L'ENFANT SECRET (Philippe Garrel 1979) - REVIVALS
PHILIPPE GARREL: L'ENFANT SECRET (1979) - NYFF REVIVALS
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ANNE WIAZEMSKY IN L'ENFANT SECRET
Sad couple, lost child, cinematic poetry
L'Enfant secret/The Secret Child is a late Seventies example of Philippe Garrel's typically moody autobiographical explorations of the depredations of artistic life. Though it's one of the most famous of them, winner of the 1982 Prix Jean Vigo, it was long impossible to find. Except for a DVD produced in Japan, it was available only in a copy in the hands of Garrel himself. Now a handsome, restored print has been made, with clear images and sharp sound, and it's being shown at the Metrograph Theater in New York and as part of the Revivals section of the 2017 New York Film Festival.
L'Enfant secret concerns a man, a woman, and a gradually abandoned child named "Swann." Like Garrel's other films that I've seen, it's stark, harsh, and poetic, this quality emphasized by contrasty black-and-white images further heightened (or restored to original intent) in the remastered print, along with (also intentional) complete fall-outs of sound, alternating with spotty dialogue and a warm keyboard score. This is vintage Garrel, stoical, arbitrary, moody. It's like a telegraphic diary, not very good storytelling, not very good entertainment, rudimentary in style, but capable of leaving a viewer feeling devastated with its ruthless depiction of life full of promise and life thrown away.
A summary supplied on IMDb describes L'Enfant secret as "four chapters based on the birth of a 'secret child', or a film, with chapter titles: 'La séction Césarienne' (Caesarian section: a descriptive detail introducing the mother); 'Le dernier guerrier' (the last warrior: how the father sees himself); 'Le cercle ophydique' (the serpent's closed circle: the couple reunites at the psychiatric ward); 'Les forêts désenchantées (unfairy [sic] forests: the film in the making)."
But if this is indeed what this cryptic, stoical film is actually about, it's not what an unprepared viewer sees, which isn't filmmaking and career development but moments in the lives of Élie (Anne Wiazemsky) a young woman who has a child by an actor who doesn't show up to be the father, and who later begins to use IV drugs. She becomes involved with Jean-Baptiste (Henri de Maublanc). He is a filmmaker, or a man who wishes to make films. In scenes of him, or Élie, or the two of them, Jean-Baptiste suffers depression, or brain damage from on overdose of LSD, or both, and he winds up in a sanatorium, where he suffers the damaging effects of shock treatments those close to him learn about only later.
Perhaps one can't or oughtn't be an "unprepared viewer" of Garrel's films, because they are heavily autobiographical, so some rudimentary knowledge of his life is a necessary subtext, and Jean-Baptiste can be understood as a version of himself. Note that Maurice Garrel, Philippe's father, was an actor, who appears in his 2005 Sixties epic of a doomed poet, Les amants réguliers/Regular Lovers (NYFF 2005) starring Philippe's son, Louis Garrel, uniting three generations of this French cinematic dynasty. I was struck in L'Enfant secret by how much Henri de Maublanc, with his big stylish mop of dark hair, resembled Philippe's now 34-year-old son. It's as if Philippe brought up his son to take over the key role in his endless autobiographical sagas - except that Louis has developed quite a varied career on his own, apart from playing in no less than seven of his father's films. He has played in more of Christophe Honoré's, besides co-starring in his own debut aa director a couple of years ago and playing in films by a number of other directors. Louis's fame has become more mainstream than his father's. But his father, whose greatest recognition always has come at the Venice Film Festival, retains an unspoiled avant-garde cachet.
At the point when he made L'Enfant secret, however, Garrel had made a conscious decision to turn away from the focus in his films on his great love, the German singer-songwriter Nico, with whom he had been involved for ten years, ending in 1979, and if not to cease being autobiographical in his movies, at least to approach his life in them in a new way, aided by a new collaboration with the Belgian-born scenarist Annette Wademant. This was Garrel's fifteenth film, and he's made seventeen since.
L'enfant secret begins with Élie and a young man, and the implied conception of her child, whom she names Swann, evidently after Proust's character. It's only later that Jean-Baptiste enters the scene when he and Élie exchange their first kiss in a villa outside Paris. She goes on tour as an actress, and Jean-Baptiste has his depression. She reappears, and so does the now grown up Swann, a toddler who can walk fast, and Jean-Baptiste has regained hope and struggles to regain his memories. But she gives up the child, who she doesn't want and she says doesn't "doesn't love me anymore." Now, it seems it's she who needs help, as we see her brandishing a needle and suggesting to Jean-Baptiste that the drug is "good," and that he may like to try it.
In the center of the film, Jean-Baptiste may seem to take over. But the egocentrism of Garrel's films may be countered by his collaboration with Annette Wademant on the writing. Anne Wiazemsky arguably continues to affect the viewer more than de Maublac, with her sad, soulful face: she is pure emotion, while he, even when he's smashing a window and cutting his hand, is a little more like a fashion model.
But that's okay, because one of the things that makes you want to go back to Garrel's films is their link with the powerful rudiments of film, with early movie history. The impressionistic - and favorable - 1982 review of L'Enfant secret in Cahiers du Cinéma by Serge Daney doesn't translate very well - it reduces to a network of jottings and allusions - but one thing holds true: his comment that at some moments, like the one when Jean-Baptiste struggles to light a butt he's found under a bench, this film reminds us of Griffith or Chaplin.
L'Enfant secret, 92 mins., premiered in France 1979 but had French theatrical release 2 Dec. 1982 and showed at the Berlinale 26 Feb. 1983. A few other later festival showings. Now digitally remastered version begins theatrical premiere at the Metrograph (NYC) 18 Oct. 2017, also showing in NYFF Revivals section 10 Oct. at 6:00pm, with Garrel in person at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (Lincoln Center). Screened for this review at the Metrograph 23 Sept. 2017. The Metrograph is staging a two-part retrospective of Philippe Garrel's films; Garrel will be on hand for part of that too. For the program of Part 1 (13 films) go here. Philippe Garrel's new film, L'amant d'un jour/Lover for a Day, is part of the Main Slate of the 2017 NYFF. Anne Wiazemsky died 5 Oct. 2017 in Paris at 70 (Garrel is 69).
THE SQUARE ( Ruben Östlund 2017)
RUBEN ÖSTLUND: THE SQUARE (2017)
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TERRY NOTARY IN THE SQUARE
Östlund's new film is a prizewinning dazzler, but lacks clear focus
Östlund'S The Square is a crisp and thrilling festival film, full of drama, shock, and hilarity, and with a terrific soundtrack - but contents one has some difficulty imagining a mainstream audience putting up with or having the patience for, since it's weird and two hours and twenty-two minutes long. Nonetheless it has a US distributor, Magnolia. It's a good-looking film, notable for a powerful use of music and ambient sound. It was great to watch it at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, surely the best place to watch, but also particularly to hear, a movie in New York City, if not the whole country (even if it could use some new seats).
How did this film win the Palme d'Or at Cannes? Perhaps first of all for being intense, entertaining, and unclassifiable. It's like a performance piece and also about a performance piece. Its main character, Christian (the suavely awkward and watchable Claes Bang), is the director of the hippest major art museum in Stockholm. Not wholly unintentionally, the movie confuses him with an artist and he - and the public - confuses art with attention-getting PR.
The Square is cool, but too diffuse to deserve being called the best of Cannes. Östlund crams miscellaneous anecdotes into the film from here and there. It's an omnibus film, curiously scattershot after the intense focus of the director's previous one, Force Majeure, though it's got a morally weak protagonist, like that one, as well as a malevolent child, like in Östlund's more clinical and troubling Play (NYFF 2011). It's got too much going on. In that, it's just the opposite of Force Majeure, which focussed relentlessly on one man's moment of cowardice and its drawn-out consequences. Christian is a morally weak man too, like Force Majeure's Tomas, but he's high-profile, powerful, and experienced at putting on an elegant, sophisticated front, which is very different from Tomas.
Force Majeure had one dramatic natural set piece, but just one. The Square has several, and Östlund winds things up with a spectacular set piece, of a motion capture artist (Tarry Notary) as a wild man terrorizing a glittering crowd of the rich in a gilded, palatial hall. This is more and even better performance art, dazzling and rather scary - but it doesn't tie things together. It's just one more impressive, stylish attention-getter. The Square sure is strange stuff coming from a Swede. It does vaguely remind one of Michael Haneke. Some of its barbs at the expense of contemporary (earthworks, conceptual, and performance) art are well deserved, but in their blanket quality there's an air of philistinism about them, too, a weakness of the scattershot methods.
In the first set piece, Christian gets cleverly mugged in a big public square in initially scary, disorienting circumstances. There is some kind of big fracas in a crowd and Christian thinks he's helping a guy who seems terrified and menaced by persons unknown. When they separate, he finds his wallet, phone, and even cufflinks have been deftly lifted. It's actually a conventual ploy, but it's staged dramatically - with Östlund's good use of loud sound effects and mockingly soothing music throughout - so it fools us, because we're not clued in on what's happening. Anything could have been going on, including performance art. Is robbery a kid of performance art: performance art a form of robbery?
This experience of being robbed while thinking he's being helpful is why later Christian commissions a public artwork called "The Square," to be a space, in a public place, that's guaranteed to be honest and safe and free, for those who choose to make it so. This is a symbolic reference to the social contract, also a reference to the world of Östlund's father's or grandfather's times when you could leave a child in a public square and know he'd be safe. Ironically, that's now reduced to an art concept.
Christian also has two young men who seem journalists, but apparently are hired to do PR for the museum. If they're a comedy team, they're a dangerous one, since they later create a promotional video online to attract interest in "The Square" that is so violent and tasteless it causes public outcry. The two young men are shock artists themselves, and Christian's mistake is to let them act without supervision.
Claes Bang is great doing a combination of clumsy foolishness and experienced coverup, but the editor needed to cut out some of this stuff. And why is there all this running up and down the parallel stairs of two apartment buildings, Christian's posh one and the poor banlieue one? Why must Christian drag his two young daughters back there? After a while the humor wears thin and the mockery of contemporary art is, as mentioned, far too heavy-handed. The send-up of today's art in the age of Banksy and Ai Weiwei as hard to distinguish from advertising or propaganda is valid, but there's no distinction made between frauds and authentic artists of the last fifty years.
One of the major episodes is Christian's effort, with his museum assistant Michael (Christopher Læssø), to scam the robber into coming forward and returning his wallet, phone, and cufflinks: they go in Christian's Tesla to a ghetto-ish development on the edge of town he's tracked his phone to, where Christian distributes threatening letters to all the apartments in the building. (This apparently is something that once worked, in Östlund's hometown of Göthenberg:* it might work less well a town that's 50% bigger. The episode isn't helped by being implausible. ) This shows up Christian's fear of the poor, one supposes. Only isn't that perfectly normal, to be uncomfortable doing this? Naturally, Michael, who is black, finds a Tesla not a very comfortable place to sit and wait in a ghetto area. Christian winds up having an aggressive kid, aggrieved by the letter, on his case - one of his endless problems.
The film ends with Christian's resignation, due to the offensive publicity video he shouldn't have let happen. Only it doesn't end, because it drags on and on. Bang's manipulation of art world bureaucratese is convincing, but enough is enough.
The humor is at the expense of the privileged, like Christian, who cater to the hyper-rich. But men are also a target, and Östlund can't resist working in Elizabeth Moss as an American journalist, who does a short interview with Christian and later has sex with him, then gets on his case about it. All good fun? But also a bit embarrassing. Östlund uses threats of, or actual, violence and loud noises skillfully to keep us viewers on our toes, and various well-staged scenes have theatrical panache, but in the end they begin to seem like an enjoyable smokescreen to cover up the lack of unity and focus of this overlong but otherwise enjoyable and original film. One knows Östlund will go on making interesting and increasingly ambitious films, hopefully leaving out the kitchen sink next time.
The Square, 2 hrs. 22 mins., debuted at Cannes 20 May 2017, winning the Palme d'Or. Nearly two dozen other international festivals. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, showing 19 Sept. 2017. Limited US release by Magnolia Pictures to begin 27 Oct. 2017.
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*He said so in a festival Q&A.
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CHRISTOPHER LÆSSØ, CLAES BANG IN THE SQUARE
SPOO/POKOT ( Agnieszka Holland, Kasia Adamik 2017)
AGNIESZKA HOLLAND, KASLA ADAMIK: SPOOR/POKOT (2017)
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AGNIESZKA MANDAT IN SPOOR
Admiration for a crazy lady
From a novel, this new movie by Agnieszka Holland and her daughter expresses an intense, boisterous, and rather disturbing admiration for a vigorous nut case of a lady in late middle age, Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat) - she has to tell people not to put an "n" in the name and insists they just call her "Duszejko," never "Janina" or "Ms." A great admirer of the doctrines of William Blake, she lives in Kotlina Kłodzka, a virtual nature preserve on the Polish-Czech border that's not a preserve at all: its bristling with birds, wild boar, deer and other wildlife, but the macho local culture involves constant hunting and poaching - killing out of season that "Duszejko" abhors. Correspondingly, the story is punctuated by hunting rules, with title cards showing what animals are in season month by month and what ones aren't, through winter to summer and back to winter again.
This looks like the chronicle of an eccentric woman in her sixties who becomes the suspect/ad hoc investigator of a crime story as a series of murders occur, but it turns into an animal activist drama whose hero gets away with murder. It's suggested, in passing, that astrology, a big hobby of Duszejko's, is a good thing too. This is impressive, boisterous filmmaking, full of noise, action, and life. It's also sprawling and troubling in its apparent advocacy of questionable strategies. Spoor is an oddball work by a famous director, a curiosity, a genre-bender, that may find and hold its own niche.
The key apparently lies in the source novel by Olga Tokarczuk, her 2009 Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead. Tokarczuk is a both critically acclaimed and commercially successful writer who seems to have a strong bent for provocation. Speaking of her more recent 2014 The Books of Jacob, bluntly depicting Polish treatment of the Jews, the Economist reports how she has had abuse heaped upon her by the country's new conservative patriots. Drvive Your Plough is likewise described in a Polish lit website in English as having caused a good deal of "consternation among Polish readers" for "turning to popular literature" with a novel in the "crime genre," focusing on a "central character" who's hard to take, and by the additional claim that the book is a "metaphysical thriller" and therefore somehow resonant with prfound meaning. Judging by this film, there's kookiness where that profundity should be.
One reviewer of the film pointedly claims that the lead actress, Agnieszka Mandat, looks like Aileen Wuornos. But she may as much resemble the director herself, as her daughter rather resembles her. Duszejko admits she's unqualified to teach but is a part-time instructor to school kids in English to keep busy. She lives off by herself in a rough but rangey cottage with two big female dogs. She starts breaking the rules when the dogs disappear by bringing out her class in the middle of the night to hunt for the dogs. She is bereaved, and doesn't get over it, and rails against all the men in authority and power around town - the richest man, the mayor, the chief of police, the local priest. We get the message pretty bluntly when the priest condemns Duszejko's pet cemetery, firmly declaring that animals have no souls.
Killings are dotted through the year. When the hot weather comes, Duszejko meets up with an entomologist doing research in the woods(Miroslav Krobot) and they have a lively and vigorously physical late-blooming affair that's also a union of activists against the world. The entomologist rails against the loggers who are killing off the larvae of insects that are essential to the ecology of the region - of the planet.
Mandat is impressive, alternately scary and beautiful, and carries the action well. Spoor's energy and flow are fun and impressive. At its best moments, the film effortlessly conveys a sense of burgeoning nature and human events out of control. But it feels out of control too, its police procedural element never providing the pace and backbone it might. Filmmaking skills come to feel wasted in the repetitiousness and excessive length. Spoor frequently harangues the viewer with its - or Tokarczuk's - feminism and ecological activism. The score by Antoni Komasa-Lazarkiewicz, typically, is hard-driving and energetic but a bit monotonous too. Peter Bradshaw is on target when he calls Spoor "watchable in its quirky and wayward way, with some funny moments – [but] shallower than it thinks." Its provocations only weaken its arguments and one wonders if in their enthusiasm Holland and her daughter-collaborator have lost whatever subtlety the novel source may have had.(Metacritic rating: 61%/)
Spoor/Pokot, 128 mins, debuted at the Berlinale; a dozen-plus other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, 30 Sept. 2017, with a Q&A by the filmmakers afterwards.
WESTERN (Valeska Grisebach 2017)
VALESKA GRISEBACH: WESTERN (2017)
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MEINHARD NEUMAN IN WESTERN
Portrait of an estranged loner
One should be wary of a filmmaker's expressed intentions when watching her film: so with Valeska Grisebach's Western, whose title, both explicit and playful, it's best to ignore. The main character looks a bit like a cowboy hero, and there's macho competition, even a horse, but different things are going on from what you'll find in the Hollywood genre. These are Germans working on a water system construction project in a rural part of Bulgaria. The "newbie" in the group is Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), a tall, grizzled non-actor with a moustache somewhat resembling Sam Elliott, who, despite little knowledge of Bulgarian spends a lot of his time connecting with the locals, with complicated consequences that have more to do with the European Union than with the Wild West.
In the end the genre aspects do come to life, but in a highly original, contemporary way, and without the satisfying resolutions of the traditional genre - a difference that has both good and bad aspects. There are many specific, interesting scenes here, but it might have helped to locate them within a more focused dramatic structure. Despite its several interesting characters, Western winds up feeling patchy and diffuse. It's hard to say what this is all about - it's left unresolved, but the fascination is with the joys and shortcomings of communicating without language and stuff that happens when strangers are planted in a place like this.
Meinhard is the main focus, along with several Bulgarian women he connects with (Veneta Fragnova, Viara Borisova); Adrian (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov), the Bulgarian male who becomes his local "best friend;" and the boorish German crew boss Vincent (Reinhardt Wetrek). Meinhard is wordlessly repelled by Vincent and his coworkers at the outset and seems to spend much of his time exploring: in fact a weakness of the film is that it conveys little sense of the actual work done by the Germans or for Meinhard's part in it.
A white horse wanders wild and free, and Meinhard manages to ride it bareback. As a sign of local conflicts and implied "colonialism" or at least condescension and economic nationalism, Vincent plants a German flag on top of a tall pole at the work site - which quickly disappears. Some of the Bulgarians harbor old resentments, while the Germans talk about finally being back "after seventy years." Meinhard emerges as a "legionnaire" who did unexplained stints in Afghanistan or Iraq, with no home to be homesick about, no family, no wife, no kids, lonely, longing for connection, his estrangement from his fellow Germans on the work crew a sign he may not be good at really connecting for long. He puts on nice shirts in the evening and goes into town, spruced up, ready to charm and make nice - for a while. In the end, Adrian gives back the knife he's gifted to his son, Wanko (Kevin Bashev) saying "He doesn't need this," and asks pointedly, "What do you want here?" (Subtitles translate both languages for us, somewhat blurring the effect of the non-verbal communications.)
The film has a documentary realism and often seems real, disturbingly so in an incident that occurs with a horse. Mostly this reads as an unusual study of how people communicate when they have hardly any language in common; or long-held national prejudices; of conflicts between outsiders and locals. And it's a somewhat enigmatic study of Meinhard, a loner searching for connection - who makes remarkable progress in making local friends that comes in handy when the Germans encounter hostilities, but winds up still a stranger to everyone, though we share with interest in his bold and intriguing little adventures.
Western 120 mins., debuted in the Un Certain Regard series of Cannes 2017. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival shown at 8:30 pm 1 Oct. 2017 at Elinor Bunin Theater, Lincoln Center. The director and actor Syuleyman Alilov Letifov were on hand for a Q&A with Programming Director Dennis Lim. The film will be released later by Cinema Guild.
ZAMA (Lucrecia Martel 2017)
LUCRECIA MARTEL: ZAMA (2017)
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DANIEL GIMÉNEZ CACHO IN ZAMA (THE ACTOR'S PARENTS WERE EXILES FROM SPAIN)
A strange and inventive slow burner, long awaited and long delayed
Based on a 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, which in her country is a cult classic, this is Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel's first feature in nine years, since The Headless Woman (NYFF 2008), which had followed the much admired 2001 La Ciénaga and 2004 The Holy Girl. The story set in the late eighteenth century focuses on a petty official of the Spanish crown, Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), living in a remote outpost on the Paraguay river, endlessly awaiting transfer to Buenos Aires that never comes. "While not much happens (star Daniel Giménez Cacho largely wanders around, perplexed, under a three-cornered hat), when it finally does, it’s violently unsettling. This hallucinatory work vaguely suggests a stoned, swampy relative of 1970s Werner Herzog, but invents its own cinematic language," wrote Jonathan Romney in the Guardian from Venice when the film debuted. And that's an understatement. The ending is apocalyptic and deeply ironic, a sort of "don't ever go to live where there are natives" message. The film is slow going much of the way, but nobody can complain it lacks drama at the end. It's jazzed up with periodic popular music that reminded me of Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together.
Zama is full of enigmatic and inconclusive scenes and colorful, made-up period details and it revels in exoticism; the cinematography is handsome, the color gorgeous. Martel has explained that since the novel source supplies little physical detail, she immersed herself in a lengthy book by an eighteenth-century writer, but would up making much of the detail up. Much is made of wigs, and men are constantly seen taking them off and putting them back on. A governor has red painted nails and wears, supposedly, the ears of an executed wrongdoer on strings around his neck; a tall black slave wears a long blue dress coat and a loin cloth. In the opening scene, richly conveying a sense of strangeness, Zama lies in the bushes watching a group of naked white women by the water covered with mud who yell "voyeur" at him. When he beats a retreat one runs up and grabs his leg. He smacks her away, very hard This is intended to convey that he is not a nice man. Though he's a victim, it's not certain he doesn't deserve his fate. He has a wife, and kids who are growing up without him, in Buenos Aires, but maybe they're better off without him. Maybe colonialism and macho sexism deserve purgatorial sufferings.
An English translation of the book by Di Benedetto was recently published by The New York Review of Books, and there is a 5,000-word review of it by J.M Coetzee in the 19 Jan. 2017 issue of the magazine. From Coetzee's summary I learned details that weren't clear in the film, notably why Zama has been demoted and is always longing for the earlier days when he was a corregidor addressed as "Doctor" with his own district to run. It's because Spain has instituted a new, tighter and more centralized administrative system requiring that officials be Spanish-born, and Zama is an americano, born in the New World, so he is now doomed to be forever second in command.
A long conversation between Zama and a bewigged, dressed up and luridly made up lady focuses on their longing to be somewhere European, where people don't sweat all the time. This is a flirtation, but a useless one. He has a native woman and squalling child. Now he refuses to go to a brothel because he'll only have sex with a white woman; or at least so he says. His dream of a love life is unfulfilled like his dream of escape to a more civilized place - in the film, anyway.
Martel's adaptation of the book leaves out sexual details, while adding attractive visuals like a superb palm-strewn swampland and llamas around the corner in doorways. The novel is a first-person narrative, which has been dropped. In the Q&A Martel said everything that happens and all the dialogue is the first person narration of the film. But despite an impressive mise-en-scène and editing that flows with confidence, the self-conscious complexity of the central character has been subsumed into something more stoical and stolid, just as narrative action has to some extent been subsumed into exotic scene-staging in which the somewhat tricky chronology becomes only harder to follow.
At one point clearly the action jumps forward to some years later when Zama is bearded and older looking. Zama is transferred to a worse outpost, but some of the same people are sent to be with him. He has a widow as a lover now, who lives apart, and has born him a sickly son. Much is made of a young man, Manuel Fernández (Nahuel Cano) who's writing a book on, as it were, company time, and the gobernador wants Zama to read the book, and get rid of Manuel Fernández, but he's uncooperative. Much is made, in Di Benedetto's book (according to Coetzee) of the riddle of a woman, or two women, in a house where Zama takes up residence because he's low on money. But, Coetzee reports, the novel, though long in gestation (which fits with Lucrecia Martel's experience with this film), was hastily written, and this means details are confusing, especially in the third part.
It would remiss not to mention the story's mysterious, recurrent villain, Vicuã Porto (Matheus Nachtergaele), Zama's nemesis, who's mentioned early on but never appears in person - or appears to - until the final scenes. He's not just Zama's nemesis but "a bandit of mythical status—no one is even sure what he looks like—on whom all the colony’s woes are blamed." His story is somewhat simplified from the novel's version, but he's constantly referred to, and enters, in one incarnation, for a decisive encounter with Zama and others sent to combat him, at the end.
Zama is an exotic, delicious to look at, slow-moving but fast-ending film that isn't fully satisfying the first time and might require repeated viewings, preferably in combination with study of Di Benedetto's novel, now finally available to Anglophone readers and clearly requiring careful study in its own right. It's not certain that Zama the film can ever be fully satisfying, but one can revel in its imagery and ponder its meanings.
Zama, 115 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2017 and is Argentina's Best Foreign Oscar entry. A half dozen international festivals including Toronto, Haifa, London, Busan and the New York Film Festival, as part of which it was screened for this review in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center 2 Oct. 2017 followed by a Q&A with Martel and NYFF programmer Dennis Lim.
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A STUNNING LANDSCAPE FROM LATE IN THE FILIM
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (Luca Guadagnino 2017)
LUCA GUADAGNINO: CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (2017)
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TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET AND ARMIE HAMMER IN CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
Summer love
Many lovers of André Aciman's intense 2007 gay romance (plus coming out and coming of age) novel set in 1983, Call Me by Your Name, are embracing James Ivory's screen adaptation, directed by Luca Guadagnino. And one can see why. The combination, along with Armie Hammer as Oliver, the 23-year-old visiting research assistant, and Timothée Chalamet as his professorial host's bright, ripe teenage son Elio, seems just about perfect - especially since the Ivory-Guadagnino adapting team have wisely chosen to keep the novel's sometimes overwrought, over-analyzing first-person intensity more on the light and "frothy" side - without tempering the sensuality. Chalamet in particular is a revelation, but his young-guy role is ably anchored in the gay love story by the 6'5", deep-voiced Hammer. Both throw themselves into the brief but intense summer romance set in northern Italy, providing the core of what turns out to be a beautiful film, Guadagnino's most straightforward effort and greatest success so far.
The romance, with its strong (yet somewhat vague) physical, sexual side, is the thing, a sort of youthful explosion both sudden and long-awaited. The delay, filled with Elio's endless questioning and self-doubt about whether he likes Oliver or Oliver likes him, when the mutual attraction turns out to have been there from the first - this is deftly conveyed by Ivory's dialogue in a single conversation, making up for all those agonizing and teasing inner monologues in the book, though in the movie as in the book it's halfway through before the two guys even kiss.
What's lost is the emotional richness and sadness of the novel's years- and even decades-later followups that show this affair was the love of Elio's life, while Oliver moved on and (clear in the film) got married very soon after, not that the affair didn't mean a lot to Oliver too. This is where a novel - especially by an avowed Proustian, indeed Proust scholar - can provide intellectual subtlety a film lacks. But what Guadagnino can provide, as he showed in his impressive feature debut I Am Love/Io sono l'amore, is pulsating physicality. Every soft boiled egg, every cup of coffee, every dip in the lake and boyish erection is savored, while many moments are heightened by a background of Elio's intensified keyboard playing.
Chalamet arrives with a delicate beauty plus a dash of bravado, and quite a skill set. Elio, and so Chalamet, is fluent in English, French and Italian, dances with abandon, smokes with panache, makes love to a young woman, Marzia (Esther Garrel), plays piano and guitar, and has sex with a (large, ripe) peach. That last act may be his greatest challenge, but the actor is also, impressively, closeup on camera for the long final shot where he smiles and weeps and turns away, his face alone conveying the novel's last chapters' messages. Early on, he plays a Bach air on guitar and when Oliver requests a keyboard version, improvises it in three different styles. But Hammer as Oliver too is an impressive mix, hunk as smart as ephebe, casual with his trendy salutation, "Later," physically relaxed and friendly, but dazzling in his etymological knowhow.
It's an Italian but also international setting, a splendid summer and holiday house with a cook and gardener-driver, the nearby towns vague in the novel but apparently shot around Lucca for the movie, the place inherited, one gathers, by Elio's mother (Amira Casar). This is where Guadagnino comes through especially, since he is assured with the local people and atmosphere, including a comical couple arguing over politics in Italian at an alfresco home dinner party (in the novel these are nightly).
It isn't forgotten that both Oliver and Elio's family are Jewish, though Elio says his mother (for local consumption in this Italian town without minorities) - and this is 1983, after all, a fact subtly conveyed throughout - are "Jews of discretion": they don't broadcast it. A nice detail is that when the relationship gets going Elio breaks out a little gold Star of David he has like Oliver's and wears it around his neck as a token. Not that in the movie some details from Aciman's novel don't become a bit fuzzy, including the two young men's relationships with young women, Oliver's poker-playing in town, the identities of the cook, Mafalda (Vanda Capriolo) and gardener-driver, Anchise (Antonio Rimoldi) - while Oliver's scholarly accomplishments come across early on as a stunt, like Elio's keyboard acumen.
What to me seemed over-emphasized in the film's shortened context is the almost sermonizingly "understanding" speech of Elio's father (Michael Stuhlbarg) after Oliver is gone, about the relationship he and Oliver have had. It seems also unnecessary on the two guy's short final trip together to inject sequences of spectacular nature, when the novel has them in Rome. But these flaws don't keep the movie from feeling like a success that touches us and leaves one with much to ponder. This is a rather ideal novel adaptation that makes one feel why such things are worth doing.
And this one has a special resonance. I can find no better way to end than the conclusion of Jordan Hoffman's own admirably specific Guardian review: "Call Me By Your Name is a masterful work because of the specificity of its details. This is not a love story that 'just happens to be gay'. The level of trust and strength these characters share brings a richness that is not necessarily known to a universal audience. But the craft on display from all involved is an example, yet again, of how movies can create empathy in an almost spiritual way. This is a major entry in the canon of queer cinema."
Call Me by Your Name, 132 mins., debuted at Sundance and Berlin Jan. 2017, showing in at least two dozen festivals. Screened for this review at the New York Film Festival Tues. 3 Oct. 2017 at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, with a Q&A involving Luca Guadagnino, Armie Hammer, and Timothée Chalamet and a typically enthusiastic audience. People love this movie. And so do critics: Metacritic rating 97% [4 Oct. 2017; now 93% [11 Jan. 2018), NOW 94% [Jul. 2025]. US theatrical release 24 Nov. 2017.
FACES PLACES/VISAGES, VILLAGES JR, (Agnès Varda, 2017)
JR, AGNÈS VARDA: FACES PLACES/VISAGES, VILLAGES (2017)
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JR and Agnès Varda in Faces Places
Façades
French cinematic icon Agnès Varda, as I noted about her beautiful 2008 documentary self-portrait, The Beaches of Agnès (Rendez-Vous 2009) , likes to be told what she wants to hear. So rather than a "documentary" her new film made with 33-year-old photo installation artist (or photographer/muralist) JR is best seen as aa beautifully staged presentation. It is a showcase for her and JR. In fact they work out a duo act, and a very smooth one it is. They join up to travel around France doing what he does. He has a Mercedes van painted to look like a giant camera, in which he can quickly process photographs and make very large prints suitable to be plastered on walls, which is what they do.
Along the way the 88-year-old but very vigorous (if fragile) Varda calls the shots. And in any case, she is the star, the little stocky woman draped in scarves with the casque of hair, half white, half dyed (this time) a reddish brown. If anyone objects to this plastering of big photos on walls for legal or personal reasons, it's not shown. If this sounds like objections to Varda or JR or their film, they're not. Visages, Villages is a charming, rather magical little film, and a portrait of French niceness. Everyone in this film is polite, good tempered, and friendly. Vive la France! This Tour de France has some of the childlike charm of Michel Gondry's films and is admirable for its purity and simplicity, a celebration of the transitory, of faces and places, of photography and the amiable and attractive defacement of property by artistic people.
The narration of Visages, Village is a running dialogue of JR and Agnès. They too are unfailingly nice - in one conversation he explains why he likes older people, and so, her - she's a little feisty, objecting to a compliment on her wrinkles (when her eyes and her hands get the giant-photo treatment, pasted on freight cars), and to a friend being called "an old friend." They visit JR's 100-year-old grandparent (she hasn't that much to say). Old age is a topic: Varda says she is ready to go and thinks a lot about death (but there's nothing gloomy about this indomitable femme).
JR has a team of assistants, but on the trip we don't get to meet them, only JR, in his hipster hat and highschooler clothes and perpetual shades, which Varda keeps nagging him to take off (eventually he does, but we see his eyes as a blur, because her vision is blurry). We see the pair traveling in the van. They may not be alone in it and surely don't sleep in it, but where they sleep isn't shown. How JR makes his prints and what kind of prints they are also isn't shown or explained. They go around pasting large photos on façades of (usually old) buildings, in the country, in "villages." Once the face of a woman who's the sole remaining inhabitant of a row of devastated houses is pasted on the façade of that house where she remains. (She is moved.)The photographic paper seems thin and it fits between the cracks of a brickwork front.
They meet a farmer who talks about how agriculture has changed. He enjoys helming a tractor with lots of computer gadgets, but misses the other farm hands, who now aren't needed. JR does his portrait, and puts it on a barn-like structure. Later JR and Agnès visit and photograph goats and goat farmers. The trend is to burn off their (the goats') horns at an early age. This means they don't fight and promotes milk production. But they find a lady who keeps the horns on her goats. They're meant to have them, she thinks. So what if they fight? JR does a giant photo of a goat with horns that goes on a wall, to remind folks goats have horns. The goat farming lady also used to use milking equipment but got rid of it. She didn't like the noise it made, and realized that hand milking was a peaceful time, not to be lost. Varda likes this independent lady. She also likes three dockers's wives met at Le Havre. One drives big rig trucks. Their giant photo portraits get pasted on tall networks of boxes and then the three women are posed up in spaces where boxes were.
These are art pieces, sometimes temporary ones, like Christo and Jean-Claude's. Such is the photo portrait Varda took of artist and photographer Guy Burdin, his full length, bent in a sitting or lying pose, blown up by JR and mounted on a fallen-down German bunker on a beach. But this time the tide, after one day, washes away the photo portrait. So this is a sign these pasted-on photos, though they look monumental, may wash away in strong weather, like so many interesting pasted-on graffiti on the walls of Paris - for JR's methodology is not unique, though his works are accomplished and impressive. Varda chose well, or they chose each other well, for her fame enhances his through this film.
This is a photographic tour, so it is fitting that the duo makes a visit to a small cemetery at Montjustin to pay homage to the greatest of French photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his second wife, Martine Franck. The finale, a surprise to JR (supposedly, anyway: some of their conversations may be staged), is a train trip to Switzerland to see Jean-Luc Godard. He gives them the cold shoulder, leaving a note but not answering the door. Agnès, who was close to him once, and saw him five years before, is angry but still says she is fond of him and recognizes his eminence as a cinematic innovator. This also becomes a ritual, because they leave a bag of pastries on the door and write a message. They pay another homage to Godard, recalling the race-through-the-Louvre scene of his Bande à part by racing through with JR pushing Agnès in a wheelchair. How it all ends I don't remember: it just ends. So it is with road trips, one thing after another, and then the end. But JR and Varda are still around and came to the NYFF to talk about their work, as they have at other festivals.
Visages, villages/Faces, Places, 89 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2017 Out of Competition and had French theatrical release 28 June to rave reviews (AlloCiné press rating 4.2); in at least 17 other international festivals including Telluride, Toronto, and Vancouver and the New York Film Festival. Theatrical release in New York 6 Oct. 2017. Screened for this review at Quad Cinema 7 Oct.
THE FLORIDA PROJECT (Sean Baker 2017)
SEAN BAKER: THE FLORIDA PROJECT (2017)
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RIVERA, PRINCE AND COTTO IN THE FLORIDA PROJECT
Marginalia
A harsh way to say it is that Baker humanizes sleaze, but this is what artists have been doing since the nineteenth century, inviting the educated classes to enter as fascinated tourists into the lives of classless, powerless, marginal people. Baker made a name by creating a gemlike first film, Tangerine, out of minimal materials in every sense, using an iPhone5 in 2015 with an anamorphic lens attachment and heightening the color (the images still glow in my memory). This time he has in every way gone bigger, shifting to 35mm film and from the world of a transgender prostitute and the fringes of Hollywood to, well, a prostitute and a big purple motel on the edge of Orlando, Florida's Disney World.
But a lot of the time - and this is its key feature - the extraordinary, marginal beings Baker focuses on in The Florida Project are six-year-olds. They are especially Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince) and her two friends, Scooty (Christopher Rivera), who lives just one floor down, and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), a new girl from a nearby inn called Futureland. The three-storey purple palace of last resort is called the Magic Castle. Its kindly but exasperated manager, who paid $20,000 to have the purple coating applied, is Bobby (Willem Dafoe). (Purple they call it, but as Anthony Lane points out, it's really mauve.)
For many at the Magic Castle this is a place of last resort. Bobby is always yelling "you're outta here" to Moonee's mom, Halley (Bria Vinaite), who is a childish, irresponsible, down-on-her-luck 22-year-old unemployed stripper with big tattoos on her breasts and piercings. She sells perfume illegally with Moonee in tow at nice nearby hotels but, though it's left vague, she's turning to prostitution to make the $38 a day rent at the motel. She also gets free food from behind the Waffle House where Scooty's mom (Mela Murder) works as a waitress. She's understandably hostile to Halley and her son's association with Moonee.
The three kids run wild, while Moonee is allowed with the other two, scamming tourists to get ice cream they haven't the money to pay for, spilling it in the lobby, entering into the rooms that are forbidden and once shutting down the power throughout the motel. They also explore an abandoned building, commenting on how they would redecorate the rooms, and then set fire to it. Moonie often goes back to a stately pleasure dome called Orange World, a gift shop topped off by the head of a giant wizard, and a cone-shaped Twistee Treat. In a world where a kid is lucky not to have fully grasped what the adults are doing (but Moonee is catching on fast), there is much to stimulate the fantasy of a child, despite the tawdriness hovering around the edges. And Moonee acts like a queen, showing off the place to her two pals: she knows her way around. It's summer. No school. Or did she ever go to school? Moonee reigns, anyway.
The Florida Project has a series of crises and incidents rather than a plot. It oscillates between Bobby, Halley, and Moonee, but it enters more into the kids' world than into the adults'. But while the word "adult" is used, when Moonee tells her pals "I can always tell when an adult is going to cry," there are no adults, though Bobby is, maybe, a kindly mother hen. With his images and his entry into foul language of the underclass so far it turns into some kind of rough poetry - but it can still make you wince. Sean Baker is a maker of magic - but not one who beautifies the ugly. The ugliness is all there. But toward the end when the three kids run off to a field of grazing cattle and stare at it, magic and poetry happen.
In the defiance of Moonee and her mother there's a sense of hope but also anger at their situation. Both are young enough not to have given up. In the dramatic final sequence that in a sense pulls all the scattered narrative together, that's even more clear. What Baker is selling us is sympathy and hope, in a region where our first reaction would be to see none. In other words, he is a humanist. Perhaps also a dreamer and fantasist.
What he's also doing is something like the Italian neorealists - but not entirely. They used dubbing: the non-actors who starred didn't have to understand what they were saying. This time it's likely that Bria Vinaite, whose tattoos and piercings are real, may be close in sensibility if not experience to the character and situations she plays in The Florida Project. But she is also acting, and so is the feisty Brooklynn Kimberly Prince. Baker is practicing a particularly artful kind of wrangling with his inexperienced actors and making knowledgeable use of his locations. This has an energy and a shape: more will linger than the color and this gift for marginalia will be known.
The Florida Project, 115 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2017 in Directors Fortnight, listed in 18 international festivals on IMDb, including New York. In theaters starting 6 Oct. 2017. Screened at Angelika Film Center 7 Oct. An A24 release. (Metacritic rating 94%.)
LOVER FOR A DAY/L'AMANT D'UN JOUR (Philipppe Garrel 2017)
PHILIPPE GARREL: LOVER FOR A DAY/L'AMANT D'UN JOUR (2017)
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LOUISE CHEVILLOTTE AND ESTHER GARREL IN LOVER FOR A DAY
Daddy issues
Philippe Garrel's new film, Lover for a Day/L'amant d'un jour, looks like a lot of his other work. It's filmed in stark but elegant 'scope black and white and focused on a middle-aged man and two young women. His numerous autobiographical films are much like this. And yet, like the other two in the trilogy this concludes, Jealousy (NYFF 2013) and In the Shadow of Women (NYFF 2015), this seeks to go in a new direction. Oddly enough, it's in a sense filmmaking by committee, with four screenwriting credits, notably two female. The screenwriters were Garrel; his wife the young writer-director Caroline Deruas (L'Indomptée); Maurice Pialat's former partner Arlette Langmann (À nous amours); and Luis Buñuel's prolific writing collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière - a distinguished crew indeed.
Garrel has said the woman's point of view was sought at every point for this film. He remains very much in charge stylistically, but the girls do take center stage. Far from Garrel's dreamy, epic evocation of 1967-68 Regular Lovers (NYFF 2005), this is certainly a relatively slight piece of work, yet the collective writing may conceal layers of complexity. But on the other hand Boyd van Hoeij, in Hollywood Reporter in one of the most perceptive reviews, points out it's the film's "problems with structure" that "keep it from greatness." And that's because it's not clear whose point of view it is.
The movie starts off with a bang, pun intended, a quick connection between a man and a woman in a hallway that concludes in a restroom - with a loud female orgasm. Such realistic lovemaking, and emphasis on the woman's pleasure, is unusual for this director, however sensual his films. Next we see a dark young woman, Jeanne (Garrel's daughter, Esther Garrel, better here than previously, though trying too hard) turn up at the small apartment of her philosophy prof dad, Gilles (Éric Caravaca,) exploding in a hysterical, unstoppable, body-shaking rush of tears. Feeling rejected by her boyfriend, Matéo (Paul Toucang), the first great love of her life, Jeanne has abruptly left him with nowhere else to go. But Jeanne finds out there's somebody else living chez papa, Ariane (Louise Chevillotte, a fresh face), one of her father's students, who's been his live-in lover for three months and is Jeanne's same age, 23.
Jeanne says this is okay. There's not much she could do about it anyway. In fact Ariane and Jeanne bond - sort of, Ariane providing Jeanne first with comfort, later with advice to try lightening up and having a quick affair or two.
Actually, there's something Electra complex-ish going on here, ultimately. The "lover for a day" is Ariane's, a pretty young man called Stéphane (Félix Kysyl), who she has quick stand-up sex with, and Jeanne engineers this relationship by introducing Ariane to him. Gilles immediately finds out about it and is horrified. He tells Ariane she has now turned out not to be the kind of person he had had in mind, though he acknowledges that he used to be like her, and had earlier said the relationship could be open-ended. He calls her now "a female Don Juan." Maybe he should have chosen somebody older? Gilles tells Ariane she has to move out, and Jeanne has the place, and her father, to herself.
Along the way, Garrel finds time in this very brief movie for several group scenes. There's one of dancing, which more briefly achieves some of the magic of the longer, signature sequence of Regular Lovers, along with a discussion by students and older men of the French-Algerian war. Both these show the atemporal quality of Garrel's movies. This one has contemporary notes, but a lot of it could be from the Sixties, the Seventies (the latter in a sense Garrel's heyday) or some other era. A timelessness is contributed by Renato Berta's cinematography. The images of kitchen, bedroom, and sidewalk are familiar ones from previous Garrel films. The notable use of an iPhone, and its context, temselves seem anachronistic.
The movie can be taken various ways, too. Most of the audience was respectful at the big New York Festival screening. Yet there was also constant tittering, not explainable by a the film's moments of intentional self-mockery. There is a certain elegance in Garrel's faithfulness to his resolutely small, personal, obsessive, almost zen focus on love triangles. Still they risk seeming indistinguishable and dispensable. And yet, despite missteps - a suicide attempt, a wrong turn toward porn photos, minor male actors who lack authority - Lover for a Day winds up charming the viewer, as its male anti-heroes do their young women.
Garrel rehearsed the film one day a week for a year, he explained, making the final actual, low-budget shoot fast and smooth. This is a method of more rigor that may also have conveyed more dryness. Was there room left for spontaneity? Sometimes hard not to think, while watching Lover for a Day, of Éric Rohmer's similarly themed yet so very different films, so bright and full of charm and light, technicolor being as essential to them as black and white seems to be to Garrel. Once Garrel had hardly any dialogue, but that distinction is no longer present. Not only do Jeanne and Ariane do plenty of chatting, but voiceovers kept explaining things. However, here the emphasis is on manipulation, though foolish choices, a Rohmer favorite, also feature. You can't claim either director's world is more real, but Garrel's feels harsher.
And yet this time not so much, because there is a happy ending, which happens almost by magic, through a chance meeting on the street.
Lover for a Day/L'amant d'un jour, 76 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2017's Directors Fortnight, where it won the SACD Prize ex aequo with Claire Denis for Let the Sun Shine In. It entered French theaters 31 May (AlloCiné press rating 3.5), also playing in at least eight festivals. Screened for this review at Alice Tully Hall 10 Oct. 2017 as part of the New York Film Festival. Acquired by MUBI for US release coming 19 Jan. 2018. Metascore 76%.
THE RIDER (Chloé Zhao 2017)
CHLOÉ ZHAO: THE RIDER (2017)
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BRADY JANDREAU IN THE RIDER
A young cowboy
The Rider, a sad and beautiful little film using real people and dramatizing their lives, shows us the vanishing life of cowboys, especially the bronco buster, rodeo rider kind. The focus is Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau), a young cowboy who's had a severe head injury in a rodeo and has to come to terms with how it alters his life. He doesn't want it to, and we see why. Young Chinese-American filmmaker and NYU Film School grad Chloe Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards show as few films can the beauty of the western lands of America, the clear skies, the glowing horizons, the grace of horses, their spirit, and the gentle, patient bond between them and the men who train and ride them.
It's painful and also deeply touching to watch Brady try to do what it's now dangerous for him to do. He was in a coma; he has a metal plate in his head. He has had seizures. There is a syndrome that makes his hands clutch up tight unable to open. He was a champion rodeo rider. If he goes out and does that again, it could be fatal. Even breaking horses is probably too violent, too physical. Yet he tries the latter. See how Zhao shoots Brady taming and eventually mounting a horse that's never been ridden before. This sequence says more about the bond between men and horses than any Western and captures a magical patience and harmony.
The Rider risks becoming becalmed as Brady sits with his differently enabled sister Lily and becomes almost too much to bear when he's playing with severely handicapped young rodeo rider Lane Scott at a rehabilitation center, paralyzed and rendered speechless. In a sense this film isn't exactly going anywhere. It swings back and forth; it's about a situation; about a process, not an event. There are no narrative subtleties or clever twists. The best moments, and they make it all worthwhile, are when Brady hangs out with best buddies Cat, Terry, Tanner and James, or with his father, Wayne Blackburn (Tim Jandreau), who drinks and plays the slots too much and neglects payments on their trailer and chides Brady for his stubbornness. This is where Zhao makes best use of the extraordinary access she has gained with these special people. They live in a world apart, not specifically mentioned, but of the Lakota Sioux in South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (and Brady Lower Brule Sioux heritage) - hence the quiet, the wild, isolated beauty of the land.
Maybe, as some might argue, the details of this world could be better delineated in a straight documentary. But not the emotion. And as Brady Jandreau said in a Q&A, the old Westerns showed cowboys who had no emotions at all. These guys have a lot of emotion, especially Brady. The Rider isn't so much about his way with horses, the adrenalin rush and fulfilment or rodeo riding, but about the emotions he's dealing with, which, under the stoicism and style - and these young cowboys sure are stylish - are painful and intense. Style, and a gentle disposition, are almost all Brady has left without access to the eight minutes of rodeo fame any more. He has virtually no education and no other skill set. But as Guy Lodge notes in his Cannes Variety review, Brady has what it takes to play himself and make it elegantly, touchingly watchable because he's equal to the film's emotional demands and is a "natural, laconic brooder, with the steady stance and gaze of a scragglier Heath Ledger." There's emotion, but the whole game is to steer clear of sentimentality.
Bravado and risk - the bronco-training, a hard wrestle with a pal, promises to the disabled Lane - alternate with hard knocks. Brady has to work in a local supermarket doing this and that, a humiliating scene for a cowboy. His favorite horse must be sold. Brady keeps telling everybody his time off from rodeos is only temporary till he Heals, but the film trajectory is of his gradual unspoken admission that the macho toughing-it-out, the "Say I won’t, and I will" tattoo on Lane Scott's back, must be relinquished. But this is a surrender that's never signed, except to acknowledge, in a final scene, that love and family outrank ego.
The Rider, 104 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors Fortnight, winning the Art Cinema Award; ten other international festivals including Telluride, Toronto, London and New York, screened at the latter 12 Oct. 2017 at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, for this review, followed by a Q&A with Chloe Zhao, Brady Jandreau and Tim Jandreau moderated by Kent Jones, Director of the Festival. The film will be distributed by Sony Pictures Classics in 2018. Metascore 84%.
ISMAEL'S GHOSTS (Arnaud Desplechin 2017)
ARNAUD DESPLECHIN: ISMAEL'S GHOSTS/LES FANTÔMES D'ISMAËL (2017)
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MARION COTILLARD AND MATHIEU AMALRIC IN ISMAËL'S GHOSTS
Like Daedalus, Desplechin shoots high and crashes
This new film by Desplechin has some similar elements, going back and forth in time, exotic locations, Russians, with his last one, My Golden Days. But while that one was charming and came together, this one is annoying and makes no sense. It seems the English-language critics agree with me, because the Metascore is a miserable 58%. The French public also seems to have hated it (AlloCiné 2.2, terrible), but the French critics, on the other hand, were pleased (4.0). There is a great deal of sound and fury here - and shouting by the lead actor, Mathieu Amalric, who's at his shrill, excessive worst (and other cast members don't look their best either). But all the complexity seems more imaginary than real.
Nothing comes together, and nothing resonates either emotionally or aesthetically. This is a curiously drab looking film, a jumble of scenes and incidents, full of sound and fury, signifying not as much as they seem to want us to think. Those who admire it all are seduced by the air of complexity and stick with it. The rest of us go away disappointed. At his best, which is a lot of the time, this original and passionate director produces films that are rich and lovely and significant, like Kings and Queen, A Christmas Tale or My Golden Days. But he's capable of duds, as is shown by Jimmy P, and this is one of them. No doubt a necessary stepping stone, as Robert Motherwell said about his unsuccessful artwork, to the films that sing and charm us.
The movie actually doesn't begin the way the trailer makes you think, and I admit I saw the trailer several times a while ago: in it, the protagonist, Ismaël, played by Matthieu Amalric (Desplechin's longtime alter ego), a filmmaker (though we don't see him making any films, and only rarely writing) is living with a new woman, Sylvia, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, when suddenly on the beach there appears to her a woman, Carlotta Bloom, played by Marion Cotillard, who declares herself to be the wife who disappeared 22 years ago, a shock that disturbs and infuriates them. She has been alive, and didn't tell them. Well, that's a somewhat contrived subject, perhaps worthy of someone like Hitchcock. But actually Desplechin has a whole lot else going on and it's not clear what part this shocker plays or where the center lies. The trailer is more conventional, and Hitchcockian, and it provides a structure that you could make an interesting film about - that revelation of the reappearing wife missing for 22 years. Claude Chabrol might have made a murder mystery out of it.
The film actually begins somewhere else, with scenes from a movie about a character called Ivan Daedalus (Desplechin seems to have been reading James Joyce - but he's also referring back obliquely to his first film), played by Louis Garrel, based on Ismaël's supposedly ne-er-do-well brother, a minor diplomat, whom he thinks was a spy. And these scenes of Daedalus recur. But what the point of them is, isn't so clear. Nor is the crisis of Carlotta-Sylvia resolved in a satisfying way. Though definite things happen, it's blurred by some shifts back several years that seem confusing.
The action here gets lost in useless drama, Ismaël looking like a bum and having fits of hysteria, everybody slurping from glasses of wine or whisky. The biggest disappointment is that things aren't resolved, either in Ismaël's artistic life or his personal one. But the characters also just don't engage us the way they do in My Golden Days or A Christmas Tale. Much use is made of swirling music, which reminds one of Gabriele Mucino's films, where the main characters are all having an adolescent, or thirty-something, or mid-life crisis, all at once. Mucino's films may be conventional, but they make sense and their issues are resolved. The swirling leads somewhere.
Carlota explains what she was doing in her years in the void, but her revelations are a huge letdown. There's still no motivation, and not much detail. She's not really interesting. But then, of course, perhaps she's Ismaël's fantasy, his "ghost" (fantôme in French). Yet she can't be, because Sylvia is the one who sees her first.
It's not satisfying to watch a film where the plot is a mystery, or the key elements are dropped for other ones along the way for no clear reason. Desplechin is original and gives his imagination free reign, but that allows for self-indulgence, which this time was fatal.
At first I was intrigued. But as time went on, my attention was not rewarded. The Guardian's film critic, Peter Bradshaw, has a knack for putting things in sharp, clear terms, and his conclusion about Ismaël's Ghosts at Cannes stands up today. He wrote: "This is an unfinished doodle of a film, a madly self-indulgent jeu d’esprit without substance: a sketch, or jumble of sketches, a ragbag of half-cooked ideas for other movie projects, I suspect, that the director has attempted to salvage and jam together." The version reviewed here was presented five months later as the 20 minutes longer "director's cut." It would require more than the addition of additional footage to bring Ismaël's Dreams into a form that made sense and had true artistic merit.
Ismaël's Ghosts/Les fantômes d'Ismaël,[/I] 134 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition 17 May 2017 and simultaneously in French cinemas; ten or so other international festivals, including the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review (as the "director's cut") at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, 14 Oct. 2017.
FÉLICITÉ (Alain Gomis 2017)
ALAIN GOMIS: FÉLICITÉ (2017)
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VÉRO TSHANDA BEYA MPUTU IN FÉLICITÉ
Rough music
Events take place in Kinshasha, the big city and capital of the Congo, one of the poorest countries in Africa. and focus on the hard-knock existence of the title character, a singer in a bar (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu). Her fourteen-year-old son gets in a motorcycle accident and is badly hurt (and he gets worse). When she asks for money from her husband for her son's operation, he chases her out; her father threatens to kill her, but gives her the money. The actress has a raw, down-to-earth intensity that fits the character's hardscrabble existence. As it must.
The severe injury of Félicité's son is a bad blow for her, and the actress said that the character was half alive and half dead. But the vigor of the music is invigorating. Moreover Kinshasha is a rare African town that has a symphony orchestra and when we see and hear it playing Fratres” by Arvo Pärt, it raises us to a higher livel. The filmmaker, Alain Gomis, a Senegalese born in Paris, whose his previous features were Aujourd'hui (2012) and L'afrance (2001), folds the music in sparingly but effectively with the scenes, weaving a sense of the vernacular cheek by jowel with the sublime. Gomis has a real feel for cinema. Somehow wordlessly, more with Beya's worldly wise, knowing, ironic and sensuous face than anything else, conveys a sense that under the right conditions hardships and compromises can absorbed and made to play in one's favor, if one has what it takes. And you never doubt that she's got it. However, one must confirm as various critics, such as Jordan Melzer of Hollywood Reporter, have, that "The storytelling is a bit wobbly, and, especially in the latter scenes, drawn-out almost to the point of exhaustion," but also as he says, that this is compensated for by "moments of poetry" scattered through the film, particularly in the form of music.
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Félicité, 129 mins., debuted at the Berlinale winning the Silver Bear and nominated for the Golden Bear. other awards including Chicago, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Sydney and Mill Valley. Included in the Main Slate of the New York Film FEstival. Reduced 29 Mar. 2017 in France, very well reviewed (AlloCiné press rating 4.2). Acquired by Strand Releasing, it comes to The Quad Cinema on Friday Oct. 27, 2017. Metacritic rating 75%.
BPM/120 BATTEMENTS PAR MINUTED (Robin Campillo 2017)
ROBIN CAMPILLO: BPM/120 BATTEMENTS PAR MINUTE (2017)
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NAHUEL PÉREZ BISCAYART IN BPM
Love and AIDS activism in gay Paris
Love and AIDS activism in gay Paris
In his film, Robin Campillo depicts the life of French ACTU-UP in the early Nineties, fighting against government and Big Pharma indifference to gay AIDS suffering in France as the original New York ACT-UP had done to American straight mainstream non-cooparation starting in 1987. Campillo's stirring film is both universal and personal. It evokes many communities' struggles against an indifferent world, or youth against hostile elders. It's also a personal, individual homage to a time when Campillo himself was an activist, and it's a moving portrait of love heightened by closeness to tragedy.
As I watched BPM, I often thought of David France's documentary about ACT-UP in New York How to Survive a Plague ( ND/NF). I also remembered living in San Francisco in the early Eighties, when I'd open the two gay weekly newspapers every Monday and page through one photo after another of young men cut down in their prime by the terrible new disease. Campillo vividly evokes the heightened atmosphere of those times. Bdyond anything that happens here, I value the atmosphere it creates and the times and emotions it leaves one to muse upon.
As I wrote of France's film, "People were dying left and right, life was tragic, but people had a palpable sense of the need to go for broke, and the leaders were heroes who were the best they could be." BPM effectively captures this feeling with a vivid, well-chosen cast and a fluid, emotionally intense movement, slipping from one sequence into another to show how the same spirit inspired them all. At the center are Sean Dalmazo (Buenos Aires-born Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, The Aura]
, Glue) and Nathan (Arnaud Valois), two activists, from the original core of French ACT-UP who become lovers. The memorial for one of them at the end, bringing together all the original activists, serves as a ritual representing the innumerable losses.
BPM isn't about the horror of AIDS and doesn't emphasize gruesome symptoms but it does have a bit of realistic anal sex. However, it's primarily about activism. Its core is debate, conducted by rules to keep unnecessary talk minimal. The group applauds by finger-snapping to interrupt talk less: this finger-snapping approbation gives the gatherings their unique flavor - and also Campillo's habit of shifting seamlessly to another scene and another debate to move things forward. The film is staunchly improvisational, its speeches passionate and off-the-cuff, and the whole inspired by a team spirit that fits the action. Debate is the essence, but it's stripped down so as to find the most effective strategies.
Alternating with debate, and eventually love story, are the shock tactics, notably the throwing of fake blood at establishment objects. These passages make explosions of energy releasing what's pent up in the tedious arguments and laborious bureaucratic dealings, and the alternation gives the film a vigorous rhythm. But while it has energy and movement, BPM is deliberately "untidy," flaunting rough edges, though still full of articulate writing, with Campillo and Laurent Cantet collaborating here as they did for Cantet's The Class.
The title, the average heart rate, may evoke Larry Kramer's classic autobiographical play and New York HIV-AIDS account[i]The Normal Heart[/I, but Campillo's film is more understated than American accounts, and in particular isn't out to provide indoctrination or instruction, to feed us dates and names and lines of demarcation. This I found refreshing and also, moving. It allows us to enter more freely into the mood.
BPM/120 battements par minute, 140 mins., debuted at Cannes 20 May 2017, winning the Grand Prix, Queer Prize and FIPRESCI Prize, also showing in two dozen other international festivals, including the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival.
LET THE SUN SHINE IN/UN BEAU SOLEIL INTÉRIEUR (Claire Denis 2017)
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JULIETTE BINOCHE IN LE THE SUN SHINE IN/UN BEAU SOLEIL INTÉRIEUR
CLAIRE DENIS: LET THE SUN SHINE IN/UN BEAU SOLEIL INTÉRIEUR (2017)
Sad comedy of an older woman seeking love
Though she somewhat returns to the obsessive female love territory of her 2002 Friday Night, French master Claire Denis takes a different tack from more serious films like Beau Travail (1999), White Material (2009) and 35 Shots of Rum (2008) in this new film, whose lead is masterfully possessed by Juliette Binoche. Un beau soleil intérieur follows a 50-something woman - a very beautiful one, obviously - in her "search for love" with various men. It's a tragicomic series of misadventures, delineated by many sexy intimate closeups by regular dp Agnès Godard, but also by comically clumsy meandering dialogue that dramatizes the fumbling search and gently satirizes the comic war, or dance, of the sexes. And for this unusual, highly verbal, aspect of the film, Denis has collaborated with novelist and playwright Christine Angot, who has provided many of the devastatingly silly, or cruel, lines. And Isabelle (Binoche's character) is silliest of all, witness her long final session with a fortune teller (Gérard Depardieu). As many have noted, this is both Denis' most lighthearted film (despite its sad side) and her talkiest.
That ending says this: Isabelle has no idea how to choose a man, and she has not found an appropriate one. But she's still ripe for the game, and playing it requires doses of cockeyed optimism. Depardieu's seer hasn't a clue, and neither has Isabelle, and so the plotline isn't really quite leading anywhere, neither plumping for nor quite rejecting any of the unsuccessful mates - which is, after all, rather kind to men in general, offering some sympathy for even the worst of them. It begins with a stuckup banker, Vincent (the very smooth, subtly repulsive Xavier Beauvois), in the first, most realistic sex sequence, which ends with neither of them satisfied. Then she spends an evening with a married, self-absorbed young actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle, very cool and sexy), and she is tremendously excited by the idea of him. At her place, he is recalcitrant. He asks for a drink, then when offered it, wants to leave. Se coaxes him back, and he stays. Next morning he explicitly wishes it hadn't happened, insisting he preferred the "before." The rapport is ruined, if there ever was any, and yet the nature of the danger is that the attraction still hovers on both sides, nudged by the stuttering talk.
She goes to bed with her ex-husband - who tells her their ten-year-old daughter says that when she's with her, Isabelle cries every night, and that's bad for her - while Isabelle is turned off by something he does in sex that she finds false and artificial, so that encounter gets cut abruptly short, a pretext perhaps. Several other men follow, one a sympathetic artist colleague (Bruno Podalydès); another a beautiful, sad-faced stranger (Paul Blain) with whom she has a lovely dance to Etta James' song, "At Last." Is that the best it can ever be, an iconic torch song and a swoony dance with a stranger? Or does this only symbolize cinema's inability to capture love in anything but iconic images?
Binoche is wonderful through all this, sympathetic, needy yet never pathetic, occasionally looking almost her age perhaps, but frequently having moments of happiness, hope, or desire where she glows and radiates like the prettiest of twenty-somethings. She is something, and she never seems to be straining. It's all completely natural, possessed, from within, a career best performance and a triumph for the reputation and promise of that under-appreciated group, actresses of a certain age.
What these connections all have in common is that none of them is quite right, and that they often contain random droll moments of pretension, misapprehension or malapropism. LIfe is alarmingly frustrating and silly. And yet the point is, that in spite of that, the urge is still always there. Throughout, Denis asserts her style and mastery by the rhythm she gives the scenes and the way she transitions from one to the next; by the extraordinary subtle, flickering balance between the sad and the droll. She has faced danger and transformation in films like Beau Travail or The Intruder and here, she's not moving toward some rom-com plotline resolution. This is underlined in an original fashion by the ending session, over closing credits, with the kooky, meandering "seer," Depardieu fluently improvising, riffing, inventive nonsensical bullshit about Isabelle's men and her futures with them, all of whom he sees as positive - or perhaps not. Nothing is certain, and nothing is concluded. And that's bravely life-affirming.
Let the Sunshine In/Un beau soleil intérieur, 94 mins., debuted at Cannes 18 May 2017 in Directors Fortnight, opening in France 27 Sept., AlloCiné press rating only a good 3.5 (70%), but top marks from Cahiers, Les Inrocks, Libération and Humanité. in at least 26 international festivals including Toronto, New York and London. Watched 29 Oct. 2017 in Paris at Cinéma Le 3 Luxembourg.
THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) (Noah Baumbach 2017)
NOAH BAUMBACH: THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) (2017)
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ADAM SANDLER AND JUSTIN HOFFMAN IN THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED)
Baumbach's shot at maturity and warmheartedness
One reviewer, Jessica Kiang, says it evokes "so many other media," theater, short story, TV, she doesn't know why it's a film. She puts her finger on something. This is scattershot, fragmented, and it does that in a sincere and not unsuccessful effort to adopt a warm and comprehensive point of view. This is also perhaps the former Wes Anderson writer's most Wes Anderson film.
It is mainly a decent attempt to be not dry, witty, and cruel like The Squid and the Whale (still an entertaining and watchable film), but, only 12 years later, to be about being an adult, having children, learning to forgive one's father and face his mortality, and so on, and so forth. The "stories" faceting helps to do that, but leave one with a messy, shattered vision. Maybe this is a transition, and that would be from cleverness to something like wisdom, a harder mark to strike.
There are two brothers, the financially successful Matthew (Ben Stiller, very fast on the ball here), and Danny (an unusually straightforward Adam Sandler), once interested in being a musician, but never having done anything, really. Their father Harold (Dustin Hoffman, also straightforward and fine), who was married four times, is a sculptor, but whether he was any good is a question the sons must face. At any rate he taught for 33 years at Bard, where Danny's daughter, Eliza (Grace Van Patten) studies and is a "promising filmmaker." Or does she just partake of the pretension of the younger generation and its ease with provocation, since her little ilms are comic-pornographic? There is also Jean (the surprising Elizabeth Marvel), who was always ignored but does her duty of being present nonetheless and has one speech of protest.
A storyline that strikes home for some of us is the one about work, calling, and worth that finds Harold's career highpoint in a box in storage at the Whitney Museum because yes, the museum indeed once did buy one of his sculptures. And yet Harold, struggling with age and failing powers, deceives himself into thinking inclusion in a Bard faculty show is a "retrospective" or that a photo album of his sculptures will lead to one, and that will give his career a boost. This is about male ego and self-deception but also about sons coming to terms with the real size of their once enormous and threatening and detestable fathers. Is Harold really a very good artist who just didn't "play the game" like his contemporary L.J. (Judd Hirsch), who's having a show at MoMA, or is he just kidding himself? But he's obviously at times a pretentious twat, as when he says things like "I find Maugham to be skillful without being an artist. . ." His simplistic and pompous little dismissals of everybody show him to be an ass, but somehow they have no bite. This script is full of loving detail. It's satire is forgiving. So is its low keyed piano score - forgiving of the audience.
Being, wisely, about what people are rather than what they do, the film isn't heavily plot-driven, and that's a good thing, though it has solid plot elements, especially revolving around hospitals for Harold, who has a life-threatening crisis, and for Danny, who faces up to the need for a hip replacement. Matthew takes care of it, even to a private room, and this is one of numerous sequences about the brothers' rapprochement. Any rapprochement with Harold is fraught because however diminished, he remains as annoying as he ever was. In an exaggeratedly frank speech by Danny at the faculty show, which Harold can't attend because he's in the hospital, Danny says he hopes his father was a good artist because if he wasn't, "he was just a prick."
This strikes a false note, due to Sandler's unusually straightforward delivery here. This is a new Sandler, to go with the new, more humane and serious Baumbach. This is far from his wittiest film and as Kiang's comment hints, there are ordinary, sit-com-ish elements, but there are home truths about growing up that make the less sprightly texture seem worthwhile. This is all about the three main males as finely played by Hoffman, Sandler, and Stiller, but there are other good actors including Candice Bergen, Emma Thompson, Judd Hirsch, even a cameo by Sigourney Weaver that becomes one of several recurrent jokes that help keep the tone light.
This was at Cannes, then the NYFF Main Slate, but released on Netflix 13 Oct. Watched online, but in Paris. Also showing in US theaters, including IFC and Landmark. Metacritic rating 79%. There's a lot to cover here in a thumbnail review. It takes a while to get going, but when it does, it feels warm and kind, and you appreciate its sincerity and goodwill. And yes, Dustin Hoffman and Adam Sandler are good even if Ben Stiller is the closest to a grownup, among the males anyway. Watched 4 Nov.
LADY BIRD (Greta Gerwig 2017)
GRETA GERWIG: LADY BIRD (2017)
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SAOIRSE RONAN AND LAURIE METCALF IN LADY BIRD
Loving and leaving Sacramento in a sparkling if overstuffed debut
Greta Gerwig has been an actress with the mumblecore directors Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers; and, with growing fame, with other directors like Jason Winer, Alison Bagnall, Woody Allen and Whit Stillman. Then with mutual profit and success she became a muse for Noah Baumbach, contributing a lot to the writing of the Baumbach films she starred in as she had to earlier screenplays (in fact she had focused on acting originally only because she couldn't get into playwriting MFA programs). Now at last after over a decade in the business, she has become a writer-director, creating but not acting in her own loosely autobiographical tale. It's a generally lighthearted feature that tries to say a little too much but is fun and amusing and not without its moments of heartache and shock. This movie is charming, but flawed. It won't assume a place among classics of the recent past like Heathers, Sixteen Candles, and The Virgin Suicides. But it seems a good expression of the ebullient spirit of its maker and it has some things to say about early millennial ambition in the urban boonies and some of the tests faced by a California girl in her late teens in 2002.
Lady Bird focuses on senior year at a Catholic high school in Gerwig's native Sacramento, California, that crucial moment in a bildungsroman before its protagonist escapes to the great world where she must go to make a name for herself. Though to start out she's not going off to be a star in any particular field of the arts, only choosing to go to study at an East Coast college and not a local California school like, most obviously, UC Davis, which for this young woman would be death. After all, it started life as an agricultural college. This girl really wants New York, and she knows it.
But she's not New York, and she's not shrewd or sophisticated. She a Sacramento girl. The problems Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) encounters are several. In a school musical production she gets involved with Danny O'Neill (Lucas Hedges), and they have a sweet affair. He "respects" her and loves her so much he doesn't want to touch her breasts. At prom night another reason for his reticence emerges: he's actually gay. That ends that. Hedges is an actor much in demand who was Oscar-nominated for his supporting role in Manchester by the Sea; not surprisingly, he's touching and adorable in this role, which doesn't end with the couple's abrupt breakup but has several appealing followup scenes. Next, via a coffeeshop job, Lady Bird finds her way to the cool, sophisticated Kyle (Timothée Chalamet, another topnotch young actor, costarring in the upcoming Call Me by Your Name), who's also apparently rich. But there is a misunderstanding that makes her feel cheated when she thought they were both losing their virginity together, and it turns out Kyle has been with "about" six girls: he doesn't even keep count. This portrait of Lady Bird's amorous and sexual path is limited but vivid.
With girlfriends it's complicated too. Her best friend is the plump, smart Julie (Beanie Feldstein), who's good in math (as Lady Bird would like to be but definitely isn't) and in love with the handsome math teacher, Mr. Bruno (Jake McDorman). But our heroine is a snob, or a climber (also not averse to cheating on tests or stealing a grade book), and gets into an "in" set by pretending to be rich and pals around with stuck-up Alpha rich girl Jenna (Odeya Rush). A major asset of Danny's was that his grandmother lived in her favorite house in the poshest neighborhood of Sacramento. It's not a tough decision to choose Thanksgiving at Danny's grandma's over at her parents. In justification of this trend, Lady Bird's family is poor, and rising beyond it is going to take maneuvering. Her long-depressed father (Tracy Letts) loses his job in the tech industry, and finding another is tough. Her mother (Laurie Metcalf) works in a psychiatric hospital.
A major theme is Lady Bird's conflict with her mother, whose constant criticisms get in the way of her showing her underlying love. This movie is over-busy, and though it constantly touches on this theme, it never emerges with the force it seems to deserve. (On the other hand, it contains many choice moments one wouldn't want to see cut.) Daddy comes through smelling like a rose, kindly filling out the student loan applications that are crucial to Lady Bird's escape, and also when she does leave, slipping into her suitcase thrown away letters that show her mother's love. The latter is a compensatory afterthought, more telling than showing, but fits in with Gerwig's omnibus writing style.
As Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson, Saoirse Ronan delivers a fine and dedicated performance that yet has lightness. Ronan has a severe presence, and may seem a very odd choice as a stand-in for the beautiful and bubbly Gerwig, who is luminous where Ronan seems drab and flat. But Ronan is also simply very, very good. Even if the actress lacks Gerwig's beauty and bubbliness. some of the other major qualities are there, and Ronan exudes an energy here that eventually gives her too a kind of glow of her own. Nonetheless as Richard Brody says in his New Yorker essay, this film is tight and on the surface conventional and lacks the exhilerating improvisatory feel of many of the ones Gerwig has previously acted in and helped write.
The main thing is, this happens in Sacramento, to which this is a hail and farewell. Lady Bird, doubtless like the filmmaker, loves Sacramento. When Lady Bird finally gets her driver's license, driving around the town and admiring its sights moves her deeply . But this flat, hot town, original home of Joan Didion, who escaped to places like Malibu and Manhattan, is too limited for such an ambitious young person. For college she must go to New York, or, if not there to a college in Connecticut or New Hampshire, "where writers live in the woods."
This isn't much of a sketch of intellectual development. Lady Bird goes to a Catholic high school. One nun does speak of her love of Kierkegaard. And her second boyfriend has gloomy, left-leaning political ideas. Meanwhile it's post-9/11 and Bush's wars are getting going.
On the one hand, Gerwig tries to tell us too much information. Some elements never seem clear, like Lady Bird's brother (Jordan Rodrigues) and sister, apparently adopted? On the other hand, despite the lack of subordination and inclusion of undigested details, they do give the movie a particularity that others of the kind often lack. Gerwig is irrepressible. That is part of the charm. And in this lean season this movie is a boon and contains much that can be savored.
Lady Bird, 94 mins., debuted at Telluride (1 Sept. 2017) and Toronto (8 Sept.), also was at the New York Film Festival (8 Oct.) and in 14 other festivals. It opened in the US 3 Nov. 2017.
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HEDGES, RONAN IN LADY BIRD: AT DANNY'S GRANDMA'S HOUSE
LAST FLAG FLYING (Richard Linklater 2017)
RICHARD LINKLATER: LAST FLAG FLYING (2017)
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FISHBURNE, CARREL, AND CRANSTON IN LAST FLAG FLYING
Ritual and repetition
Last Flag Flying, based on a book, is a passionate mulling over of the issues of war and service, death and ritual, but it's a mulling over that goes on a little too long. The quality of the three main performances never flags though, till the symbolic last flag is not flying but folded, triangle by triangle, and handed over to the bereaved. This story is described as a kind of sequel to the Jack NIcholson vehicle The Last Detail, but not really.
Linklater is a listener, A.O. Scott recently wrote, certainly true of his "Before" trilogy with Delpy and Hawke, and of this. In which case he expects us to listen too, and this works very well for those with the patience. Mine flagged, but I never lost respect for the seriousness of the endeavor. The talkers are three men following the coffin of a young marine killed in Iraq, and the three were together in Vietnam. Larry 'Doc' Shepherd (Steve Carell) was only 19 then, and it's his son who joined the Marines and got killed. Doc comes after years and finds two old buddies to keep him company when he seeks his son's body - which, for reasons we will learn, he wants not to allow to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors, but next to his late wife in New Hampshire, where he was imprisoned and now lives and works.
The actors have very different styles that match pretty well their very different characters. Doc is recessive, tight-lipped. His opposite is the alcoholic Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston), who sleeps at his own failing bar. Cranston is a darned good actor when he has the right role, and the over-the-top, loudmouth, in-your-face Sal is such a role. He exaggerates everything, but he gets it all out there. The most complex character, though he gets only limited opportunity to show it, is Reverend Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne), who was as loud and violent and dangerous as Sal back in the day, but now is a staid black preacher whose fire comes out only in his sermons. Sal and Doc first come on Mueller in full voice before his congregation. It's an elegant, restrained display of the gospel style. Off the pulpit Mueller is stiff, clean-living, and godly. Later, when the men start squabbling, the old profane Mueller comes out. But this too is restrained. Fishburne is as well-modulated an actor as Cranston is a broad-brushed one, but both performances work and offset each other.
Carell hardly even seems to be acting, but that of course can be the best acting of all. He has shown his mettle in a variety of unexpected roles in recent years, in films like Foxcatcher, The Big Short, and Battle of the Sexes. He does the job that's thrown at him, and his neutrality provides a sounding board for the more boldly drawn emotions of Sal and Mueller, till you realize Doc has the deepest feelings and most impressively absorbed grievances. But Carrel remains a little too opaque for that to come through as powerfully as it should. Grievances because Doc is the one who spent years in the brig (he was Navy, they Marines) for some misbehavior they were really all three involved in. Their misbehavior included using up morphine needed for the wounded. And so we learn that Mueller's new life began with desperate addiction and alcohol. Then recovery led to unmitigated desperation and church and meeting his wife there, and his new calling - a classic trajectory.
At times this movie, co-written by Linklater with Darryl Ponicsan, adapting his novel, is quite content simply to preach to us or lecture us. Thus it explains that the Iraq war is as futile and based on as flimsy a premise as the war in Vietnam. But, somewhat contradictorily, it also tells us, or the men do, that it's always honorable to serve one's country as a soldier, and the Marine motto, "Semper Fi," means something. Of course things are complicated, very much so. This is all about compromises. Doc must honor his son, without accepting the war he was in. He accepts the honor of seven soldiers accompanying his son's coffin to the grave but insists on a civilian burial place. Arguing over this is the protocol-conscious Colonel Wilits (Yul Vazquez). Watch Wilits scream at Lance Corporal Washington (the excellent, extremely watchable J. Quinton Johnson) in full Marine profanity not to let the boy's father bury his son in his graduation suit, but properly, in his Marine dress blues. Washington briefly but crucially provides something else to listen to: an inside voice on what happened to Doc's son.
Ritual and formality are things that become crucial in times of most suffering: remember Emily Dickinson's words, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes." For its earnest pursuit of these matters and for its committed performances I respect Last Flag Flying immensely. But as a watch and a sit it has its longeurs. There's too much loading and unloading of the coffin, and too much shifting of vehicles and climbing on and off Amtrak by the three men. If Richard Linklater is a listener, he is not a trimmer. We can see that in his celebrated Boyhood, which was made by a process of accretion. Last Flag Flying gets to the end, and just ends. But it's over two hours long, and so many of its points are stated more than once. A filmmaker is never just a listener: he must choose what he, and thus we, are going to listen to, and must give it a theatrically effective shape. That never quite happens here.
Last Flag Flying 124 mins., debuted 28 Sept. 2017 at the New York Film Festival, where it was the Opening Night Film, and showed at 16 other festivals, mainly domestic, but also London, Mumbai, Vienna, and Mar del Plata. US theatrical release 3 Nov. 2017. Metacritic rating 65%, lowered by views of those who think it too labored, stiff, and dreary, despite the good acting, and too lacking, as I've said, in a strong dramatic structure.
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YUL VAZQUEZ AND J. QUINTON JOHNSON IN LAST FLAG FLYING
THELMA (Joachim Trier 2017)
JOACHIM TRIER: THELMA (2017)
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OKAY KAYA, ELLI HARBOE IN THELMA
Girl becoming
This is Joachim Trier's fourth feature. The first two, Reprise (2006) and Oslo, August 31st (2011), in his native Norwegian, coauthored with his constant collaborator Eskil Vogt, were dazzlingly entertaining and emotionally compelling studies of brilliant, troubled young men, in both instances played by the efforrtlessly riveting Anders Danielsen Lie. They're two of the best films of the decade. Louder than Bombs (2015), the third, branching out in a new direction, was a disappointment. In English, with a cast of well known, somewhat oddly assorted actors including Isabelle Huppert, Gabriel Byrne, David Strathairn, and Jesse Eisenberg, it focused on a family's efforts to cope with the death of one among them. It felt false. Most of the scenes, except a few raw, vivid ones with a teenage family member, played by newcomer Devin Druid, seemed telling rather than showing.
The new one is more of a success, beautiful, as assured as the first ones, and haunting in its way. But one still wonders about the direction Trier is going and wishes he'd get back to the authenticity of his first films. Thelma, a film located back in Norway again, plays with genre and story lines so much, being "false" doesn't even figure (I guess). It's a beautiful, arty, creepy film, mixing horror, tasteful lesbian love, coming-of-age, and superpowers, all embodied in a young college student with a strict Christian background. All this is a lot for the doe-like, slightly feral Eili Harboe, who plays Thelma, to carry, and we have to accept a little - no a lot - on faith that all this is happening to her. It's bestowed upon her by the sheer power of cinematic technique, the nice staging, handsome cinematography, measured editing, atmospheric but subtle music, and restrained use of special effects - often as simple and old-fashioned as showing a character in one shot, then following with another shot of the same space with the character missing, to suggest he's been made to disappear by some magical power. Yes: the magical power of old-fashioned cinema trickery.
By way of background is a striking early scene when the six-year-old Thelma (Grethe Eltervåg), prettily decked out in a pink and blue outfit, is taken hunting out in the snow by her stolid, from the first somewhat scary father, known by his first name, Trond (Henrik Rafaelsen) when Trond is about to shoot a deer, and turns his rifle toward little Thelma instead. Happily Trond shoots neither the deer nor his daughter. Nothing has happened but we'll never trust Trond again. Ever see anyone take a six-year-old girl out hunting with a rifle?
At university, Thelma is tempted by alcohol and marijuana, and we learn how strict her upbringing has been when she confesses to Trond in a daily phone call back home and he forgives her, but only this once. She develops lesbian longings when she meets the dark, slinky Anja (Okay Kaya), another girl student. It's a dangerous attraction. While sitting next to Anja in the big library reading room, Thelma has the first of her fits. Everything about Thelma's college life is pretty (even the young men she meets), and even her fits are delicate, swanlike surrenders. But something is clearly wrong and so later she has some tests. They show her attacks of vibrating are not epilepsy but "psychogenic" fits. It also emerges, the Norwegian medical records system being state-of-the-art, that back home she had odd spells as a child, for which her father, a doctor (GP), gave her an antipsychotic drug they deem awfully strong for a child, called Nozinan.
Oh, there's more: Trier delves into pills, injections, a dangerous, perhaps murderous dad, and a stashed-away grandmother in a mental institution kept on heavy drugs for decades, a fate Thelma may have in store if her father learns of her new symptoms. But is she discovering lesbian love or discovering superpowers - since her erotic fascination with Anja is matched by her emerging ability to make things she wants happen at will?
She goes to the beautiful Oslo seaside Opera House designed by Norwegian architects Snøhetta with Anja and Anja's mother Vilde (Vanessa Borgli), and we get a glimpse of of the hall's spectacular, high interior and a ballet performance. But Thelma, her vibrating hands intercut with a dancer's violent gestures, has one of her fits and has to leave. She seems to be coming apart, and she gets her disabled mother's permission to come back home. There, things come to a head and the superpowers dominate the scenes. But after straightening things out, Thelma returns to university life and more smooching with Anja. Which seems, after all the buildup, a little lame, even silly: Thelma lacks the punch of a regular horror movie. Though Trier tackles a mainstream genre here, this won't satisfy the general run of genre fans.
Still, the action really grabs you for a while. Trier's inventiveness with simple things like water and babies in the bath and his exquisite control over the material all give pleasure. One realizes, too that the terrible inner solitude and the obsession with death of his protagonist were his earliest preoccupations. But the amount of meaning and genre possibilities he imposes on his mysterious young lady is stretched to absurd lengths, and for all the beauty and imagination on display here, things seem to have gone a bit haywire.
Observing the somewhat brittle young people deployed in Thelma's university scenes, it's hard not to remember the authentic and spontaneous Norwegian high school kids in the wonderful recent online/TV series "SKAM". In comparison, these students are just chess pieces, Thelma at best nought but an exquisite game whose eroticism is generic. It's time for Trier to come back to serious stuff, to the visceral, real experience he gave us so memorably in those brilliant first two films.
Thelma, 116 mins., debuted in Aug. and Sept 2017 in Norway and at Toronto, and thereafter in 19 other international festivals, including New York, opened in the the UK 3 Nov. and the US (limited) 10 Nov. 2017, released by The Orchard. Metacritic raging 74%. Opening in San Francisco at Landmark Opera Plaza Theater and Berkeley at Shattuck Cinemas 1 Dec. 2017.
THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE (Aki Kaurismäki 2017)
AKI KAURISMÄKI: THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE (2017)
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SAKARI KUOSMANEN, SHERWAN HAJI
Crossing paths
In this new movie as in his last one (made in 2011)), Kaurismäki is working in his signature style, with his usual actors (or sad sacks from the same mold), deadpan dialogue, bright colors, dominant blues and greens, direct lighting on actors, sharp images, ironically clear camerawork and editing and bright live old fashioned rock music. But again there's a big change from the old Kaurismäki. The gloom is missing.
And we may miss that gloom, its quiet beauty and dry sadness. Some even think its absence a betrayal. But I would argue they are wrong, that the filmmaker is flourishing in this new mode, and has lost none of his chops. But there is, certainly, a new focus: Kaurismäki is looking at one of the worst problems we face: the global refugee crisis. While the superstar artist Ai Weiwei's wide-ranging documentary this year, Human Flow, exhaustively described this problem, it provided no solutions. The Finn has a simple one he's advancing in these films: let each of us light our own little candle. This may not be much. But half a loaf is better than none.
A friend who now lives in Sweden once explained to me, when we saw Kaurasmaki's film before Le Havre, Lights in the Dusk (2006) in Paris, how visiting Finland and meeting Finnish people had greatly enlarged his appreciation of the Kaurismäkian oeuvre and mood. But without that I've grasped one thing: this is one of the world's unique cinematic stylists. Before you decide what your reaction to this movie is, or say anything, I suggest you warm up on the language - not Finnish, that would take more time - but watch several more of his films. They will grow on you.
Initially the language may seem thin, minimal, parsimonious, but the more you see how distinctive and consistent his world is, the richer it becomes. They're full-on movies. What goes on is visual, narrative, psychological, musical. These movies are full of music, background music whose wonderfully seedy makers turn out to be right on screen. The Other Side of Hope is simply a continuation of a new direction, more "positive," if you like, perhaps the second in a trilogy about refugees, the first being the 2011 Le Havre (NYFF 2011 , about the port, and an African boy who washes up into it and is protected by a beat-up and impoverished old Frenchman who shines shoes. That's the bare bones of the story, but there are rich echoes and sounds. The Other Side of Hope has a grown-up Syrian refugee. Instead of a shiner of shoes, it has a shirt salesman who gets lucky and buys a run-down restaurant.
The style is pervasive, and the delight is in the typically deadpan depiction of Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen), as he leaves his wife, and goes off in his big black Checker car. (To tune into this film is to notice that car, and then to love it: so simple, so solid, so perfect, so out of time). Slowly but surely, in a series of deft, minimal scenes, Wikström disburses his sales stock of shirts, enters a poker game, gets lucky, wins a bundle, and decides to buy a little restaurant called The Golden Pint. A good investment? Hell, no. It's been failing and the previous owner takes off to the airport owing the staff. Efforts at rebranding the place with sushi and other cuisines are quietly howling failures. (Lights in the Dusk was the end of Kaurismäki's "Loser Trilogy," but there is always a loser.) Pascal Mérigeau of Le Nouvel Observateur, cited on AlloCiné, writes of "the sublime parsimony of the shot that lasts only just as long as is necessary." This is true. Like Antonioni, Kaurismäki proves on film what Mies' dictum "Less is more" means. And Mérigeau goes on, "those notes of sad and smiling irony that belong only to this filmmaker and to none other, so hard in appearance, so sweet at their heart."
In Kaurismäki, success (and Wikström seems to be having, sort of, a string of them) has a way of looking much like failure. But conversely failure isn't that far from success. The filmmaker himself may be seen as the maker of a string of failures that, viewed more closely, are gems.
Meanwhile, we meet Khaled, the Syrian refugee (Sherwan Haji), who turns up on a boatload of coal, covered with black ash. He washes it off at a town public bath, a symbolic rebirth. He meets an Iraqi waiting to be granted status, Mazdak (Simon Al-Bazoon), and gets some advice germane to our filmmaker's world: look happy, he says; the sad sacks get sent home. But don't be smiling or laughing on the street: they'll think you're crazy. Indeed they will, here, of all places. If there's one thing we learn from Kaurismäki it's that Finns are deadpan sorts. The Arab actors fit the mold. Khaled has a serene, inexpressive manner. Like La Fontaine's reed, he bends, but does not break: he is repeatedly attacked by Finnish white nationalist bigots, but somehow he seems to survive. The court decides - with enormous irony - that Syria is in no danger (the local TV news shows the devastation and atrocity rife there) - and handcuffs Khaled to send him home to Aleppo tomorrow.
Khaled escapes, and hiding, is found by Wikström and hired to work in the Golden Pint. Wikström in effect adopts Khaled, hides, protects him, and gives him a fake ID a techie young man grinds out magically from a little machine as utilitarian in its more modern way as the Checker car.
Like Wikström, Khaled is selfless too, because his concern isn't so much for himself as for his sister Miriam (Niroz Haji), who has disappeared, while all the rest of their family were killed in a bombardment. He is convinced she is alive somewhere, and is bent on finding her. Marzak's cell phone is the opening conduit in a new version of "le téléphone arabe": passing news by word of mouth. It works. This is an upbeat story with a difference, because while there is hope for Miriam, Khaled is still the target of the brutal racists.
This description does little justice to the film. One enjoys the tale of Wikström and his cohorts, savoring the Kaurismäkian style, seeing Khaled and Mazdak as a mere flutter under the surface, though what one savors is how subtly the two stories are gradually linked - the way the tale of a refugee's survival in a strange land is woven into a thoroughly Kaurismäkian display. In fact this shows Kaurismäki working in peak form. Some still complain that the upbeat mood and the concern with World Issues are betrayals, but somehow this film has gotten the best reception from critics the mournful Finn has ever had.
The combination of Kaurismäki and hope for refugees, however welcome or not, is a strange one, no doubt. But it seems to be working.
The Other Side of Hope/Toivon tuolla puolen, 100 mins., debuted at Berlin Feb. 2017 and has shown at 30 international festivals, including Telluride, Toronto, and the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 5 Oct. 2017. It opens in US theaters 1 Dec. 2017 and comes to the SF Bay Area 8 Dec.
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THE BAND
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THE CHECKER
WONDER WHEEL (Woody Allen 2017)
WOODY ALLEN: WONDER WHEEL (2017)
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JUNO TEMPLE IN WONDER WHEEL
Muted tragedy on a garish stage
Another year, another Woody Allen movie written and directed by him. Since he cranks them out this way, and he's over eighty now, his record is great. You may think his best work, comedy classics like Bananas, Sleeper, and Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, and the serious stuff, like Annie Hall, Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hannah and Her Sisters, is all in the past, the latest of these being 1989. But what about Matchpoint (2005, Metacritic 72%) Vicky Christina Barcelona (2007, Metacritic 70%), Midnight in Paris (2011, Metacritic 81%), and Blue Jasmine (Metacritic 78%), the last only four years ago? He gets great casts, he comes up with ingenious screenplays, and lately he's had the famous Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro adding an orange glow to his scenes.
The critics hated Wonder Wheel, but like all Woody Allen movies, it's worth looking at, and if it's a failure, it's an interesting one, different from the others. I have to repeat my favorite quote from the artist Robert Motherwell, that an artist's unsuccessful works are the necessary stepping stones to the good ones. We can't all produce nothing but masterpieces or hits, and if we don't keep working, we won't make anything. If Woody had taken a year off, there's no guarantee what he did next would be a zinger. More likely he'd just lose his touch, or get so depressed he couldn't work again. He's said making movies every year is all that keeps him from going suicidal.
Wonder Wheel seems perched uneasily between a corny Forties or Fifties Hollywood movie, an arty play by William Inge or Tennessee Williams, or a Greek tragedy. Isn't this a new combination, at least for Woody? Creating a feel that's both lurid and downbeat, the action is set at the declining Brooklyn beach playground of Coney Island in around 1950. Storaro gives it a glow that hovers between the natural and the unreal, a light that illuminates lovingly recreated postwar rides, games, and tacky signage, including large Pepsi and Coca Cola ads, as well as brightly lit actors in period clothing. The action is narrated for us, tellingly, by Mickey (Justin Timberlake), a young man who, though a lifeguard in the summer, when this takes place, is a student of literature at NYU with an interest in playwriting. He makes it clear he's looking for more complexity and variety that he got from traveling to Bora Bora - his favorite place in the wartime world tour with the Navy that forcibly interrupted his studies. When he meets the 25-year-old Carolina (Juno Temple) and falls for her, it's her wild story of escaping from life with a gangster husband that arouses him most. "You've been around the world," Carolina tell him. "Yes, he says, but you've been around the block." (More amusing exchanges like this might have enlivened the often dreary proceedings.)
The center stage action focuses on the 39-year-old former actress Ginny (an enjoyably gritty, unglamorous but beautiful Kate Winslet: and how could she not love this role?), who's stuck with the crude, alcoholic but on the wagon schlub Humpty (Jim Belushi), who runs a carousel, while she's stuck as a waitress at a seafood restaurant. But Ginny meets Mickey, and they initiate an affair which he enjoys, but she expects more of - escape from her dreary life. Carolina has appeared, after five years of alienation from her father, Humpty, on the run from the Mob who she's blabbed about to the feds. She hides out with Humpty and Ginny. There is the delusion that since they weren't speaking for so long, the Mobsters wouldn't come here to look for her, and she becomes a waitress while starting college classes to better herself as Humpty wants.
There's another character - a symbol of doom, a pointless distraction? - in the person of Ginny's young son from a previous failed marriage, Ritchie (Jack Gore), a nearly full-time arsonist, mostly too busy setting fires to attend school.
Much of this seems uninteresting in the recounting, even the appearances of Mobsters in beautiful gleaming black Cadillacs, carrying doom with them like the motorcycles in Cocteau's Orphée. They are coming to carry Carolina away. Mickey trashes his relationship with Ginny, and we may feel for Ginny, who, like Humpty, turns to drink when the shit hits the fan. That takes various forms: Richie setting more and more fires, Carolina luring Mickey away from Ginny, Ginny ruining her relationship with MIckey by giving him a ridiculously inappropriate expensive present bought with money stolen from Humpty's family savings meant for Carolina, Carolina's ominous disappearance - a whole lot goes wrong.
Woody whips up a tragic finale, but it fizzles. Few playwrights since O'Neill and Arthur Miller have been able to manage even a muted, pathetic modern tragic finale. But for a moment while her inexplicable son is setting fires, we witness the spectacle of a woman in flames in Kate Winslet's sadly striving Ginny, full of vigor but with nowhere to go. So at the end she and Humpty are back together again much as they were at the outset. There is a flirting with tragedy, but a lot of the focus on this complicated (but well-orchestrated) plot is, as so often with Woody Allen, on youth and age, and the latter's urgent need to get in bed with the former. Mickey likes that Ginny's decades his senior (though for the record, Winslet's really only six years older than Timberlake). Their common interest in theater is a bond, and he gives her as a present the then new book by the psychiatrist and Freud biographer Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (published in 1949). But when he sees Carolina, it's love at first sight, which he believes in, along with romance and melodrama.
Richard Brody of The New Yorker notes that Allen "fills the story with wildly mixed emotions of pride and gilt, psychological clarity and moral horror," but under pressure of her migraines and failed dreams and guilt Ginny "loses her grip on reality," suffering "a form of madness that blots out the story's bitter truths and comes as a sort of deliverance." That's a nice way of seeing it, because it's a resolution: I felt the finale was just a muddle, though that's more like life than classical drama, and points to the experimental, sketchy, provisional nature much of Woody's often hasty, sometimes brilliant and successful movies - when they come together. Nearly everyone charms, or at least is vivid in Wonder Wheel. Timberlake is the drama's appealing, virile, yet faintly comic narrator-participant and engine. Winslet takes us on a heady, plucky dive into hope, eroticism and despair that's fun and exciting to watch, if only for a while.
Wonder Wheel, 101 mins, had its world premiere 14 Oct. 2017 as the Closing Night Film at the 2017 New York Film Festival. The US theatrical release began 1 Dec. 2017.
A partial Woody Allen Filmography:
Metacritic ratings, titles, and dates back to 2003:
46 Wonder Wheel 2017
64 Cafe Society 2016
53 Irrational Man 2015
54 Magic in the Moonlight 2014
78 Blue Jasmine 2013
54 To Rome with Love 2012
81 Midnight in Paris 2011
51 You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger 2010
45 Whatever Works 2009
70 Vicky christina Barcelona 2007
48 Scoop 2006
72 Matchpoint 2005
54 Melinda & Melinda 2004
43 Anything Else 2003
ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE (Hong Sang-soo 2017)
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TWO SCENES FROM THE FILM
HONG SANG-SOO: ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE (2017)
A captivating woman
Eric Kohn of Indiewire calls this film "a fascinating sublimation of autobiography into Hong’s precise creative terms," and that's a good place to start. Obviously his films always have an autobiographical element, or anyway don't stray too far from personal possibility, just as they are, he has explained, largely improvised, the scenes not specifically planned in advance. They often take place at a location for a film, sometimes by the sea, and include a movie director. But this time the (quite marvellous and charming) actress Kim Min-hee, the center of attention, is playing a role that skirts a zone close to her life, and to his. The result is a heightened effect, and one of Hong's best efforts.
But apart from its typical scenes of eating and drinking and conversation, this is a dreamy, magical film, not a confessional. True, its center of attention, Kim Min-hee, was rumored to have recently had a scandalous affair with Hong himself, when he was then still married. They confirmed this earlier this year, and as a result she was dropped by her managers and represented in the Korean press "as some sort of homewrecker" (Bilge Ebiri, VillageVoice) - though her CV doesn't seem to show too much damage from this, since apart from being in Hong's two latest films, including this one, she also has the leading role in Park Chang-wook's The Handmaiden. Several years ago her collaboration on film with Hong was in the structurally more complex Right Now, Wrong Then (NYFF 2015). In On the Beach at Night Alone, Kim Min-hee not only gets to play some version of herself, she also demonstrates she is very much alive, and far too good to be blackballed for her misbehavior.
In this film, her character, Young-hee, also an actress who did just the same thing she did, with a director, with the same results, has just come back from spending a period in Europe to get away. The film begins with a short segment set in Hamburg, Germany, where Young-hee is spending time with an older, divorced woman friend, Jee-young (Seo Young-hwa), and they enjoyably wander a park and a market, visit a musician bookseller, and then have a somewhat awkward dinner with a German couple. Young-hee's time in Europe sounds different when she talks about it later back in Korea. She depicts herself as having had a peaceful, meditative time, but also a sexy time. But then her best moments with Jee-young come when they're jokily fantasizing, about living together, even about being a couple. And then there is the rather haunting, unusual moment when, about to walk across a bridge, Young-hee gets down on the ground and bows. She tells Jee-young later she was making a wish.
After that prelude, Young-hee is back in Korea in a series of scenes and conversations, some sober, some increasingly drunken, in Gangneung, a town on the eastern coast that people say has been voted the prettiest and most popular in the country. Standouts are one where she waits for a man (Jeong Jae-yeong) for an hour in a little coffee shop. He seems to have some connection with her, but the woman who runs the shop turns out to be more than his "friend," and in a series of very awkward social moments begins ordering him to prepare food, to sort the beans. Later Young-hee has a couple of sprightlier scenes, well lubricated by alcohol, in which she speaks with abandon about herself and about life. This movie could exist just so we can watch Kim Min-hee in action bringing this character, who may or may not resemble Kim Min-hee herself, into action. As Justin Chang wrote for the Los Angeles Times, this movie, if less structurally and conceptually complex than other recent ones, "is more than worth seeing for Kim’s exposed nerve endings alone," as well as its unaccustomed shift in mood toward the surreal.
As some of her interlocutors tell Young-hee, she must not stop acting, there will be roles for her, and she is beautiful, more than others, amusing, delightful, unpredictable: captivating. Two scenes of her lying on the beach alone, as the surf comes up, bookend one final, fantastical, climactic sequence where the director, the one she had the affair with, is present, with others. She gets quite drunk, quite hysterical, almost screaming.
Drinking and periods of tipsiness are commonplace in Hong's movies, doubtless indeed in Korean culture, at least the branch of it represented. Drunken outbursts must thus be read as not embarrassing, but quite normal, and perhaps welcomed as revelatory, and afterwards, forgivable, and forgettable. Thus with Young-hee's screaming outburst. In the context it's a welcome aria, an opportunity to dot i's and cross t's, and above all to thank the director (Mun Seong-kun), who's there, for giving her his love (not to reproach him). Young-hee says some rude things to some of those present, but they seem to be taken in good spirit. The director then speaks, and has his drunken outburst, bursting into tears for the trouble he has caused Young-hee.
Those two scenes of Young-hee lying on the beach alone - asleep, when she is awakened by someone so she's not washed into the sea - are singled out by Eric Kohn of Indiewire as in key contrast to the usual chatty Hong Sang-soo scenes, related also, he thinks, to the moment when she drops down before the bridge to pray, and suggesting an "indefinable sense of longing, an added layer of metaphysical sadness enveloping the picture." Perhaps. But also, more specifically, the two parallel awakenings on the beach are a way of suggesting that the whole second sequence of Young-hee's greater drunken outburst and the director's reply, have been only a dream, and she has not really met with the director at all. It's a wish fulfillment fantasy, perhaps, providing closure she would have liked but hasn't had.
The greatest delight of Hong's films, which they share with the French Nouvelle Vague that is an obvious influence, is how they seem to catch life on the fly - and at the same time, fail to catch it. The particular delight of On the Beach Alone at Night is the way it records this fascinating actress in a whole range of moods, from quiet and pensive to aggressive and hysterical, all appealing and delightful, her mercurial character perhaps intermingling imperceptibly with the actual person, providing a version both sublime and a little ridiculous - a superb calling card should any other filmmaker want to consider hiring her, despite what the gossipy papers say.
On the Beach at Night Alone/ 밤의 해변에서 혼자 101 mins., debuted at the Berlinale 16 Feb. 2017 (where Kim won the Silver Bear Best Actress prize), and its Korean theatrical opening was 23 Mar. This is one of three new movies Hong made this year, along with The Day After (also included in the Main Slate of the NYFF) and Claire’s Camera. It showed in 14 other international festivals including the NYFF 8 Oct. 2017, with a limited US theatrical release (with reviews) on 17 Nov. It was screened for this review 22 Dec. 2017 as part of the Museum of Modern Art "The Contenders" series.
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KIM MIN-HEE AT BERLIN WITH THE SILVER BEAR BEST ACTRESS AWARD
BEFORE WE FANISH (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2017)
KIYOSHI KUROSAWA: BEFORE WE VANISH (2017)
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RYUHEI MATSUDA AND MASAMI NAGASAWA, CENTER, IN BEFORE WE VANISH
Dream deferred, love affirmed
Kiiyoshi Kurosawa is best known for his superb modern horror films, especially his 1997 Cure and 2000 Pulse. Reviewing the good but not quite so good one made in between, the ironically titled Bright Future , I wrote "Kurosawa like no other living director creates his own haunting and disturbing moods." He took a successful turn toward a more conventional family drama about a man ashamed of being out of work with his 2008 Tokyo Sonata. But in 2012 he came home in a new format, with a drawn-out but absorbing horror miniseries, "Penance", about murder and schoolgirls; its five episodes were shown in theaters and on Japanese TV; you can watch it online. Things have been uneven since then, as can happen with the prolific. Two overlong movies, Journey to the Shore and Daguerreotype (with Tahar Rahim, Olivier Gourmet, Mathieu Amalric, and Malik Zidi, all wasted, which I couldn't finish), came out in 2015 and 2016. But in between was the successful and more typical Creepy.
Well, this new one, based on a play (by Tomohiro Maekawa), is in between the two. It meanders too much, and doesn't seem to know how to grab us and hold us and move toward a climax. It's overlong too. But it's fun to watch, even amid cheesy special effects, Kurosawa's mastery of odd atmosphere, his way with young characters. One settles in comfortably for the work of a real pro, and winds up with a mystical and meditative work that plays with Eighties sci-fi.
What happens is a very low keyed alien invasion but it begins, as if influenced by American blockbusters' penchant for high-octane openings, with the violent, bloody murder of a family, and then Akira (Yuri Tsunematsu), the teenage daughter, appears walking down the street splattered with gore. But there are several other stories. There is the journalist, Sakurai (Hiroki Hasegawa), who, though he insists his interest is more important things, is sent in to follow up on the killings, and then he is approached by a loose-limbed, kind of crazy young man called Amano (Mahiro Takasugi) who offers to be Sakurai's "guide." (Takasugi does some falls and slides that are very graceful; and he's not the only one.)
An illustrator who works at home, Narumi (Masami Nagasawa) finds out her estranged husband, Shinji (Ryuhei Matsuda), has come back from a walk helpless, with loss of memory and incomprehension of basic tasks and ideas. This delights Narumi, who had grown to hate Shinji. Now that he's robed of most of his personality, though his helplessness can be a bit annoying, he becomes like a cuddly doll for her, or a playful reminder of all she loved about him originally.
The restored affection of Narumi and Shinji turns out to be the real unifying thread of a movie that instead of being primarily about alien invasion or apocalypse ends with a focus on the redeeming power of love. What helps this, perhaps the subtlest note, is that for a while we may imagine that maybe Shinji only thinks he's been invaded by an alien. He has, but this invasion turns out to be benign; the aliens are moved by what they find and change their minds. This is a hint of something dealt with in more detail in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth: the fact that life on earth can change a guy. Roeg's film meanders too, but it treats some of these themes more richly and, of course, has David Bowie. To do him justice, though, Ryuhei Matsuda looks rather like an alien too, at least from certain angles: perfect, but just a skosh off..
Sometimes Sinji's questions sound like mockery of human politics and philosophy. He also starts insisting that he is an alien, come as part of a takeover. He must absorb - like Invasion of the Body Snatchers , certain human concepts. He's not the only one to do this, and they do it by asking a few questions to get the person focused on an idea, and then touch their forehead, whereupon they generally collapse from the loss, which may be debilitating - or freeing. When Narumi's boss at work has his concept of work taken over, he and his colleagues merrily go about destroying the office.
There isn't very much violence, or rather it simply isn't effective as, say, in Cure, where each successive death is at once a shock and a confirmation; actually Akira goes on being very violent, killing people who annoy her wholesale with whatever weapons come to hand. They emit flashes and look suspiciously like Fifties sci-fi movie ray-guns at times: but Kurosawa clearly intends this playful allusion to more naive and simpler cinematic future-worlds.
Before We Vanish doesn't always know what it wants to be (Cure and Pulse, for that matter Tokyo Sonata, never deviate). Kurosawa may have chosen the play because it seemed germane to former interests. When the people invaded by aliens touch a forehead and the person drops to the ground, it echoes earlier, more powerful and haunting Kurosawa films. But the trouble is he has apparently expanded the play, when he ought to have made it leaner and more powerful. There are many amusing or enjoyable or even thought-provoking moments here, but the action is meandering, rather than suspenseful, and the result isn't the audience-pleaser that the director's best work has been.
Before We Vanish/散歩する侵略者 (Sanpo suru shinryakusha), 129 mins., debuted at Cannes in May 2017; it was included in at least 14 other international festivals, including the New York Film Festival (30 Sept. 2017). Its US theatrical debut, from Super LTD, begins 2 Feb. 2018, in NYC at Lincoln Center and IFC Center, and also in LA.
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