mystical overtones in The Last Time I Saw Macao, a documentary posing as a nostalgic film noir about a man who returns to the Chinese-controlled former Portuguese colony to see an old friend. We never see the main characters, and the plot about mysterious assassins never gains traction. Directors João Pedro Rodrigues (of the 2009 NYFF selection To Die LIke a Man) and his collaborator João Rui Guerra da Mata haven't gotten a grip on juicy material as they did in the award-winning earlier film. These 85 minutes feel interminable.

Calling this a "stunning amalgam of playful film noir and Chris Marker–like cine-essay" is typical empty festival blurb hype. Things feel wrong from the "spectacular" opening scene (unrelated to anything else) of the actress in which Cindy Scrash lip-synchs to Jane Russell’s “You Kill Me" from Josef von Sternberg’s 1952Macao with baby tigers cavorting in a fenced-off space behind her. The sequence is strangely lifeless -- and pointless. A silly sequence of a war game in which somebody is supposedly shot for real adds on more pointlessness, and gradually the "noir" story of the visit begins in voiceover, accompanied by conventional shots of Macao.

Images are mostly a travelogue to the old and new city, but there is too little chronicling of Macao's current status as the world's most intense gambling venue. Vegas-like signs abound, and one good image is a fake Venice lagoon with a Chinese gonadalier singing a Sinatra song in a mock-Sinatra voice. More of this kind of incongruity might have been interesting. The contrast between the old world charm of the Portuguese colony the narrator knew and the crass, hyperactive Chinese Macao is alluded to, and seems potentially fascinating material. But the observations of the place in the voiceover and by the camera are mostly at one remove, the kind of thing any sensitive tourist given to facile pronouncements could come up with. "Candy," the "friend" from decades ago, is evidently a transvestite (also the topic of To Die As a Man), gradually turns out to be much more than a friend. The interrupted attempts of the two to get together involving useless phone calls, are more tedious than suspenseful. Rodrigues' sometimes pleasingly lurid gay campiness (in other films) is far too muted here in this colorless effort. Chris Marker? Baloney!

Included, inexplicably, in the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review, A últia vez que vi Macao debuted at Locarno.

PABLO LARRAÍN: NO (2012)

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GAEL GARCÍA BERNAL, LUIS GNECCO IN NO

TV ads that mattered

No, by Chilean director Pablo Larraín (Tony Manero, NYFF 2008; Post Morten, NYFF 2010), is the richly imagined account of an ad campaign, one that happens to have a peculiar significance, because it led directly to voting down General Augusto Pinochet's fifteen-year dictatorship in a 1988 referendum. Many roles are resolved into a few in what is nonetheless a rich canvas headed by Gael García Bernal in one of his best performances in years. The only troubles are that the narrative meanders and that the outcome is, if you're aware of history, very obvious, and the screenplay cannot contrive to get around this. One also may feel Larraín has made a considerable sacrifice in abandoning the fabulously dark and sinister mood of his previous two features. But if this movie works with the American artthouse audience, it could push the director into the international mainstream in a way that his sublimely creepy two earlier films could not.

Those previous two films starred the great Alfredo Castro, first as a petty thief and murderer, then as a spineless coroner who has the job of recording the autopsy of the assassinated president Salvador Allende, Chile's elected leftist leader who was killed in a CIA-supported coup in 1973. In both cases Larraín approaches the Pinochet regime's devastatingly effect on the hearts and minds of the Chilean people in a way that is indirect but extraordinarily vivid. Tony Manero has the more lowly and despicable protagonist, a zombie-like fellow who lives to immitate John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, but isn't very good at it, and is capable of killing an old woman just to steal her little TV. Post Mortem's focus is on death too, however, allowing for the development of its own slimy, sepulchral mood. Even the look of these two films is creeply. They have a sickly greenish tinge.

For No, Larraín adopts a brighter palette, though his decision to use virtually extinct Sony U-matic cassette video cameras from the early Seventies for the entire film stays with his preference for a distinctive, ugly look -- which in this case makes everything throughout harmonize with the advertising TV clips and archival footage from the period, as does the square Academy ratio of the film. This time instead of approaching the regime crabwise, he faces it head on. When young ace adman René Saavedra (García Bernal), reluctantly at first, takes on the campaign to promote the anti-Pinochet "No" vote in fifteen-minute late-night TV broadcasts, he is joined by members of the opposition. There are many parties and the film could get lost in leftist in-fighting, but from the start the focus is on advertising strategies. In the very first scene we watch Saavedra show an ad for a cola drink called "Free", and the businessmen balk because it's flashy and American-looking and has a mime in it. And this isn't just to create atmosphere. It's a hint of the same visual style Saavedra will want to use in his nightly anti-regime TV spots.

The first of many dark jokes is that Saavedra not only wants to ignore the dark side of the regime, but really doesn't care much about politics, though he may like impressing his estranged leftist wife Veronica (Antonia Zegers of Post Morten). Saavedra is the son of a dissident who was exiled when he was young after the Allende government was toppled (which might explain García Bernal's Mexican accent). But -- and this is the relevance of this movie to American politics -- what Saavedra cares about is snappy advertising style. He insists from the start that spots about the "disappeared ones" and torture -- the horrors of the dictatorship and the primary reasons for voting it out -- are too downbeat for adverts and should be replaced by zingy, upbeat imagers of happy people picnicking, rainbow flags, a tall man walking up a pathway, and so on, and happy jingles about freedom (like the cola). The second irony is that he's partly right. Pinochet represents hopelessness for the majority of the population and almost anything else represents light and positivity.

As No progresses the narrative gets a little chaotic and it's not always clear what we're seeing, but the substance of the film is nothing more than an inventive unreeling of the opposition "No" campaign TV spots, interspersed with scenes from Saavedra's life, meetings of government officials, and glimpses of the "Yes" adverts. There are moments when the "No" adverts seem absolutely ridiculous, others when they're actually moving. But we're continually aware that however crucial they might be, this medium is still all just flash and filigree. Saavedra's boss Lucho Guzmán (Larraín's previous star Alfredo Castro, looking this time only vaguely sinister) is a devious fellow who is actually running the pro-Pinochet "Yes" ad campaign -- covertly, pretending he's only a "consultant" for it -- while working with Saavedra on other non-political ads. Meanwhile he's threatening to "fuck up" the "No" crew good and vainly trying to bribe Saavedra off the "No" campaign by offering him a partnership in the firm. Saavedra refuses, but it seems for him more an ego trip than an act of idealism.

Behind Guzman's lures and threats there is a greater external menace, highlighted by the vulnerability of Saavedra's living with his innocent young mop-head son Simon (Pascal Montero), whose custody he shares with Veronica. There are cars following him and the other "No" campaign crew around and a vague suspicion that they may simply be wiped out or "disappeared." How can anybody believe that this will be a genuine election? It's assumed that Pinochet will insure his winning, but Veronica believes that the late-night "No" broadcasts will help awaken the public anyway. At the same time she tells Saavedra that his ads are just "a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy," and that in working on this campaign he's just playing the regime's game. Nothing is simple. All is ironic. And everything matters.

While Larraín's earlier films were small, cozy productions, this one is ambitious. The elaborate ads, involving large casts and multiple locaitons, are further augmented by the film's realistic crowd scenes of demonstrations and repression by riot police. The film's progression seems somewhat haphazard despite the obvious and strongly upbeat finale of the election, but this doesn't keep the proceedings from being compulsively watchable because of the sheer fascination of the rich material put together for the TV spots, the arguments about style and tone etc., and the deft minute-to-minute craft of editor Sergio Armstrong. García Bernal's understated performance (and the frequent presence of young Simon in key, scary moments) makes the film feel intimate despite the collective focus; the cast is all good. "Mad Men," with its preference for soap opera plotting to actual detail about advertising work, was never like this. Larraín has made a movie where propaganda content actually matters in all its specific detail, and it couldn't be more relevant to a time of Middle East revolutions and European and American elections in which regimes could rapidly fall. The film, incidentally, uses archival footage of Pinochet himself at numerous points; no actor plays the dictator. This time the writing is not by Larraín but Pedro Peirano.

No, 116min., debuted in Cannes' Directors' Fortnight, also shown at Locarno, San Sebastián, and Telluride. The official entry of Chile for Best Foreign Language Film at the 85th Academy Awards 2013. UK release Feb. 8, 2012, US Feb. 15, France Apr. 3. Screened for this review as a Main Slate selection of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Oct. 12, 2012. It definitely seems one of a handful of the most important films of the NYFF, and Pablo Larraín, with three distinctive films under his belt at only 36, clearly on his way to international importance as a director.

ROBERT ZEMECKIS: FLIGHT (2012)

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DENZEL WASHINGTON IN FLIGHT

Days of wine and airlines

Robert Zemeckis' compulsively watchable new movie begins with a shocking notion: suppose you're on a passenger flight and the pilot is drunk? Then suppose the plane is flying in terrible weather, and develops irreparable mechanical problems? This is the situation screenwriter John Gatins (Hard Ball, Real Steel) takes on in Flight, which throws it all at you: mortal danger, heroism under pressure, moral confusion, the threat of jail time. The plane goes into a nose dive, but Captain Whip Whitaker (the formidable Denzel Washington) performs a bold set of maneuvers that saves the day. After the emergency landing the media present Whip as a hero. But a blood test shows he was legally drunk while piloting the plane. Flight starts out as a disaster movie and then pulls a switcheroo and turns into a character study of addiction and recovery. And the movie works because both parts are effective. Denzel's performance in the cockpit and the digitals of the crazy flight disaster and the chaos on board are as stunning as any in the genre. But when Whip wakes up in the hospital the movie turns compellingly to his confusion and ambivalence, which are suspenseful because of the scrutiny the disaster has brought upon him. There are no wrong moves here in Zemeckis' first return to regular live action directing in a decade. Here is a mainstream move that has both visceral excitement and emotional depth. The excellent supporting cast is headlined by Kelly Reilly, John Goodman, Don Cheadle, Bruce Greenwood and Melissa Leo. Gatins, who started on the script fifteen years ago, has still managed to keep it snappy, outlining things clearly and forcefully but not losing subtlety or turning maudlin or preachy. But there is a lesson here. Whip Whittiker may be the ultimate high-functioning alcoholic, but his accomplishment still leads to personal disaster. Maybe the screenplay is a little too wound up about its recovery topic -- it's hard for someone who's overcome addiction not to be -- but that's its only serious flaw.

The opening sequence, itself a shocker, shows Whip awakening after a glamorous night of debauchery with Trina (Nadine Velazquez), a fellow alcoholic, and a flight attendant who's working with him. The flight is early. It takes a couple lines of cocaine to get him up and ready. The snort of cocaine starts a jump cut to the plane, where Whip enters fully uniformed, looking commanding -- but we know the state he's in.

In the flight sequence, after several on flight vodka miniatures, Whip performs with breathtaking cool and skill, using tricks he learned flying in the Navy. There remains the question whether the whole disaster might have been avoided had he been fully in command of his senses. Given the terrible weather, he might have just cancelled the flight But this sequence dazzles, and is a neat structural device, because no matter how sullen and unappealing Whip seems thereafter -- and we well understand how his ex-wife (Garcelle Beauvais) and estranged son (Justin Martin) have no use for him -- we always remember he can be a hell of a pilot. And so we also understand how Charlie Anderson (Bruce Greenwood), his old Navy pal, now a pilots' union rep, would want to save him from the very serious charges he could incur for flying drunk in an accident with fatalities.

At the hospital he meets Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a heroin addict, masseuse, and would-be photographer whom he latches onto, thinking he can save her. She later has to save herself by losing him.

Whip hides from the media at his grandfather's Georgia farmhouse, where he pours out gallons of booze he had stashed there. The gesture is symbolic, because when he learns the charges he's up against, he abandons logic and is back bingeing. Nicole was in the hospital after OD-ing and resolves to stay clean, taking Whip to an AA meeting (which he quickly slips out of). She realizes she can't reclaim her life and live with him. He doesn't realize anything. The truth takes a while to sink in, and longer for him to tell to the world.

Denzel Washington is the man to put across the weakness-in-strength of this character, a man who is on a long-term downward spiral but capable of remarkable courage and skill under pressure.

John Goodman, in a rakish Dude performance as Whip's boon companion, enabler, and dealer, is cast as the Devil -- "Sympathy for..." by the Stones heralds his first appearance. In fact Don Cheadle, as the lawyer the pilots' union brings in to save Whip, is the Devil too. For an alcoholic, everyone is an enabler, and a Devil. The question is whether Whip will end his personal nosedive as he did the planes, or go down with these enablers' encouragement.

Flight moves toward a kind of courtroom climax, though it's technically only a hearing of a union board headed by Melissa Leo, whose questions lawyer Cheadle has set up Whip to dodge. But how this confused, conflicted, unsympathetic yet somehow charismatic figure will turn out is never clear till the last moments of the film -- which come a little late and are a bit preachy, but not enough so to spoil the strong earlier segments.

Flight , 138 mins., debuted as the closing night film of the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review on October 14, 2012. It will be released in the US Nov. 2, the UK Feb. 1, 2012, France Feb. 13. Metascore 76%.

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DENZEL AT OCT. 14, 2012 NYFF PRESS 'FLIGHT' Q&A

NYFF, 2012. The Main Slate: an overview.

Comments and favorites.
(As a quick summary of my Filmleaf Festival Coverage, which includes a full review of each, here again is a list of the Main Slate films of the 50th New York Film Festival, with my brief critical comments in bold after each FSLC blurb. My top choices are highlighted in red.)

For the filmlinc.com source of this information click on the logo above or HERE. The blurbs are from the FSLC. Please note there were many wonderful sidebar items not covered here. See the Filmlinc website.

There are 33 Main Slate films, several more than some years. If you followed the Filmleaf Forum 2012 Cannes thread you'll recognize AMOUR, BEYOND THE HILLS, HOLY MOTORS, LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE, NO, and YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET. I'd forgotten, but also at Cannes was Lafosse's OUR CHILDREN, and so was HERE AND THERE and Raul Ruiz's THE NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET. So that makes nine from Cannes, plus two from Venice and three from Locarno. LIFE OF PI and FLIGHT are opening and closing films that will not reward the film festival goer with anything not later to be in a local theater. This will be true of some others, including AMOUR, possibly HOLY MOTORS (both debuting theatrically at Film Forum in NYC, as I have mentioned). LIFE OF PI AND FLIGHT will have wide distribution. Films that have a US release coming outnumber those without release almost two to one.

Stills show some of the ladies.

Amour (Michael Haneke, Austria/France/Germany)
["Love."] Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner of Cannes 2012 is a merciless and compassionate masterpiece about an elderly couple dealing with the ravages of old age. A Sony Pictures Classics release. [Cannes.] This was the most important, moving, and artistically elegant film of the festival.

Araf—Somewhere In Between (Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Turkey/France/Germany)
Director Yesim Ustaoglu depicts with empathy and uncompromising honesty the fate of a teenaged girl when she becomes sexually obsessed with a long-distance trucker and the promise of freedom that he embodies. [Venice.] A largely forgettable effort, too much like similar films, despite some nice visuals.

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PETZOLD'S BARBARA

Barbara (Christian Petzold, Germany)
Christian Petzold’s perfectly calibrated Cold War thriller features the incomparable Nina Hoss as a physician planning to defect while exiled to a small town in East Germany. An Adopt Films release. [Berlinale.] A superbly made film, with Nina Hoss fine as usual, one of the festival's best.

Beyond the Hills/După dealuri (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days director Cristian Mungiu returns with a harrowing, visually stunning drama set in a remote Romanian monastery. Winner, Best Actress and Best Screenplay, 2012 Cannes Film Festival. A Sundance Selects release. [Cannes.] A bit of a slog, but not as much as the usual new Romanian films, but a powerful and involving story, and in its way beautifully made.

Bwakaw (Jun Robles Lana, The Philippines)
A moving and funny surprise from the Philippines starring the great Eddie Garcia—and a truly unforgettable dog—in the story of an elderly loner going where he’s never dared venture before. Touching, fresh, memorable. A disappointing look to the visuals.

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LVOVSKY'S CAMILLE REWINDS

Camille Rewinds/Camille Redouble (Noémie Lvovsky, France)
Noemie Lvovsky directs and stars in an ebullient comedy of remarriage that gives Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married a sophisticated, personal, and decidedly French twist. [French release September 12, 2012.] I enjoyed this free-flowing and relaxed lark; maybe not top grade festival material though.

Caesar Must Die/Cesare deve morire (Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, Italy)
Convicted felons stage a production of Julius Caesar in this surprising new triumph for the Taviani Brothers, winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. An Adopt Films release. [Berlinale.] Very involving, but marred by fudging of the facts, 'documentary' scenes obviously rehearsed.

The Dead Man and Being Happy/El muerto y ser feliz (Javier Rebollo, Spain/Argentina)
A dying hitman and a mysterious femme fatale set off on an oddball journey through Argentina’s interior in this playful and unexpectedly moving reverie on love, death and the open road. [San Sebastián Festival.] Made up as he went along and it shows. Interesting sound design, maybe too interesting.

Fill the Void/Lemale et ha'chalal (Rama Burshtein, Israel)
With her first dramatic feature, writer-director Rama Burshtein has made a compelling, disconcerting view of Israel's orthodox Hassidic community from the inside. Seems like an advertisement for ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and I'm not buying.

First Cousin Once Removed (Alan Berliner, USA)
Alan Berliner creates a compelling, heartfelt chronicle of poet and translator Edwin Honig’s loss of memory, language and his past due to the onslaught of Alzheimer’s. An HBO Documentary Films release. World Premiere. Relentless but a good record, and not your average Alzheimer's patient, to put it mildly. This guy is smart.

Flight (Robert Zemeckis, USA)
Denzel Washington and Robert Zemeckis team on this tense dramatic thriller about an airline pilot who pulls off a miraculous crash landing...while flying under the influence. A Paramount Pictures release. Closing Night. World Premiere. Very mainstream, a fest ticket-seller. Involving though. And people say Denzel just plays himself all the time. Not fair at all. This is the complex protagonist that the over-hyped ARGO doesn't give us.

Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, USA)
Lightning-in-a-bottle, Noah Baumbach’s love poem to his star and screenwriter Greta Gerwig recalls Godard’s early celebrations of Anna Karina, but, as a New York movie, it’s beautiful in a brand new way. [Debuted at Toronto.] Yeah, this is high class Mumblecore alright and I liked it but the reaction is very mixed and I am tending to forget it.

The Gatekeepers/Shomerei Ha’saf (Dror Moreh, Israel/France/Germany/Belgium)
Six former heads of Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, discuss their nation’s past, present and future, in what will surely be one of the most hotly discussed films of the year. A Sony Pictures Classics release. [Documentary. Debuted at Jerusalem Festival.] Another good, searching Israeli doc like The Law in These Parts (SFIFF), great if you're into talking heads and archival footage.

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GINGER AND ROSA

Ginger and Rosa (Sally Potter, UK)
Sally Potter’s riveting coming-of-age story, set in London in 1962, centers on two teenage best friends (played by the revelatory Elle Fanning and talented newcomer Alice Englert) who are driven apart by a scandalous betrayal. [Will debut at Toronto. UK release October 19, 2012.] Very Seventies self-indulgent lady filmmaking. One-dimensional; no context.

Here and There/Aquí y Allá (Antonio Méndez Esparza, Spain/US/Mexico)
After years in the U.S., Pedro returns home to his family in Mexico, but the lure of the north remains as strong as ever. A most impressive feature debut by Antonio Mendez Esparza. [Cannes.] Dull and flat. All that was glorious about neo-realism has been lost.

Holy Motors (Léos Carax, France)
Leos Carax’s unclassifiable, breathtaking, expansive movie—his first in 13 years—stars the great Denis Lavant as a man named Oscar who inhabits 11 different identities over a single day in Paris. An Indomina Releasing release. [Cannes.] A wild affirmation of how bold movies can be. No.. 2 of the fest after Amour.

Hyde Park on Hudson (Roger Michell, USA/UK)
Bill Murray caps his career with a wily turn as FDR in this captivating comedy-drama about the President’s relationship with his cousin Margaret “Daisy” Suckley (Laura Linney). A Focus Features release. [Debut at Toronto. US theatrical release from December 7, 2012; UK, FEb. 1, 2012.] Harmless but annoying tripe, great stuff for the cottonhead arthouse oldie aud, another fest ficket-seller.

Kinshasa Kids (Marc-Henri Wajnberg, Belgium/France)
Perhaps the most ebullient “musical” you’ll see this year, Marc-Henri Wajnberg’s singular documentary/fiction hybrid follows a group of street children in the Congolese capital. [Venice Days series.] Well, this is a good topic, and a less sloppy filmmaker might have made something great out of it.

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THE LAST TIME I SAW MACAO

The Last Time I Saw Macao/A Última Vez Que Vi Macau (João Pedro Rodrigues)
This stunning amalgam of film noir and Chris Marker cine-essay poetically explores the psychic pull of the titular former Portuguese colony. [A cross between documentary and fiction. Locarno Festival.] A laudable but embarassing effort to jazz up a conventional travelogue.

Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, USA)
NYFF alumni Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgrass) and Véréna Paravel (Foreign Parts) team for another singular anthropological excavation, this time set inside the commercial fishing industry. [Locarno.] Very bold abstract doc, more a harsh visual poem than instruction about anything. But the in-your-face picture of large-scale US fishing is there.

Life of Pi (Ang Lee, USA)
Ang Lee's superb 3D adaptation of the great [Yann Martel 2001] bestseller resembles no other film. A 20th Century Fox release. Opening Night. World Premiere. Another fest ticket-seller, but a visual delight and a technical marvel. The ugly stuff of the novel's sea ordeal drops out, but this remains a nice memory.

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LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE

Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, Japan/Iran/France)
Master Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostmi ventures to Japan for this mysterious beautiful romantic drama about the brief encounter between an elderly professor and a young student. A Sundance Selects release. [Cannes.] A real puzzler. Fascinating, and finely crafted. But then you think, so what?

Lines of Wellington/Linhas de Wellington (Valeria Sarmiento, France/Portugal)
Passionate romance, brutal treachery, and selfless nobility are set against the background of Napoleon’s 1810 invasion of Portugal in Valeria Sarmiento’s intimate epic. [Debuts at Toronto.] A bumbling and amorphous continuation of husband Raul Ruiz's work, valuable bit of film history I guess, but not a success.

Memories Look at Me/Ji Yi Wang Zhe Wo (Song Fang, China)
Song Fang’s remarkable first feature, in which she travels from Beijing to Nanjing for a visit with her family, perfectly captures the rhythms of brief sojourns home. [Locarno.] A big bore. Again neo-realism is turning over in its grave. Reduced fundamental issues of parenting and aging to chit-chat.

Night Across the Street/La Noche de enfrente (Raul Ruiz, Chile/France)
A final masterpiece from one of the cinema’s most magical artists, this chronicle of the final months of one Don Celso allows the late Raul Ruiz the chance to explore the thin line between fact and fiction, the living and the dead. A Cinema Guild release. [Cannes.] Fascinating, complex, stuff you may be puzzled by but will enjoy talking about.

No (Pablo Larraín, Chile/USA)
Gael Garcia Bernal stars as a Chilean adman trying to organize a campaign to unseat Pinochet in Pablo Larrain’s smart, engrossing political thriller. A Sony Pictures Classics release. [Cannes.] Different direction for Larraín, and a bit shapeless, nonetheless darkly hilarious and significant; one of the best of the fest, maybe no. 3.

Not Fade Away (David Chase, USA)
The debut feature from The Sopranos creator David Chase is a wise, tender and richly atmospheric portrait of a group of friends trying to start a rock band in 1960s suburban New Jersey. A Paramount Vantage release. Centerpiece. World premiere. We all like rock and roll, but does anything make this special?

Our Children/À perdre la raison (Joachim Lafosse, Belgium)
Belgian director Joachim LaFosse turns a lurid European news story about a mad housewife into a classical tragedy. Émilie Dequenne more than fulfills the promise of her award-winning performance in [the Dardennes'] Rosetta. [Cannes.] Lafosse is good at messed-up, inappropriate family situations. Not very tightly edited.

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RACHEL MCADAMS AND NOOMI RAPACE IN PASSION

The Paperboy (Lee Daniels USA)
Nicole Kidman gives one of her best performances in this steamy southern gothic directed by Lee Daniels (Precious) and co-starring Zac Efron and Matthew McConaughey. A Millennium Entertainment release. Parta of a Gala Tribute to Nicole. Lurid fun, if you like Zac in skivvies and Nicole with her legs spread. I do.

Passion (Brian de Palma, France/Germany)
Brian De Palma brings great panache and a diabolical mastery of surprise to a classic tale of female competition and revenge. Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams are super-cool and oh so mean. Just glossy eye-candy, and the French original was no masterpiece and this does not improve upon it but just sexes it up.

Something in the Air/Après Mai (Olivier Assayas, France)
Too young to have been on the May ’68 barricades, a group of young people explore their options for continuing the political struggle in Olivier Assayas’ incisive portrait of a generation. A Sundance Selects release. [Venice. November release in France.] Yeah, we all love the Seventies too, but this just meanders -- though the mise-en-scène is terrific.

Tabu (Miguel Gomes, Portugal)
An exquisite, absurdist entry in the canon of surrealist cinema, Tabu is movie-as-dream—an evocation of irrational desires, extravagant coincidences, and cheesy nostalgia grounded in serious feeling and beliefs. An Adopt Films release. [Berlinale.] Really original second half, boring first.

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SABINE AZEMA IN YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet/Vous n'avez encore rien vu (Alain Resnais, France)
The latest from 90-year-old Alain Resnais is a wry, wistful and always surprising valentine to actors and the art of performance starring a who’s-who of French acting royalty. [French release date September 26, 2012.] Probably a great final statement, as Mike D'Angelo said, but I liked the idea of it better than actually watching it.


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French posters for Tabu, Beyond the Hills, Our Children, Something in the Air, and Holy Morors


NOTE: The Film Society of Lincoln Center's offerings keep growing with the aid of the new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center across the street from the Walter Reade Theater, which houses two cinemas, an ampitheater and a café. Reviewing each Main Slate film in detail kept me from thoroughly covering the many sidebar items, though I was impressed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s exhaustive and lovingly assembled documentary, Celluloid Man, which profiles P.K. Nair, the founder and longtime guiding spirit of the National Film Archive of India, who has been compared to the legendary Henri Langlois of the Paris Cinéthèque. For students of Indian film or of film in general this is a must-see. Other sidebar films of the NYFF shown to the press and recommended to me included some strong new documentaries. Philippe Béziat's Becoming Traviata follows the production of the opera in Aix-en-Provence. Francesco Patierno’s The War of the Volcanoes, is about rival film productions on the island of Stronboli by Rossellini with Ingrid Bergman and his ex-lover Anna Magnani. Liv and Ingmar (Dheeraj Akolkar) follows another turbulent film relationship. Curfew, in Program 2 of the Shorts program, is about babysitting. There was also a Masterworks series that included Laurence of Arabia and [i]Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Included (which I did see) was Charlie Is My Darling, a 65-min. documentary painstakingly reedited by Mick Gochanour and Robin Klein (who did The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus ) of footage shot in 1965 of the Rolling Stones touring Ireland. It shows the Stones just beginning to be super-famous and includes what is said to be the first performance before an audience of "Satisfaction." Interesting discussion of this film by Richard Brody in his New Yorker movie blog. And as in earlier years there was the NYFF sidebar series Views from the Avant-Garde.

[CHRIS KNIPP]