New York Film Festival 2022

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New York Film Festival 60 (Sept. 30-Oct. 15, 2022)

GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

Main Slate so far: Opening Night film, Noah Baumbach's Don DeLillo adaptation White Noise, Centerpiece Film, Laura Poitras' Nan Goldin and Sackler family documentary The Beauty and the Bloodshet, closing NIght feature Elegance Bratton's autobiographical feature about Marine basic The Inspection, and Anniversary Film James Gray's autobiographical Armageddon Time.

Film at Lincoln Center announces Noah Baumbach’s White Noise as Opening Night of the 60th New York Film Festival, making its North American premiere at Alice Tully Hall on September 30.

In one of the year’s most gratifyingly ambitious American films, Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) has adapted Don DeLillo’s epochal postmodern 1985 novel White Noise, long perceived as unfilmable, into a richly layered, entirely unexpected work of contemporary satire. Adam Driver heartily embodies Jack Gladney, an ostentatious “Hitler Studies” professor and father-of-four whose comfortable suburban college town life and marriage to the secretive Babette (Greta Gerwig, perfectly donning a blonde mop of “important hair”) are upended after a horrifying nearby accident creates an airborne toxic event of frightening and unknowable proportions. In a tightrope walk of comedy and horror, Baumbach captures the essence of DeLillo’s cacophonous pop-philosophical nightmare on unbounded consumerism, ecological catastrophe, and the American obsession with death. Impeccably matching DeLillo’s and Baumbach’s similarly percussive form of stylized dialogue, White Noise is wonderfully abrasive and awe-inspiring, a precisely mounted period piece entirely befitting our modern, through-the-looking-glass pandemic reality. A Netflix release.


Links to the reviews:

Armageddon Time (James Gray 2022)
Aftersun (Charlotte Wells 2022)
Alcarràs (Carla Simón 2022)
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras 2022) CENTERPIECE FILM
All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen 2022)
Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino 2022)
Enys Men (Mark Jenkin 2022)
EO (Jerzy Skolimowski 2022)
Corsage (Marie Kreutzer 2022)
Couple, A/Un couple (Frederick Wiseman 2022)
Descendant (Margaret Brown 2022)
De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Verena Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor 2022)
Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook 2022)
Eternal Daughter, The (Joanna Hogg 2022)
Inspection, The (Elegance Bratton 2022)
Master Gardener (Paul Schrader 2022)
No Bears (Jafar Panahi 2022)
Novelist's Film, The (Hong Sang-soo 2022)
One Fine Morning/Un beau matin (Mia Hansen-Love 2022)
Pacifiction (Albert Serra 2022)
R.M.N. (Christian Mungiu 2022)
Return to Seoul (Davy Chou 2022)
Saint Omer (Alice Diop 2022)
Scarlet/L'Envol (Pietro Marcello 2022)
She Said (Maria Schrader 2022)
Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt 2022)
Stars at Noon (Claire Denis 2022)
Stonewalling (Huang Ji, Ryunji Otsuka 2022)
TÁR (Todd Field 2022)
Till (Chinonye Chikwu 2022)
Trenque Laquen (Laura Citarella 2022)
Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund 2022)
Unrest ( Cyril Schäublin 2022)
Walk up (Hong Sang-soo 2022)
White Noise (Noah Baumbach 2022) OPENING NIGHT FILM

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PARK CHAN-WOOK: DECISION TO LEAVE (2022)

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TANG WEI, PARK HAE-IL IN DECISION TO LEAVE

A police procedural that becomes an erotic cat and mouse game

A RogerEbert.com Cannes review by Ben Kenigsberg provides the essentials of Decision to Leave: "Park, making his first feature since his miniseries adaptation of John LeCarré's "The Little Drummer Girl," is still in a LeCarréan mode, firing plot details at viewers in a clipped editing style at a rapid pace. The film combines a complicated mystery, a love story, and occasional bits of broad comedy to come up with a thriller that feels at once overstuffed and single-minded, derivative and sui generis." This dodgy-ness and complexity can delight, as it does critics like Manohla Dargis and Jessica Kiang. But it can also annoy or confuse those who have trouble following and are jarred by an inconsistency of tone that's almost inevitable in a film that's a mystery thriller, a love story, and a mind-teasing game of shifting jump cuts, flashbacks, and fantasy images.

What's thrilling, though, is the intensity of focus on the central theme of the married detective who falls in love with an attractive female murder suspect and the complexity of the man and woman's relationship, which is all the more erotic and haunting for never becoming sexual. Working in surfaces and depths simultaneously, Park seeks, and achieves, a layered effect. Just as there is an investigation and a love story, there are multiple things going on all the time on different levels.

But the screenplay really does continually and memorably revolve around Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), the chief detective, and Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei of Lust, Caution), the suspect: you walk out of the theater with this duo whirling around in your head, an effect insured by a strikingly tragic, romantic finale on a wild seacoast with fog and spume and roaring waves and rocks as a tide sweeps in and the two principals are present, but lost to each other. It might be incredibly corny if it weren't done so dazzlingly well that it becomes heartbreaking and thrilling. It's one of many things here that reminds you Park, whatever his unevenness or absurdity sometimes, is one of the world's great filmmakers. It is also the case that the two leads play with remarkable conviction and chemistry, with Tang Wei particularly powerful as a memorably chameleonic femme fatale. Did she push her husband off the mountain or is she just very complicated? And she gets more so.

Obviously Park is further than ever from the arresting brutality of the Vengeance trilogy that made him internationally famous, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance (2002, 2003, and 2005). Partly he is in police procedural world, and partly (as more than one reviewer has pointed out) whether he's seen Hitchcock or not, he's in the world of Hitchcock's Vertigo, a man in search of a vanishing, entrancing woman he can never quite track down. There's a lot to process here, and if you want a movie to be understandable the first time through, as I tend to do, you won't be entirely satisfied. But you would also be foolish not to be impressed by such compelling complexity in playing around with a seemingly over-familiar genre.

There was linguistic play in Parks' last feature The Handmaiden (2016 - a long six years ago), where the Japanese occupiers of 1930's Korea speak Japanese and the occupied speak Korean. Here it is established at once that Seo-rae is Chinese and came to Korea as an illegal but was allowed to stay because of a Korean relative who was a a hero in the 1930's war against the Japanese. Her Korean is "insuficient." But it is also interesting, and no doubt for Koreans much subtlety arises from linguistic twists - and meanwhile one of the contemporary phone uses is her way of speaking Chinese into hers when expressing a particularly complex feeling or idea to Hae-joon and having it talk back to him in instant Korean -auto-translation. Smart watches and smart phones are also used as recording devices and oral journals that document and bring back the couple's complexly waxing and waning romance. Numerous reviewers have remarked on how Park makes the smart phone business that confounds many directors contemporary and intriguing.

Sometimes the jump-cuts and switches back and forth in time or from reality to wish made me feel dizzy and helpless. But I'd rather be on a train that's going too fast than one that's going too slow, maybe even be watching a film that's too long than one that's too short. Decision to Leave has a whole second act that starts things all over again, raising the layering effect to a higher level and providing more food for thought. There's no way around the fact that this is a movie for second or more viewings - and, whatever its failings or frustrations, one of the year's best.

Decision to Leave 헤어질 결심 139 mins., debuted at Cannes May 23, 2022, where it won the Best Director award. French theatrical release May 29, AlloCiné press rating 4.0 (80%). Over two dozen other festival showings including the New York Film Festival. US theatrical release Oct. 14, 2022. South Korea's best foreign Oscar entry for 2023. Screened at Albany Twin (West Coast theatrical release) Oct. 28, 2022. Metacitic rating 8̶4̶%̶; now 85%.

CHINONYE CHIKWU: TILL (2022)

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DANIELLE DEADWYLER, JALYN HALL IN TILL

The famous lynching and a memorable performance

As Justin Chang wrote in his review in the Los Angeles Times, the lynching murder of fourteen-year-old African American Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 is "one of the cornerstone tragedies of the civil rights movement." He had been seen off by his widowed mother Mamie in Chicago and traveled to the share-cropping Black town of Money, Mississippi to visit cousins in the summertime. Chnonye Chikwu's movie deals with an event already well known through books and films, now finally 70 years later remembered in the 2022 Emmett Till Antilynching Act. The film carefully avoids being a horror story, a political biopic, or a tale of martyrdom while skirting these things, when as Justin Chang says Chikwu "undermines the template of the prestige biographical drama she only appears to be making." The way it does this is through its beauty, its calm, its reverence, its relentlessness, and especially the stunning and powerful performance of of Danielle Deadwyler as Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett Till's mother, whose story above all this is. This is an extraordinary performance of rare concentration and power. The film is not an easy watch, even though it spares us its grimmest details. One of the best things about it is the way at some points it just pauses to sit for a moment with its feelings, or those of its characters. It allows Deadwyler's performance to hold us. It does, but somewhat at the cost of the film as a whole.

Chikyu showed what she could do in the way of relentlessness in Clemency (ND/NF 2019), her film indictment of American capital punishment through the point of view of a Black woman prison warden. That Sundance-prize-winning film also showed the writer-director's skill working with actors even as I called it "one long, loud wail that might be more ennobling and memorable as an aria." Clemency struggled in darkness. Till walks out into the light. The central event isn't the boy's murder: it's Mamie, his mother's, insistence that his mutilated body, with his unrecognizable face, be brought home to her in Chicago and then displayed in an open casket for mourners, press, and public alike to see - out in the light. The scene where Mamie privately examines her son's body Justin Chang describes as a "long, artful and awful sequence" whose "strange mix of the tactful and the unsparing" is one that "exemplifies the sheer difficulty of the challenge Chukwu has set herself" in telling this story.

We cannot know exactly what happened that day in the little Black-catering local grocery store where Emmett till encountered the proprietor Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett, whom Justin Chang calls "suitably loathsome") and may have complimented her as looking like a movie star and later outside whistled at her in admiration. But we glimpse this so that later at the trail of her two "brutish" husband and brother-and-law who came (with three Black employees) to take Emmett away and lynched him we know that Bryant's accusation of the boy's physically assaulting her is a baldfaced lie. Because this is Mamie's story and also to avoid further martyrizing the African American public, Chukwu has made the decision not to show the lynching of Emmett itself, only the rushing in, the menacing of the relatives, the taking away of the victim, and then, in the distance his muffled screams.

The body of Emmett is important too, and the face, when it's brought to Chicago - when you consider it, a remarkable event, under the circumstances and since it was found in a river - after it is left with Mamie to look at. Here the camera gradually gives us a view of a limb and then the face, but only briefly. More important is the speech of Mamie when she goes south and testifies in the trial - also remarkable, if ultimately meaningless - and describes the intimacy with which a mother knows her son.

Likewise as Chang pointed out, biographical dramas depend or some audience familiarity with their "real-life subject." And so we don't have to be told though Mamie carefully schooled her son that in Money, Mississippi, Emmett would have to be extremely careful how he behaved toward any white person and be able to bow down on the ground to apologize in abject humility if he offended in any way. But Emmett was "an infectiously high-spirited kid," indeed, " the most gregarious of jokesters" (and one might add, as big for his age), further excited and distracted by being on holiday in a new place. He did not know yet that he had entered into Hell: the Jim Crow-era South.

But as important as the southern sequences are, including the one of the courtroom, it's what happens in Chicago that counts in this film, away from Hell, in the land of hope extended. Chang comments on the beauty of the images, drenched with color and light, and argues that the "ravishing tenderness of Chukwu’s gaze" mounts "a visual argument," saying that before the tragedy ad "even afterward" "Mamie’s home courses and sometimes overflows with love and life." And this is expressed in the "treasurable" few scenes of Whoppi Goldberg as Mamie's mother Alma and in Jalyn Hall's "boisterous" performance as Emmett. This glow of the gaze combines with the stillness and lingering at moments, especially on Danielle Deadwyler's face at key moments when the actress at once projects and embodies the profound emotions Mamie is going through.

Why should you go to see this film? Say rather why you should not. People are still (perhaps forever?)staying away from movies in droves, and one can't urge you to endanger yourself. But it is important and essential to experience that "gaze" through our gaze, to see without looking away and - through someone was looking at his phone periodically all through, this compulsion ever-stronger - the way that happens is in a movie theater, with nothing between you and the big screen. Do you remember when you did that? When you could not look away for two hours? This is the Chinonye Chukwu experience. And you go through it here for two reasons: to experience racism and the reply - Mamie's courage and defiance and her turn from lonely mourning to empowered NAACP activism; and to witness the extraordinary performance of Danielle Deadwyler. But we know from our earliest experience, all that makes a movie riveting doesn't necessarily make it good, and there are elements in Till and perhaps in Chikwu's work, that lack a sense of the big picture and drift toward conventionality. The performance, and the radiant beauty amid the squalor remain, and should be seen as the NYFF audience first saw it, in a great movie hall, with wonderful sound and an attentive audience, keeping still.

Till, 130 mns., debuted at the New York Film Festival Oct. 1, 2022 and showed at a few other festivals including Rio, Mill Valley, the Hamptons, and London (BFI). Limited US theatrical release Oct. 14 and wider release Oct. 28, 2022. Metacritic rating: 78%. Screened for this review at the Grand Lake Theatre, Oakland, California Oct. 30.

RUBEN ÖSTLULND: TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (2022)

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CHARLBI DEAN AND HARRIS DICKINSON IN TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

Östlund shocks and entertains but his points are scattershot - for a second time

Ruben Östlund's new film Triangle of Sadness is painfully entertaining and wickedly funny. It holds your attention from show-offy opening to cliff-hanger finale. Yet it is annoying and disappointing in many ways. Though a wickedly funny entertainment, if's also heavy-handed, obvious and full of irrelevancies, and doesn't do justice to its premise. The theme comes from J. M. Barrie's 1902 play The Admirable Crichton (adapted as a film in 1957) about role reversals when a group of posh passengers is shipwrecked and marooned on a desert island, and a social inferior takes over because he is a skillful outdoorsman. A few shards of the original play and film remain. The issue of social justice is very relevant, because we live in a time of a surfeit of the super-rich and an erosion of social values. Östlund knows how to make us uncomfortable, as he showed with racial discomfort in his 2011 Play, and the futile attempt to escape a moment of cowardice in his 2014 Force Majeure. He likes to look at society through the wrong end of the telescope. His methods are scattershot here, though, as they were in his 2017 The Square, where the director abandons the intense focus of Play and Force Majeure and focuses on at least three different plots. That's more or less what happens here.

Perhaps seeking relevance, or riffing obscurely off a romance in the original play, Östlund focuses first of all on two young super-models, which allows for ironic focus on sexual roles. Yaha (Charlbi Dean, who died before the film came out) makes three times as much as her boyfriend Carl (Harris Dickinson). Their opening section is an amusing, uncomfortable panel from another film, in which, after a sequence showing off Carl toyed with by fashion industry managers ("triangle of sadness" comes from an unfavorable. critique of his face), the pair argue over money at length. Women's liberation obviously means little to their relationship. Carl is the disadvantaged one, and it's painful that he wants to be "friends" or "equals," since she can afford the posh restaurants much better than he can. And yet still she plays the woman's game, this time, anyway, of leaving the check for him to pick up. This sequence is rather good.

The segue (this film is in chapters) is that to appease Carl perhaps, Yaya, who is an "influencer" - which means constantly photographing herself with her phone, takes Carl along on a free trip she's been offered on a luxury yacht. Later, we will realize that Abagail (Dolly De Leon), the yacht cleaning lady who's going to become "captain" on the island through her survival skills, notices the desirability of Carl, whom on the island she calls "Cutie-Pie." Even on the island, when they have nothing, Abagail's taking over Carl leads to lots of painful discussion between him and Yaya: their neurotic relationship survives in extremis.. In a cast of characters none of whom is at all appealing Dickinson somehow seems sympathetic. Tall and thin, with his perfect pecs and abs, he has long arms that reach out all the time and he seems like a sleek, wide-eyed human praying mantis, eager and well-meaning.

The social aspect is updated, necessarily. The vessel that sinks is a $250 million luxury yacht. Though there are new-rich types - a clueless old couple super-rich from dealing arms; a boorish jokey Russian billionaire (Zlatko Buric)who delights in declaring that his fortune comes from "shit," and a bore whose wealth is from stultifyingLY uninteresting Silicon Valley product. The yacht gets waylaid by a heavy storm and sunk by hand grenades shot off by local terrorists (Östlund isn't taking any chances). Unfortunately the desert island phase of the film is the most lame.

Apart from the coming reversal of fortune, the yacht may remind you of David Foster Wallace's piece "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which explained how a cruise where a passenger's every need is taken care of can turn into velvet-fingered torture. The service crew is introduced in a scene where their nervous supervisor Paula (Vicki Berlin) gives a pep-talk in which the "client is king" rule is ramped up to the max. Here, crew must absolutely never say no to a passenger. Thus a far-fetched sequence where one nutty rich lady insists a staff member join her in the sauna, then revises that to command the whole crew to don swimming gear and go down the sea-slide for a swim in the ocean.

The Captain (Woody Harrelson) is a drunkard holed up in his cabin and Paula has great difficulty getting him out and in uniform for the evening of the "Captain's dinner." This is where all hell lets loose after the seas turn so stormy passengers flee to their staterooms, but not before there is way more projectile vomiting than even the most heavy-handed get-the-rich program made necessary. A character in Barrie's original who's addicted to aphorisms seems to explain how the Captain, in front of a microphone broadcasting throughout the ship, exchanges sayings about socialism and communism with the Russian shit dealer; both have sympathies with both, it seems.

This is a ridiculous and over-the-top sequence, but it's undeniably compelling in its threatening, energetic chaos. The trouble is that the following, island, sequence is such an anti-climax, starting with a greatly reduced cast for it.

What can we make of this movie? As with The Square, Östlund seems a little too pleased with himself, convinced because his film contains topically relevant material and shock value it will gain accolades despite lack of formal coherence. And he succeeds, since awards do come in. But the critics were far less pleased with The Square than with Play and Force Majeure, and still less pleased with Triangle of Sadness than with The Square. Maybe Östlund, who has plenty of talent, should start listening to this critical consensus and make less flashy but better movies.

Triangle of Sadness (French title 'Sans filtre'), 147 mins., debuted at Cannes, where it won the Palme d'Or and a CSI technician prize. It was included in other prestigious international festivals, including Sydney, Sarajevo, Toronto, Zurich, and New York NYFF Main Slate), among others. Screened for this review with two other viewers for the opening noon show at AMC Bay Street, Emeryville Oct. 29, 2022. Metacritic rating: 63%.

TODD FIELD: TÁR (2022)

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CATE BLANCHETT IN TÁR

A shimmering portrait of brilliance, cruelty, and downfall

This is a story of power and prestige and their apparent downfall focused on a conductor, a woman, and a lesbian, a greater rarity* at the pinnacle of international classical music who pushes too hard and maneuvers too cruelly, and has awful things happen to her. TÁR is a remarkable picture and signals to us the ascendency of its 'maker,' Todd Field, and his star, Cate Blanchett. We already knew Cate to be great, but here she gets an exceptional chance to prove it in in a rich and demanding role for which she learned to conduct - and convincingly, with originality, to rehearse - a symphony orchestra, to speak German, and to play, not just the piano, but Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, no less, mimicking the style of Glenn Gould for a moment while devestatingly dressing down a young student at Julliard who has let political correctness and his personal identity sweep away the western canon.

This is a worthwhile argument indeed. Surely we cannot allow Bach to be treated as icky because he was a cis-male white European man and sired 20 children. Putting the defense in the mouth of one so flawed as Lydia Tár leaves it properly ambiguous: we can't decide these things right now; there's still a lot of hashing-out to do. What authority Lydia has: she is the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, behind her Leon Fürtwangler, Herbert von Karajan, and Claudio Abbado. But her dressing down of the attractive young mixed race Julliard conducting student, Max (Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist), winds up with a jokey racial slur someone happens to break the rules of the meeting and film. And this is only the beginning - and not even, because before that there has been an interview appearance by The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik as himself, retailing all Lydia's accomplishments.

What Field has done in the sixteen years since he directed a film is uncertain, apparently nothing, but he has grown exponentially as a director. In the Bedroom (2001) was already an outstanding film, Little Children (2006) noteworthy enough for Telluride, Toronto, and New York; but TÁR takes on challenges of a higher magnitude, the complex international portrait of a sophisticated profession, one that is riveting, suspenseful and slyly malicious, and a personality that defies analysis. This is both an admiring portrait of the classical music world and cruel satire, the study of a brilliant artist and an anatomy of madness. Its maniacal extreme takes it into the growing world of high class horror. And yet Field avoids the over-the-top-ness of something like Black Swan. The music is still there. There's a respect for the complex juggling involved in conducting, administration, recording, promotion, and admiration and love for Mahler's Fifth and Elgar's Cello Concerto, the two works concentrated on.

There's a galaxy of satellites or "transactional" key relations around Lydia, starting with her lover and wife Sharon (the great German Actress Nina Hoss), her abused schoolgirl daughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic), her selfless assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant). Then there are those who come and go, her assistant conductor Sebastian (actor and musician Allan Corduner) who she is "rotating out," a pretty young Russian cellist Olga (cellist and actress Sophie Kauer) who's being brought in. And there is a suicide. But she's alone, as is clear in a dangerous visit to a scary place, and a return to nameless American family where she watches an old videotape of a Leonard Bernstein Young People's Concert where the maestro, a mentor, affirms the sweet emotionality of classical music.

It isn't just a portrait of grand personal decline but also a remarkably complex picture of international celebrity music-making. The sequences of Lydia with a self-portrait book that's being published, working on a recording vs. a live performance, choosing the precise lighting and pose for the new Deutsche Grammophon album cover, these and so much mmore help fill out the details of such a complex role as major orchestra conductor. But it's the committees and boards she must meet with when she has fallen from grace that are greatest challenge. Field opts also for a complex finale. He does not go into the details that would be generated by grotesque faux pas in a "cancel culture," social media world. Instead he shows Lydia soldiering on, still conducting a symphony orchestra in an unidentified Asian country for a Monster Hunter concert. What does that even mean?

As here, and throughout the whole film, Todd Field opts for complicated, sometimes puzzling details notable for their originality and specificity - and not for the kind of flashy style the material would lead you to expect. There is much material in TÁR for thought and investigation. It's the kind of movie you want to discuss and see again.
*What will Marin Alsop think of it?

TÁR, 158 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2022, showing also at Telluride, New York, Mill Valley, and a few other festivals. Limited theatrical release started Oct. 8. Screened for this review at AMC Kabuki 8, San Francisco, Oct. 16, 2022. Metacritic rating: 90%.

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JAMES GRAY: ARMAGEDDON TIME (2022) -NYFF

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JAYLIN WEBB, BANKS REPETA IN ARMAGEDDON TIME

TRAILER

Profiles in cowardice

My title refers ironically to a special fact about this film and James Gray. His unique courage is in willingness to admit his shortcomings. Specifically, in his autobiographical Armageddon Time he shows how he fails his sixth grade best friend. The compensation, of a bitter sort, is that it's the society that's failing all of us. The best friend of wispy, artistic Jewish sixth grader Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) is Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb), who is doing his sixth grade for the second time, and who is Black. It's 1980, the start of the Reagan presidency. Politics, race, morality, and family pressures bear down on young Paul. Those and economics have Johnny in their vice grip. Paul does betray Johnny. But apart from the fact that Paul's not strong enough or responsible enough to be culpable for this, where the movie is paradoxically exhilarating is that this is a filmmaker's story about his life that shows how far short he fell from being a mensch.

Whether things get better in that sphere later we don't know, but is he not a mensch now in being able to present himself thus unguardedly? "Making a memoir," Gray has said in a recent interview (Reelblend Podcast), "Is not an act of self-aggrandizement; it's not like an excuse to talk about how terrific you are. "He sees it as an opportunity to do a searching analysis of yourself and also of the world you live in, that you lived in then. And he has said, and he shows, that he took great pains to be as specific as possible in the details about everything, the schools, the family, even the chinaware on the family table, just like his own growing up.

With this specificity and honesty, Armageddon Time became thought-provoking for me too. It aroused memories of my own family growing up, of what school was like. I didn't have a Black best friend, my father never beat me or even yelled at me. I was encouraged, along with my sister, to be artistic. Not going to private school as Paul eventually does (which separates him from his friend) was a conscious choice of my parents. I remember how sympathetic my fifth grade teacher, Ms. Robinson, was, her appreciation of my sense of humor; then how nasty and harsh was the sixth grade one, Mr. Standish, who put a damper on everything for me and on top of that had almost-physical clashes with a bigger, older boy (who may have been held back like Johnny). Because, as reviews have said this is a "very Jewish" memoir, it also aroused memories of my first warm encounters with young Jews, mostly in college, but we were still just boys then. I remembered the kinship I felt at the time. Gray's world is both sympathetic and distant.

Johnny and Paul are both troublemakers. But, as a dramatic outlining of racial and social inequallity, Johnny is consistently the one who gets more of the blame. Mr. Turkeltaub, their Mr. Standish, brands Johnny as a troublemaker and a loser. But while everybody, including the boys at Paul's new private school and Paul's own family, looks on Blacks as a danger and a liability, Johnny isn't clearly doomed until the pair get in trouble with the law. Then, Irving (Jeremy Strong), Paul's intense plumber (or plumbing engineer) father, turns out to have points with the cop in charge for having done him a favor, and so he has "a leg up." As Jews seeking to better themselves, Paul's parents know the importance of this. Because his mother, Esther Graff (Anne Hathaway, excellent), a home economics teacher, is president of the PTA, Paul thinks, and tells Johnny, that she controls the school. He is utterly naïve, but surely he is lying when he tells Johnny that his family is "very rich." They are, however, miles more secure than Johnnie, who lives with his grandmother who has dementia, and is likely to be put into foster care at any minute. What's heartbreaking in Armageddon Time is how both boys cherish dreams, Paul of being a famous artist, Johnny, with his NASA souvenir tokens, of being a space engineer.

Gray is wonderfully precise about very much in this film, including the family dynamics, with the brother Ted (Ryan Sell) who beats up on Johnny and tells him to shut up (but perhaps protectively), the parents, the uncle and aunt, also schoolteachers (Marcia Haufrecht, Teddy Coluca), and the famous Grandpa (Anthony Hopkins), all talking at once at the dinner table. Those are moments that stick with you, and surprisingly, Anthony Hopkins, as an old Jew brought from Ukraine to Liverpool and from Liverpool to Ellis Island, is believable, or at least you don't have time to question it, and his many speeches stick and sing. There is enormous weight on Grandpa's shoulders because he not only must be the one who encourages Paul as an artist but also the one who explains where they came from, about antisemitism and about the Holocaust, and who sits by in his dying days while the boy sets off his model rocket and tells him to be a mensch, not to take it when they talk shit about Blacks (and at this point Grandpa gets to spout a lot of profanity, perhaps as a rite of passage for Paul, perhaps to make him more up to date). Grandpa makes it clear to Paul the game is rigged, and you have to do all you must go get around it. This is why it's he who pushes for Paul to be switched to his brother's school, to play the game.

Yes, all this and more, and in a way it's absolutely great, and in another way it's too much. There's a nagging feeling that as fine as Jaylin Webb and Banks Repeta are (and they are both terrific actors), they just don't look right to me for who they're supposed to be. James Gray is doing his best, and it's very good. He enters familiar movie territory with Paul's new, private, school based on Gray’s alma mater, the Kew-Forest School. But he gives us details special to him: Paul is almost immediately buttonholed by Fred Trump (John Diehl), Donald’s father, who was indeed on the real school’s board of trustees. And then Donald’s sister Maryanne Trump (in a choice performance by Jessica Chastain) visits the school to give a poisonously absurd little speech about the value of hard work and how, ostensibly, no one handed her anything for free.

It feels as if Gray is drawing heavily on Truffaut's 400 Blows for the relationship between Paul and Johnny, especially when they get in their big trouble with the law by stealing a computer from Paul's new school, just the way Antoine Doinel and his pal stole the big typewriter. This is okay - there's no harm in a homage to one of the greatest coming of age films - but it underlines a big difference. Truffaut is transmuting his early life into art. Gray is intent on anatomizing all the social, racial, ethnic, and economic elements that fed into his young life and seeing them in the light of the American Zeitgeist. In the way he seems to draw on the incident from The 400 Blows, which starkly underlines the racial divide the French film didn't have, Gray is also grasping for a strength of structure that Armageddon Time, for all its wealth of information and even of wisdom doesn't have.

Gray's movie leaves us with a whole lot of things to think about, but they work as separate elements, not as a film, a work of art unified in itself. There are many touching and emotional moments, but they don't combine overwhelmingly fill you with an unforgettable visual and emotional impression the way it happens when Antoine Doinel runs down to the sea and stares into the camera. But that's not bad. It's almost a Brechtian Alienation effect. Nothing warm and cuddly here, even when Anthony Hopkins is on screen. We're supposed to think. When Gray said the film was a critique of capitalism he may have been going a bit overboard - but it's in there.

Armageddon Time, 114 mins., premiered at Cannes May 2022. It has since been or is slated for 19 other total international festivals including Telluride, Deauville, Zurich, Athens, Hamburg, Mill Valley and New York. Limited US theatrical release began Oct. 28, 2022. Metacritic rating 74%.

CHARLOTTE WELLS: AFTERSUN (2022) - NYFF

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FRANKIE CORIO AND PAUL MESCAL IN AFTERSUN

An ephemeral, sad, and somewhat indigestible masterpiece

A.O. Scott of the New York Times writes in his review of Wells' debut feature that she is "very nearly reinventing the language of film." Yes, as all the critics say, this is a recreation of an eleven-year-old Scottish girl named Sophie's summer vacation with her young father twenty years earlier at a bargain Turkish seacoast resort, framed by brief images of the adult version of this girl, who glimpses video images they shot then. (The adult Sophie is Celia Rowlson-Hall; the much more lively and often-seen young Sophie is Frankie Corio. Her young dad, Calum, is Paul Mescal.) Yes, Mescal and Corio are fresh and amazing together. But the strongest impression Aftersun produces is its different, startlingly vivid, abrupt, staccato cinematic language (of most of the footage). Gregory Oke's close, intimate, angular camera is akin to Agnès Godard's for Claire Denis, but AFtersun has its own way of visiting moments, then cutting away from them. Wells has her own way of telling a story.

AS Mike D'Angelo wrote in a private subscriber review that's positive, yet lukewarm, the film is "hyper-specific in detail but largely uneventful." He goes on to say Wells is "seeking to evoke rather than to dramatize," which is curiously imprecise - though "evoke" and "dramatize" don't do justice here. The effect is of vividly recalled instinctive memories, so close to the unconscious workings of the brain words like "story," "evoke," or "dramatize" are irrelevant. We can now quote the other half of A.O. Scott's sentence, "unlocking the medium’s often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling."

At the same time, as we watch we subconsciously form in our mind a conventional movie about that familiar theme, a preteen's summer vacation, and scenes of a father and daughter. Thus we also have to come to terms with an idea expressed by Elena Lazic in Playlist: "Bold acrobatics in editing and ambitious creative choices," she says, "feel all the more superfluous next to Mescal's effortless charisma." One can understand how someone would say this. Corio and Mescal play wonderfully together, and they might easily impress in a flatter, more conventional film. But the style of the film and the performances are not at odds with - they enhance one another, producing a kind of double whammy.

Still, at first you may like me be fighting what you're seeing on screen. Editing styles are staccato these days, but Wells seems much of the time to refuse to follow through on anything. One may see this as memory's revisiting of sense impressions, with no need for logic or narrative connections. Aftersun, whose title refers to some skin product, threads through dozens and dozens of details, a sauna, a mud bath, a lonely karaoke singalong by the girl, her many interactions with other kids, scuba diving, pool playing (Sophie is good at pool, and she is a bold, adventurous girl, ready to plunge into adolescence) a swimming pool, drinks, dinners, a rug shop, the bedroom with one big and one tiny bed (because twin beds were not provided), and on and on and on and on, and lots of precisely remembered late-nineties ephemera, including multiple half-forgotten or dearly remembered pop songs (Justin Chang says Aftersun has "an unerring musical ear for its moment") for viewers for whom this was the most intense of remembered eras.

But this is quintessentially the kind of film one only puts together later. Its vividness almost chokes you and doesn't let you think. It glimpses Calum's unhappiness. (Some say Mescal isn't up to the subtlety required to convey this mysteriously though if so, why does everybody get it? However having him alone, from behind, in a long miserable wail, seems perhaps a tad obvious: not everything in this youthful, personal, "emotionally autobiographical" first film is perfect nor need it be.) It's only later, if the film works right for you, that the sadness, the "overwhelming emotional force" (as Justin Chang puts it) starts to sink in. See Jesse Hassenger in Paste Magazine: "In its gentle, modest way, Aftersun might well break your heart." Details are left mysterious, but a final sequence, one of a number of imaginary or imaginatively embroidered moments, is a shocker, telegraphing the finality, the awareness that this dad whom his young daughter didn't see very often, because she lived with her mother in Scotland and he lived in London, may never have been seen again. Probably the strongest emotion we take away from a movie is sadness, and that sadness at its best and most effective is a gathering of emotion that builds in the memory on the way home or hours later. AFtersun is a somewhat indigestible and also ephemeral little masterpiece, and one of the best and saddest films of the year.

Aftersun, 96 mins., debuted in International Critics' Week at Cannes May 21, 2022. It showed at many subsequent international festivals; 32 are listed on IMDb, including Edinburgh, Telluride, Toronto, and New York. US limited release from Oct. 21, 2022. Metacritic rating 95%.

MARGARET BROWN: DESCENDANT (2022)

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EMMETT LEWIS IN DESCENDANT

People and a place and the indelible scar of enslavement

The power and deep message of Descendant is all in the details, which are a gradual accumulation of moments whose collective import is much more than any one of them or any simple statement, any explanation. Early on Kern Jackson, of the University of South Alabama, says his preference is for messy data and messy history, not the neatly worked out and organized kind. This expresses the spirit of Descendant too, because here things, as suggested, gradually sift out, as if by themselves. We do our own thinking and above all out own feeling, through the people, whom we experience more powerfully thanks to the warm, present cinematography of Zac Manuel and Justin Zweifach.

Above all this is a film about place, about uncovering secrets, and about feeling roots. One senses it is a great film, though it's hard to say how and why it gains that status. You are advised to read the Rolling Stone review by K. Austin Collins, who best elucidates the film's original insight and formal invention. Collins starts with a jaw-dropping drone shot that doesn't come till midway in the film: he understands how Brown's remarkable process is one of discovery arrived at crab-wise, not of declaration - and that, though it arrives to catch us from behind, as Descendant becomes a documentary about a place it also becomes a study in environmental justice , and Collins co-reviews it with the Indian documentary about bad air and saving birds, Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes. We discover now, at midpoint, that this little compound of tranquil greenery and empty spaces that is Africatown, thanks to lax zoning laws controlled like the local politics by descendants of enslavers, is surrounded with heavy-polluting industry and provided the descendants with a legacy of cancer.

Descendant is about the hidden in plain sight history of enslavement. But it's also about how places don't change. And what's good about that is it means people don't forget. The descendants of the people brought illegally from Benin/Dahomey in 1860 are still here, and so are the descendants of the people who brought them.

Doing that had been illegal since 1808 though owning enslaved people was still allowed in the US until 1865. This is a weird discovery for most of us, perhaps, in itself. The Clotilda cargo people from Dahomey therefore, after all the trauma and the loss of a culture, were only enslaved for five years. When they were released, they were sold some lousy land to have property of their own. The remnant of consolidation of that is Africatown. It was lousy then and it's lousy now, even lousier, a resident explains, with a highway running through where when he was growing up there was a quiet street with shops. Perhaps if it had prospered there would have been a massacre, like the Black Wall Street one in Tulsa in 1921.

But the place arrives to us by indirection. The focus here is oh the Clotilda and its history. Timothy Meaher, who apparently arranged the voyage of the Clotilda with Captain William Foster, had him burn the vessel to hide what had been done. The thread that runs through the pleasingly meandering line of Descendant is the search for the real underwater traces of this last slave ship, pursued particularly by an articulate diver and archaeologist, Kamau Sadiki, who is with the Smithsonian Slave Wrecks Project and an organizer and also an instructor of Diving With A Purpose (DWP), an international organization committed to resurrecting the stories of slave shipwrecks from the bottom of the sea through underwater archaeology documentation - and also teaching young Black kids to swim, as we see here.

The remnants of the Clotilda are found. This is an event that changes everything and changes nothing.

As we meet descendants of the Clotilda's original cargo, we learn they all know about this. The enslaved people were forbidden to speak of it, but the knowledge was variously passed down by oral transmission through the generations - knowledge dramatized in the film by readings by descendants from a book repressed, or shut away, for nearly a hundred years, Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” She is a figure of African American history herself, who wrote the book from talking with t Cudjo Lewis, a last living survivor of the Clotilda journey.

We meet his young descendant Emmett Lewis, a sturdy, folky-spoken and incredibly charismatic young man with long dreadlocks who tells how an elder told him about the history as he lingered a lot in the burial ground with many of the community's tombstones and memories where he learned to listen to the ancestors.

The place is Africatown, known also as Plateau, just north of downtown Mobile, Alabama. The descendants of the people brought on the Clotilda are there, and nearby are the descendants of the criminal white men who connived to bring the prisoners from Dahomey, 110 of them, held for three weeks in the swamps before they were distributed to their three different "owners." We meet both, though we spend most of the time with the Black people, and also with others, Black and White, whose interest is in the history of this event and place.

This may after all be a film even more about people more than about place, but they seem inseparable. Director Margaret Brown follows various people around, whose vernacular eloquence impresses in various ways. One young woman, Jocelyn Davis, impresses with her alertness and openness. After the remnants of the Clotilda have been found and she has viewed a large realistic reconstruction of it a and wept, and we have wept with her, she says she doesn't know what is coming next, but she is excited and ready. Emmett Lewis goes to visit a restored plantation house of the slave owners, a beautiful place, and yet, as he says, evil, and that sequence also is one, of many, that made my toes curl, which is what happens when something is too deep for tears. What a crash course in all that the right wing wants to expunge from America's textbooks. An important film, and a cunningly made one in a great documentary tradition of finding and showing.

Descendant, 109 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2022, showing also in festivals at SXSW, CPH DOX (Copenhagen), Boston, Birmingham, Camden, and in the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival. A Netflix film. Metacritic rating 87%.

MARIE KREUTZER: CORSAGE (2022)

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VICKY KRIEPS IN CORSAGE

A love-it-or-hate-it radicalized portrait of the Empress of Austria

Corsage, whose title refers to corsets not flowers, is a radicalized portrait - it is full of intentional anachronisms from language to dress to diegetic introductions of recent pop songs - of the empress of Austria-Hungary and is played, stunningly, by the actress Vicky Krieps. It's a mixed bag, beautiful, impressively staged, intentionally off-putting. It will be remembered, by some with distaste, by others with admiration. It has been a festival darling (opening in Un Certain Regard at Cannes), much awarded. If you pay close attention, whether or not you know the history it plays with rather freely, you're likely to come away confused. It's above all to b e watched for the full-bore mise-en-scène and for a major performance by the chilly, striking Luxembourgish-German multilingual actress. She gets to speak German, French, English, and Hungarian, to strike a hundred poses and wear a hundred beautiful costumes. The film belongs to her. To say this character is a crazy prima donna is an understatement.

The time is Vienna in 1877, Elisabeth is becoming 40 at Christmas and it's a turning point. She's not the young royal star and influencer she has been since her fabled marriage-for-love with Emperor Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister). Somebody points out women in the kingdom mostly die at this age. Interesting point: she's afraid of having children now and rules out sex with Franz Joseph: in one scene they start to make out and then masturbate together. But Elizabeth is massively energetic, as well as antsy and dissatisfied.

There is not much plot, or effort to give the film one by the filmmakers. Cutting off all her hair looms large. There is a rapid, almost whiplash-inducing succession of quick tableaux as the empress indulges a Spencer-like series of diet torments, riding exploits (including a fall that to her devastation leads to the death of her beloved horse), affair (flirtatious or outright sexual we don't know-Kreutzer is stingy with sensuous details) with her British riding instructor. Bay Middleton (Colin Morgan). The opening scene shows her holding her. breath under water in a tureen-like metal bath while maids time her . She also lingers in very hot water and she has a penchant for visiting insane asylums (it's hinted she feels kinship with the lunitics, and she lies down to smoke a long pink cigarette with an attractive young one). A new cure for madness is hot baths, and we see a whole row of tubs on one asylum visit.

It's impossible to list all the activities we see Elizabeth engaged, or indulged, in. She is most characdytreristically seen as a walk-out of state dinners or other affairs, a no-show at events; for her life, for her imperial responsabilities. Even as she is, we assume, still a rock star to her subjects, she turns away. Early on she says to her sister, her major confidante, "Let's go on a trip," when she has to be reminded Christmas is coming. She has children, a little girl and a grown-up boy. Both are disapproving of her antics: the little girl tells her she is the child. And this feels true. She is constantly wearing violet, passing out violet canies to inmates, smoking cigarettes with a flourish, being strapped into those titular corsets, never tight enough for her.

Corsage is very sure of itself. The enjoyable, hugely admiring Variety review of it by Jessica Kiang makes clear how its obstreperous defiance of norms (much like its subject's) defiantly, perhaps satisfyingly, sets it apart from the schmaltzy, popular celebrity portraits starring Romy Schneider and the new six-part Netflix series ("The Empress") that started this September. But this arbitrariness in flipping the historical rules it has followed so meticulously at times becomes unsteadying. One has to revel in the nutty ego games of the protagonist for their own sake to enjoy the film. But that is offset a bit, wouldn't you say, by the fact that this is a well-known historical figure at a much-documented time? This is a much more elaborate recreation of place and time than Larraín's Spencer, making its fantasy element harder to sink into.

One can praise the cinematography of Judith Kaufmann. Not so rue about the editing of Ulrike Kofler or the score of "Camille." Much else that's wonderful in the projection gets lost in the ego-shuffle. Even the Vienna Boys Choir is included. They sing as angelically as ever.

Corsage, 113 mins., debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes May 2022 (with the best performance award). It was included in dozens of other international festivals, including London, Toronto, and New York. Metacritic rating: 81%.

FREDERICK WISEMAN: A COUPLE (2022)

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NATHALIE BOUTEFEU IN A COUPLE

A COUPLE (Frederick Wiseman) gets a 4/5 in Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review, which kindly summarized at Venice this fictionalized, dramatic feature film of only 64 minutes from the documentarian of normally epic length. Nathalie Boutefeu, also coauthor of the script, stars as the wife of Leo Tolstoy with "a series of yearning monologues" (as Bradshaw puts it) "which have been adapted from her diaries and letters." This is Wiseman's first narrative feature in 20 years. His last such, the 2002 film, was similar, from a Russian (or Yiddish-Ukrainian) source but spoken by a woman actress in French and an hour long. But it was a filming of his own Paris stage production of La dernière lettre. Both seem to reflect that though Wiseman is still listed on IMDb as a resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, he resides in Paris. The new film was filmed in France, in French, in a privately owned seaside garden on the French island Belle-Île off the coast of Brittany.

A Couple is Tolstoy's wife Sophia Tolstaya speaking, and dramatizes excerpts from her journal. It is a kind of letter too, because it begins with actress Natalie Boutefou as Sophia, saying, "The first thing I feel like doing today is to write to you, Leo." She explains that they got into the habit of writing each other every day even though they lived in the same house. She goes on about how her husband, the great writer, crushed her with his power, oppressed her with his jealousy, embarrassed her in front of guests. How hard she worked, copying and recopying his manuscripts (she reportedly wrote out all of War and Peace two or three times).

The monologue addressed to Leo continues, with things he said in his diary, and more about their repressed, intense, frustrating relationship which demanded so much of her and gave so little back. More too about his neurotic fear of death. Then there are more general statements: "Even the most sincere and honest of us always wears a mask and hides what we are deep inside. . .Most people live as if they are blind. . .Life shrinks and dwindles." But she is still talking about Tolstoy. His being a creative giant made him a shrunken man, a twisted husband with not much left to give - who yet at times spoke of great love.

She describes a suicidal moment when she entered their freezing bath house and dreamed of getting sick and dying, leaving Leo to take care of the children in her place. She speaks of his infidelity, and how it changed their feelings toward each other, but then they make up and things are good for a long time.

This review of a marriage is intense, painful, partly beautiful, emotional, but also somehow abstract. One might like to hear from Leo - though she often quotes him here - speaking about this relationship for himself; but of course that also would not work because as she says at the outset, his power smothered and dominated him, and the need is for her to break free, even if she does so only to talk about nothing but him.

Nathalie Boutefeu is plain, but elegant. Wearing braided hair, she is dressed severely but handsomely in a white blouse and black velvet, sometimes a flowered shawl with a black field. There is a coolness but also a sweetness about her, restraint but also a smile in the eyes. She speaks softly and quietly. All her monologue is outdoors. Sometimes she sits or stands, sometimes she is is walking, by rocks, tide pools, bushes and grass. There are memorable closeups of termites swarming on a log and big ants, and beautiful blooming flowers. Breaks in the monologue are filled by acres of green, bramble or trees or great rocks, with crashing sea at the start.

It would not be an exaggeration to say this is a beautiful film, but its recollection-in-sadness mood isn' terribly moving. Bradshaw introduces this - rather badly titled - film as "a belletristic homage to the most famously unhappy marriage in literary history." He points out the setting is pure invention; the Tolstoy estate, Yasnaya Polnaya, was nowhere near the water. The situation is of a kind of sweet imprisonment, one might say. Not mentioned is the sweet trap of being married to one of the greatest writers in history, the reflected glory, despite the sometime psychological mistreatment. Because Tolstoy "at least sometimes" loved Sophia she was "doomed to bear the burden," Bradshaw puts it, "of looking after the house and grounds" (though surely there were caretakers to tend to the details of that), "seeing to their many children" (and while she seems to mention only two here, there were thirteen!), as well as "dealing with Tolstoy’s many guests and insufferable fan-worshipping admirers and acolytes, and of course, helping him with his work." But except for the caretaking and children and help with the work, Bradshaw is filling in details not specified here. As said, this is a film that's beautiful, sad, a little abstract. One sees the inexhaustible, now ninety-two-year-old Wiseman straining a bit to bring something to life when he is, at heart, the cool, meticulous observer - and that's a very different thing. Marshall Schaffer pointed out in Playlist that A Couple "never quite manages to transcend its origins as a precious pandemic project." No matter how beautiful it is, it remains static.

A Couple/Un couple, 64 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2, 2022, also showing at DMZ (South Korea) Sept. 25 and the NYFF Oct. 2. It opens Oct. 19 in France, and In the US released by Wiseman's signature Zipporah Films at Film Forum Nov.11. Metacritic rating 73.

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NATHALIE BOUTEFEU IN A COUPLE

MARIA SCHRADER: SHE SAID (2022)

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CAREY MULLIGAN AND ZOE KAZAN IN SHE SAID

'Times' Harvey Weinstein investigation story feels flat

A two-woman reportorial team at The New York Times broke the October 2017 story about film producer and distributor Harvey Weinstein's three-decade history of sexual harassment and rape. Weinstein, head of Miramax and his own company, became gthe most notorious example of the abuse of women, particularly in Hollywood, which spearheaded the #MeToo movement that has altered the balance of power of the sexes. She Said is a journalistic procedural film in the manner of All the President's Men or Spotlight.. It is an essential story. Unfortunately, it winds up being a more dutiful and less exciting watch by a fair margin than those other films. As the Austin Chronicle review put it, She Said" is a respectful, serious-minded effort that works so hard not to sensationalize the material, it works against its dramatic impact."

This isn't the fault of the core cast of Carey Mulligan as the tough, elegant senior reporter Megan Twohey, Zoe Kazan as her eager, weepy ingenue partner Jodi Kantor, Patricia Clarkson as their suave senior supervisor Rebecca Corbett, or Andre Braugher as Dean Bequet, their forceful, confident boss. Their performances are fine. So are those of the numerous other actors playing secondary roles, especially the key ones of women abused by Weinstein, including one, Ashley Judd, who briefly plays herself.

The story's importance is hard to overstate. Not only was Weinstein a notorius, outrageous case, a flagrant, serial abuser, but he was a really important figure in the world of movies. Some of Mr. Weinstein’s films include Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pulp Fiction (as well as other Tarantino films) and Good Will Hunting - and many of the notable films of the past thrity years; Forbes lists 81 Oscars his films won. She Said has been praised for not showing Weinsein doing his ugly business, though his modus operandi is frequently described. He had young female assistants. They were often thrilled to have this job, because they wanted a career in the film industry, and it put them close to one of the most famous and powerful figures in movies. It has since emerged, by the way, that Weinstein was as crude, crass, and manipulative in his handling of a lot of the films he distributed, especially Asian ones, as he was with his human victims, ruthlessly cutting and rearranging them sometimes so that they would be more mainstream or sell more tickets, in his belief. One should add that he was a big, physically imposing, ugly man. Sometimes one wishes this movie provided a more vivid sense of his physical presence, his bullying menace.

Weinstein routinely had these young women working for him report to posh hotel rooms he was staying in in New York or abroad. He would come to greet them wearing a bathrobe, force them to sit near him, appear semi-nude or naked, ask them to watch him shower, and persuade them to massage him and otherwise be intimate with him. This sometimes led to forced sexual intercourse. If the young woman fought, protested, or fled in tears, as they often did, he would threaten them to keep them quiet. He or his company paid millions, we learn to buy their silence, having them sign binding agreements never to speak of their experiences even to family members. When they fled from him, these young women were blocked from getting other work, left traumatized and robbed of their career hopes. The damage done was incalculable. Moreover, though this is only mentioned, it's reported that such behavior in some form or other was commonplace in the American movie industry. It's not over, and we can only guess to what extent the exposures and #MeToo have improved male behavior in the film industry and beyond.

Most of the time of She Said is spent following Megan and Jodi, who are shown to be mothers with husbands and children, as they go on numerous trips and make countless phone calls and interviews and known on doors to ferret out who Weinstein's victims were and contacting them and trying to persuade them to speak on the record. They also importantly deal with Weinstein's lawyer and accountant and persuade them to bend. The signature moments are ones in which Megan and Jodi slowly gain confidence, or the happy time when a witness changes her mind and promises to go on record. Endless effort, ultimately tiresome, is spent seeking to find out how many verifiable silence agreements Weinstein there had been and how much was paid out.

The story the Times published is long and detailed. If you read it you understand why the lengthy period of investigation depicted in the movie was necessary. If the movie drags, despite the significance of the subject matter, the causes are twofold. This story is a shocking and imortant one but it's not as complex as Watergate or sexual abuse among Catholic priests, but instead focuses on the repetitious behavior of a single man. One might contrast François Ozon's 2018 By the Grace of God/Grace à Dieu. By successively entering into the experiences of three very different men who all suffered sexual abuse by priests as boys, the film gives us a sense of exploring a whole range of society. Spotlight follows the work of multiple Boston Globe reporters discovering the abuse of multiple priests.

The other issue with She Said is simply the screenplay and the direction, which are equally flat and uninspired. (See Keith Watson's Slant review.). They make the action seem more repetitious than exciting. She Said winds up feeling dutiful. German director Maria Schrader's 2021 satirical sci-fi movie I'm Your Man was witty, thought-provoking, and enjoyable. She may have been rather out of her element here.

She Said, 129 mins., premiered Oct. 13, 2022 at the New York Film Festival, showing at 19 other mostly US and some international festivals listed on IMDb. Metacritic rating 73%. US release in theaters from Nov. 18, 2022.

LUCA GUADAGNINO: BONES AND ALL (2022)

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TAYLOR RUSSELL AND TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET IN BONES AND ALL

Almost enchanted, one still asks "Why?"

Luca Guadagnino's new film Bones and All is dangerous to describe because if it succeeds at all it's unclassifiable. The director here films a kind of teen romance road picture, featuring a girl, Maren (Taylor Russell) and a boy, Lee (Timothée Chalamet), who are cannibals. Fine young ones? I don't know. There is a big part of them that wants to be just people, though that of course is impossible. Their dilemma encourages us to identify or at least sympathize with them. Their world is in flux. They don't know who they are or where they're going from one minute to the next. The best aspect of this often disturbing and distasteful film is an authentic sense of danger and unpredictability, the excitement of youth at risk. If Guadagnino can keep the action on the screen feeling strange and unpredictable, it may feel real.

That said, it's disappointing that a major monkey wrench in the well oiled romance is the appearance before Maren and Lee even meet, but after Maren's father (André Holland) has skipped out on her leaving her, age eighteen now, to fend for herself, of Mark Rylance in full-bore character mode as folksy (but creepy) older cannibal Sully. Sully is explanatory. He informs the newly-on-her-own Maren they refer to themselves as "eaters," that the need will only grow as she ages; they can go for long periods without, but they will always need to dine again. He also points out that they can smell each other. Consuming a whole human "bones and all" is a special treat. He has his own rules. He does not kill, or he says not. Eaters do not eat eaters, or at least by his rules they don't.

Rylance is a great actor and delivering such conversation in cornpone tones must have been a pleasure for him, but it distances us, whereas Maren and Lee have their own specificity and, yes, humanness.

For followers of Guadagnino there are points of contact to begin with. Timothée Chalamet was the linchpin of the director's most appealing and successful film, Call Me by Your Name. There are a few brief but memorable moments involving Chloe Sevigny, as Maren's mother, whom she has never known, and now tracks down: Sevigny figures prominently in the director's engaging, enveloping one-season HBO series, "We Are Who We Are." It also seems as if Taylor Russell is akin somehow to Jordan Kristine Seamón as Caitlin in "We Are Who We Are," who enters into a sort-of-but-not teen romance in the series. Guadagninino again shows a penchant for teen experience, this time not misfit schoolkids, but a sort-of Bonnie and Clyde.

It might be tempting to say cannibalism is just incidental in Bones and All, or a stand-in for something else - being a misfit, addict, foreigner, gay - except for the considerable amount of gore we see in this film. In making the compulsive, bloody lust to consume human flesh and blood intense and vivid, the film stands with the best of them. It makes the ugly act more real. This in spite of the fact that, as David Rooney puts it in his Hollywood Reporter review, Guadagnino is "far less interested in the shock factor" than in "the poignant isolation of his young principal characters and the life raft they come to represent to one another..." That doesn't mean the shock factor isn't there. But our identification with the "poignant isolation," condemned to live wrong as dangerous, forbidden enfants maudits, a tragic and romantic situation we're rudely awakened from when a new scene of gore bursts with shock onto the screen. "Twilight" is one of the many implied references, but these rootless cannibals seem sadder than suburban middle class vampires whose pallor so much becomes them.

Taylor Russell is a new face and it's hard to define her or her character except to say she fits so seamlessly we accept her. The device is used of a cassette tape her father leaves her that plays through half the movie, where he describes their life together, how he protected her (running from one identity and location to the next like the revolutionary fugitive family in Lumeet's Running on Empty), but can't do it anymore.

Lee, Chalamet's character, comes with something of a family life, including a sister who reproaches him for too often being away. Chalamet is, to his advantage, deglamorized here. True, when the falling sunlight is at a good angle, his reddened hair is fluffed and his profile is turned the right way and the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score soars, he's a perfect gutter pretty boy. But dp Arseni Khachaturan's camera isn't always friendly to him, shows wrinkles and strain, his mouth is twisted, and Chalamet becomes the most interesting character he's ever played.

Many would agree with what A.O. Scott says in his New York Times review, that Bones and All is "a ragged hybrid of genres and styles, an elevated exploitation movie, a succession of moods." You might say that's always true when horror or genre are done well. The difference from some examples, like, say, Near Dark, is it all seems less a lark, and nothing is a laughing matter here.

Guadagnino takes himself very seriously, which may seem a bit much. But after being softened up by thoroughly loving Call Me by Your Name like almost everybody else, I became a fan binge-watching and binge-repeating the eight very rich hours of "We Are Who We Are." Those hours have showed how satisfyingly detailed and empathic this filmmaker's sense of a world can be and how much he cares. That explains how seriously he takes these young cannibals, and I thank him for that. I also became aware of his use of music. Music is so important in "We Are Who We Are" the whole final episode is devoted to Fraser and Caitlin's attending a concert by the composer of the series' score, Dev Hynes, aka Blood Orange. There are several splendid musical moments this time too, and the Reznor/Ross score is powerful without ever seeming to intrude.

It's also worth commenting how somehow it appears this movie effectively manages to use the environs of Cincinnati to create the feel of eight or ten different states, a brilliant stay-at-home road picture effect, with memorable seedy interiors by Khachaturan and the set dressers throughout. Guadagnino is fascinated with trailer park Americans - a tradition, like the trailer park RV vampire killers in Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 B picture classic Near Dark, which has been billed as a Western.

I still can't help asking: Why? But I think the answer is there somewhere. I ask that more pointedly for Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, because this is a better movie, its principal characters easier to almost-like.

Bones and All, 130 minutes, debuted September 2, 2022 at Venice. It was shown also at Telluride, Zurich, Austin, Bergen, Vienna, Brisbane, São Paulo, Leiden, Taipei, Stockholm, and other international festivals. It was presented in the Spotlights section of the NYFF. Metacritic rating: 72%. Limited US theatrical release Nov. 18, 2022.

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"Bones and All is a ragged hybrid of genres and styles, an elevated exploitation movie, a succession of moods — anxious, horny, dreamy, sad — in search of a metaphor. Or maybe the metaphor is obvious. Neither raw nor fully cooked, it might make you lose your appetite, but it’s more likely that you’ll still be hungry when it’s over." - A.O. Scott.

HONG SANG-SOO: THE NOVELIST'S FILM 2022)

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KIM MIN-HEE, LEE HYE-YOUNG, AND HA SEONG-GUK IN THE NOVELIST'S FILM

Turning to another medium in a dry spell

In this latest variation on his themes of revolving encounters, drinking and talking and self-reflective examinations of the creative life and the vagaries of relations between the sexes, Hong Sang-soo introduces Junhee (Lee Hyeyoung), a well known and once prolific woman novelist who has become unable to write. We find her arrived on a trip away from Seoul to a small town to visit a woman friend (Seo Young-hwa) who, unbeknownst to many, according to her, is now running a bookstore (also a cafe and local gathering place). She is herself a writer whose well seems to have run dry; in fact that seems to be why Junhee has come to seek her out. Here the novelist also encounters Gyeongwoo (Ha Seong-guk), a young film student who knows and admires her very much. She also, at a modern lookout tower, meets Hyojin (Kwon Haehyo), a director she seems not to think much of, who it turns out had intended to adapt one of her novels, till the project was squelched due to lack of funding. She is unimpressed.

After several chance meetings, Junhee winds up lunching with Kilsoo (Hong's muse and partner Kim Minhee), a well-known actress who claims to be fed up with the thespian life. Junhee has not met Kilsoo before but loves and admires her work, as Kilsoo loves and admires Juhhee's.

So it is that sitting there Junhee gets the idea of trying her hand at cinema, for the first time making a short film that she proposes will star Kilsoo, with the aid of Gyeongwoo, an idea to which Kilsoo somewhat tentatively agrees. It won’t be like other films. It will be the novelist’s film. Ir at least so runs the festival blurb: novelists have been known to dive into movie-making, but the idea may be new in Hong's world.

The action here, not for the first time in this director, is meandering and sociable. It involves people meeting old friends, or persons they have long admired, and finding ways to spend time with them in different groupings that fill up the whole day. Sociability that might seem more time-wasting for artistic people in dry spells, is seen here as necessary and restorative and leading to ideas. There is also a warm plug for the joys of reading, but only what one really likes. At a group drinking scene at the bookstore after Junhee has made friends with Kilsoo over a ramen lunch, the novelist finds herself next to a bewhiskered older poet, Mansoo (Gi Joo-bong), whom she used to drink with, too much, she thinks now, but he totally disagrees. (There is some cultural discomfort in hearing the way drinking is mindlessly extolled as a good in itself in Hong's films.) Everybody should drink a lot sometimes, says the washed up poet. Kilsoo drinks so much she falls asleep.

It appears the only character who is clearly not going through a creative dry period is the film student, Gyeongwoo - and maybe the bookseller's assistant, a shy young adept at sign language (Park Miso). Gyeongwoo however is a useful mechanism rather than one of the interesting, sympathized-with characters. There is a plethora of characters this time, but in exchange the chronology is more linear than usual except for a leap forward at the end with an excerpt from the completed short film.

Great admirers of Hong tend to like nearly everything he does and the New York Film Festival twice in a row has included two new Hong films in their annual Main Slate. But in this film the thrill is not as much there as in Hong at his best. Nonetheless the central idea is nice: a whole gathering of artistic types out of ideas or suffering creative blocks happens partly deliberately and partly by chance one day, with the result that two of them collaborate together with the essential help of a young man with a camera to make a short film, starring the actress, written and directed by the novelist.

This interesting but less that top-tier effort is marred by a repetitiousness in the dialogue in the way characters in various combinations fawn on each other, alternately gushing vague and sweeping compliments or giddily giving thanks for them. Could there not have been at least one character who is sarcastic or niggling with praise? Or are there bat squeaks of disapproval or jealousy lost in the subtitles?

One returns to a favorite idea expressed by the celebrated American abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell, that an artist's less successful works are necessary stepping stones to the good ones.

The Novelist's Film 소설가의 영화, debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 15, 2022, winning the second-place Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, also showing in over two dozen other international festivals, including Taipei, Toronto, Busan and New York. French title: La Romancière, le film et le heureux hasard. Metacritic rating: 82%.

CLAIRE DENIS: STARS AT NOON (2022)

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JOE ALWYN, MARGARET QUALLEY IN STARS AT NOON

Two Anglos in lust and in danger in central America

Issuing a second film in one year, Claire Denis has made a movie in English, with quite a bit of Spanish, appropriately enough since it's set in an updated version of of the uneasy, dangerous Nicaragua of the 1980's in the eponymous Denis Johnson novel. The updating seems to have drained much of the political logic from the story, adding real-life scenes related to the COVID pandemic in a steamy, rain-drenched Panama where this was shot starring Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn as two drifters turning into fugitive, alcoholic lovers, and Benny Safdie, who interprets a CIA agent as a kind of insidious buffoon.

Under the circumstances, though at Cannes, where this was Denis' only second time being selected afteer her debut Chocolat it did win the Grand Prix, many Anglophone critics have panned the film (Metascore 64) because the erotic political thriller is mostly not really there, only the erotic part and the sense of danger and malaise without much interest in a plot. But they're missing out how wonderful the atmosphere is, the sense of hopelessness and danger two unexpected lovers seek to escape from with drink and sex. Only Denis could do this with such sensuous ooze. I liked the spiky, nutty go-for-broke performance of Qualley and was taken by the classy, glamorous English blond good looks of Alwyn, whom I'd liked in another movie the critics liked even less, Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (NYFF 2016). Alwyn has so much glamour and sexiness he does't have to do much. Robert Pattinson was the first choice and he would have made the character more appealing: but is that desirable? It's essential that this man is somewhat dicey and out of reach.

Denis seems to be thinking of a country that's being taken over by a dictatorial regime like the one in her White Material (NYFF 2009): elections are being postponed for the second time, and armed guards of several different kinds are everywhere. Costa Rican heavies have also infiltrated. Trish (Qualley) knows more about these and also is fairly fluent in Spanish, which Daniel (Alwyn) doesn't and isn't, so she has more insider knowledge than he, when they come together. But she has been discredited and worn out her welcome by doing articles about bribery and kidnapping in the country. She Skypes a magazine editor (John C. Riley in another misjudged, tonally jarring American cameo) begging for work and he tells her she's no journalist and to fuck off. Qualley's skinniness and extreme youthfulness make it easy to accept that her journalistic knowhow hasn't gone very far despite her knowing her way around.

Trish is living a desperate, wild life, sleeping with men for $50, cash, US, regularly with a subteniente (Nick Romano) and a Vice Minister of Tourism (Stephan Proaño), and she meets Daniel, who claims to work for an energy company, in the bar of the posh hotel he's staying in, the kind of place where she steals shampoo and toilet paper to take back to her sleazy dive room. He wants to see her again and she likes him much better than her regulars, as well she might: she notes his skin is "so white it’s like fucking a cloud" (you had to be there). Before that she has seen him with a slick looking guy (Danny Ramirez) he claims is something legitimate and she warns him is a Costa Rican cop. Does he really not know he's in danger?

What counts here is the rain, the hotel rooms, the sense of being, as Trish now is, both an insider-foreigner and persona non grata, with too many córdobas and never enough American dollars, no phone and her passport in the hands of the subteniente . Both now feel a desperate need to escape the country while the means to do so are slipping ever further out of reach. Daniel and Trish are drawn to each other, she is a lush and he drinks along with her, though going more for beer while she's guzzling rum, the sex is good and the danger seems to turn them on. The signal image is of a taxi driver Daniel has given his burned cell phone to murdered at the wheel of his cab with the phone in his mouth. The ending is chilly and ironic. I was reminded of Robert Stone. If this is one of Claire Denis' bad movies, it may be the one I like best.

Stars at Noon, 135 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes in May 2022 winning the Grand Prix, showing also at Sydney, Melbourne, Deauville, New York and Vienna. US limited release Oct. 14, 2022. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Opening in France in May 2023, where they will probably dig the sensuality more. Metacritic rating: 64%.

ELEGANCE BRATTON: THE INSPECTION (2022)

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JEREMY POPE IN THE INSPECTION

A Black gay man goes through Marine boot camp successfully but doesn't gain mother's acceptance

Elegance Bratton has declared his A24-released feature film debut to be autobiographical. He like Ellis French (Jeremy Pope, himself a queer Black actor) in The Inspection, is a gay Black man who joined the Marine Corps following ten years living on the streets in Trenton, New Jersey after his mother kicked him out at 16 for being gay. The tormented, still loving mother-son relationship is as central to this movie as the boot camp experience that fills most of the run time; shortly after graduation from the camp. the film ends, but not before a highly fraught meeting between mother and son. However rough in spots, this movie is vivid, intense, and felt.

Marine boot camp paradoxically treats recruits as non-beings and the training platoon Ellis is in is presided over by an aggressive Black training officer, Sgt. Laws (Bokeem Woodbine), who says he hates recruits and seeks to break them down, but when they're turned into Marines they become precious. Reluctantly, or with much hesitation, the very Christian but clearly tormented Inez (a powerful Gabrielle Union) attends her son's Marine graduation. The Marines, after a struggle, despite discovering that he is gay during this "Don't ask, don't tell" period (1994-2011) have somehow made Ellis one of their own, and once you're a Marine, you're golden. But when Ellis has to explain to the hopeful, delusional Inez who envisions his having a string of girlfriends now, "Mom, boot camp didn't make me straight," she withdraws her invitation to come back and stay with him for his month before reporting for service, and they are back where they started. Maybe the dedication to Bratton's mother at the end of the film, along with the information that Bratton indeed served in the Marines from 2005 to 2010, indicates some kind of truce between mother and son came about before her passing; alas, he says not.

The Inspection is a strong movie but despite its autobiographical origins, doesn't always seem real. Maybe it doesn't matter: it has an emotional reality. Screen versions of military boot camps tend to seem like mechanical ritual or absurd fantasy. Moreover, Ellis' personal gay sexual fantasies of the other men in boot camp are tormenting and as important perhaps, as his daytime challenges. (See Benjamin Lee of the Guardian for the review with a fuller queer perspective on this film.)

Bratton's need to work through his own experience of boot camp and his mother's rejection sometimes seems stronger than his desire to tell a story. Starting to write the screenplay in film school his memories of five years in the Marines may have been pushed out sometimes by movies. The representation of Sgt. Laws tends to be overwhelmed a bit in our minds and perhaps Bratton's by Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket and its classic boot camp sergeant Hartman played by R. Lee Ermey, who, under Kubrick's master hand, seems too good to be true, though Ermey was a ten-year Marine veteran as wall as an actor. Sgt. Laws isn't as enjoyably absurd, but his excessiveness, up close as seen here, is very theatrical. Ellis is also tormented by the chosen recruit squad leader (McCaul Lombardi), up close all the time too, who tries to get him disqualified but fails. (An Officer and a Gentleman is another classic training movie that will come to mind, and probably eclipse, this one.)

There are new wrinkles, like Muslim recruit Ismail (Eman Esfandi), who is forced to attend a Christian service conducted by a caricatural Southern chaplain (Wynn Reichert) with non-believing Ellis, and rushes out and is comforted by Ellis weeping in the latrine because he has realized the Marines will just equate him with the killers of their comrades in Desert Storm or Iraq. Sgt. Laws shows the recruits a video of Sam Mendes' Jarhead (which would have been new then), saying it perfectly shows their experience in Desert Storm. Well, that would not be a Marine recruitment film, and neither would this. It may be true, truth is stranger than fiction, but it also seems a bit implausible that Ellis would be spotted as gay because he gets an erection in the shower naked with other recruits. Tough luck if so, since showers are obligatory and collective activities. It's Bratton's skewed impression of the straightness of his fellow recruits that mail brings a bible with girlie photos crammed into it and that night they are all busily masturbating.

In the physical part of boot camp, the sit-ups and pushups and runs and obstacle courses, despite every effort to throw him off Ellis does fine. His relations with the other recruits are uneasy after the shower revelation. He performs at least adequately, perhaps well, in the crucial final rifle marksmanship test but his enemies try to falsify his failure. This is where it's clear he has some advocates, including an instructor (Raúl Castillo) who has confided in him, another person Ellis comforts, though when he interprets kindness as an opening to physical intimacy, he gets in trouble.

Having gone through Basic Training in the Army in earlier days, it was surprising to me how much these recent Marine recruits talk to the sergeants, always shouting out and prefacing all remarks with, "Sir, this recruit..," speaking of themselves in the third person. The progress of boot camp doesn't come through as a fixed set of training goals so much as a series of vivid memories, like eating with violent appetite (which I also remember; food never tasted so good and there was never enough of it). Sometimes the personal interactions feel contrived, heightened or condensed from real experience. But each test passed is a validation, and while the friendliness of the other recruits seems a bit sudden, Ellis' sense of accomplishment is something the viewer shares. Jeremy Pope has a jutting jaw and mouth, and his own special way of smiling that morphs back and forth into a frown. If the process sometimes seems contrived, his transformation seems real, the sense of identity in desperation achieved.

The Inspection 95 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 8, 2022 then New York Oct. 14, showing in a dozen other festivals, mostly domestic, but including London BFI. Limited US theatrical release from Nov. 18, 2022. Metacritic rating: 73%.

JOANNA HOGG: THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER (2022)

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TILDA SWINTON IN THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER

A trip north

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Eternal Daughter, 96 mins., debuted Sept. 6, 2022 at Venice, showing at nine or more other international festivals, including Toronto, Zurich, London, New York (Main Slate), Vienna, Seville, AFI, Thessaloniki and Marrakech. Limited US theatrical release and on itnernet Dec. 2, 2022. Metacritic rating: ̶7̶9̶%̶. 80%.

MIA HANSEN-LØVE: ONE FINE MORNING (2022) - NYFF

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MELVIL POUPAUD, CAMILLE LEBAN MARTINS, LÉA SEYDOUX IN ONE FINE DAY

Joys and sorrows of life on life's terms

Mia Hansen-Love's new film certainly is a return to form after several that were harder to understand and lacked the direct emotional impact of her best work. This one doesn't have the before and after structure of All Is Forgiven (2007), The Father of My Children (2009), and Things to Come (2016), three of her great ones, but instead seems to plod along, weaving its way through joys and sorrows toward a quietly bittersweet finale. It's a weepy (I guess), a bit on the soap-melodrama side - but executed with such sincerity, specificity and class that you're with it every step of the way. Three of the finest and most appealing French movie actors star, with the young Camille Leban Martins as the child of one very well carrying her own. (I forgot a fourth French big name, Nicole Garcia, a tad too brittle fo my taste but adding a leavening touch that way.)

Léa Seydoux and Melvil Poupaud are at their least glamorous and never better. They are friends who start meeting up when Sandra (Seydoux), an interpreter of English and German into French for conferences whose husband died five years ago and who has had no intimacy in her life since then. She is raising her young daughter on her own, and is now beginning to cope with the tragic decline of her philosophy professor father, Georg Kienzler (Pascal Greggory, also deglamorized and very fine). Georg has been diagnosed with Benson’s syndrome, a neurodegenerative disease - a tragic mystery about which we are going to learn, by indirection, quite a lot. There is a vivid lesson in the stage he's at very early when Sandrda comes to visit him and he has great difficulty finding and opening the door to let her in.

Françoise (Garcia), Georg's ex-wife, selflessly and with no fuss takes the lead in the long struggle to arrange for Georg to get into satisfactory care, as he is shunted to other facilities and they get him finally into a nice one (right in Montmartre!). Hansen-Love's skill here, through the specificity of all this, is to steer a path, avoiding the sentimentality or manipulative brutality or the cliché movies often fall into in dealing with such situations.

Into this situation, fairly early on, comes a friend of Sandra's whom she runs into and starts hanging out with. He is Clément (Poupaud), more of an acquaintance, really, since he takes time explaining his glamorously oddball scientific specialty to her: cosmocchemistry. Studying stardust is more or less what he does. Again Hansen-Love in her script is being specific. He's not an astrophysicist, just as Georg doesn't have Alzheimer's. (Bensen's Disease is something that affects the sight and the motor control first, and only later develops dementia-like symptoms. It can attack people earlier than dementia usually does.) Meanwhile of course Sandra is coping with, and enjoying, LInn (Leban Martins), who's around nine, and takes fencing lessons at a big studio - but the toughness that implies doesn't keep her from being a sad, pouting little girl when Sandra arrives late to pick her up at the class, a moment that highlights Linn's complexity. She is strong and wants to have fun. But she has the sensitivity of a child who's missing a father.

It turns out pretty soon that Sandra and Clément are strongly attracted to each other. After a few passionate kisses they start having voracious sex. He is married and has a young son, but he's told Sandra the marriage has no love in it. But this part of the story is also very specific and complicated because he feels tied to his wife and son, responsibility visibly conflicting with need. With Sandra it's different, because after five years of celibacy and loneliness, for her it's pure need.

This creates a back-and-forth that dominates the action, along with the ongoing situation with Georg, the constant subtly devastating moments where Georg can or can't communicate or cope when Sandra sees him. There is the important subplot of Georg's books, a rich collection Françoise and Sandra and other family members have the sad task of dispersing. Sandra has to admit that the books now embody more of Georg for her than the shell Georg himself is becoming. It's a brilliant objective correlative of what it's like to experience a family member's neurodegenerative decline.

All this relates to Florian Zeller's much-admired film, from his play, of The Father, though Hansen-Love juggles more complexity here and does not attempt to put us into the point of view of the aging patient asThe Father does. The main point of view is Sandrda's. Her situation - five years of relatively empty serving of others - haas its correlative in her job of translating what other people say, often things that are not particularly interesting, rather than speaking on her own. She buries herself in the sexual passion of her affair with Clément, a tremendous outlet and comfort for her all of a sudden. She becomes very angry when he pulls away. But he's not being judged harshly. No one is being immoral or weak here - not even the staff at the not-very-good nursing homes Georg passes through.

But that's tainted by Clément's guilt and uncertainty. He's just as needy, just as passionate. He keeps starting and stopping the affair because he feels it's hurtful and wrong for his wife, to whom he reveals it. But he loves Sandra now, as she loves him. As mentioned, this has strong soap-melodrama elements. It's just so wonderfully specific and real and intelligent, and so well cast and well acted, that it transcends the genres of weepy and fraught rom-com, by dialing both genres up to the maximum and seamlessly melding them together.

This certainly competes with Hansen-Love's best work. I can't quite agree that it's sublime, or her best, as several prominent reviewers have said; but all reviews say it's very, very good, and they're right. It also takes on hard stuff with a fierceness and intelligence that put this filmmaker at a new level at the top of the game. A measure of One Fine Day is how well Linn's thread is handled throughout, the warmth of her response to Clément (and the psychosomatic ailment she develops when he pulls away): she leaves a strong impression. And this film leaves you with plenty to feel and think about.

One Fine Morning/Un beau matin, 112 mins., debuted at Cannes in the Directors' Fortnight section on May 20, 2022. It has been in other festivals including Sydney, Jerusalem, Beijing, Telluride, and Toronto. It was screened for this review as part of the Mill Valley Film Festival (Oct. 6-16, 2022). French theatrical release Oct. 5, 2022. (AlloCiné 3.7 , 74%). The US distributor is Sony. US release Dec. 9, 2022. Metacritic rating: 84%.

JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI: EO (2022) - NYFF

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The picaresque tale of a donkey

Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski at 84 perhaps has nothing to prove except to himself, and has set himself the challenge of imagining the life of another creature, creating EO, a film, made as an homage to minimalist Robert Bresson's Au hazard Balthezar from the point of view of a donkey. Peter DeBruge reports in his Variety review of Eo that Skolimowski "reckons Bresson’s relatively austere classic was the only time he shed a tear in the cinema."

Not in charge of his own life, Eo in the film lives a passive picaresque tale. At first he is being worked in a circus act. His sweet and doting young trainer Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska) leads him through the tricks she's trained him to do. But authorities declare the use of animals in circuses abusive and take away the circus animals, effectively closing down the show. This is a little like child and family service agencies that take away children from their parents on the grounds of imagined cruelty and perpetrate a greater cruelty. From now on, Eo drifts from one place to another. Kasandra is very sad and searches for him, and at one points seems to find him to give him carrot pastry for his birthday as she did last year.

From a donkey "sanctuary" Eo is set loose, then captured by a council worker and made the mascot of a soccer team. But when the team wins, the opponents seem to blame Eo, and send hooligans to beat him. He is rescued again and restored to health, though he comes very close to being repurposed as meat for human consumption. Finally after a time with a wild ruffian into headbanger music (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz), he wanders loose again and is found tied to a pole on a highway by Vito, a gorgeous young Italian with magnificent eyelashes who, of course, is a wayward priest and a gambling addict (Lorenzo Zurzolo) who's the son of a French countess played by Isabelle Huppert. What else?

It may show that Eo did not win my admiration, unlike some, such as Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, who called it an "indelible heartbreaker" and put it at number one on her best movies of 2022 list. For me it seems presumptive for a filmmaker to presume to see things from the eyes of an animal. Skolimowski's use of very closeup images of Eo's head did not convince me that he's getting into that head. The choice of a donkey loads the dice. It builds on the species' humble look and history as a beast of burden, which may seem the more painful if we realize donkeys (and mules) are more intelligent than horses. It's inevitable that we will get to mankind's cruelty to animals, this time right away. The wanderings of Eo, though beautifully and sometimes experimentally filmed, seem a bit far-fetched. Though some reviewers think this film identifies more totally with the donkey than Bresson's, often the donkey seemed to me a mere excuse for changing scenes and characters.

There have been various documentaries showing human exploitation of animals, especially slaughtering them for meat, or used in a factory farm like, this year, Andrea Arnold's Cow, which also, more monotonously but more realistically, seeks to follow the "point of view" of an animal, actually used to provide milk (and offspring who're quickly taken from her so her milk can continued bo be used), and, when her time has come, put to death (really) with a bullet to the head. The doc, be it noted, actually follows Luna, one cow, whereas Eo makes use of six donkey's in its lead role, and they do not all look alike, if you are paying attention.

But what about the millions of humans who love their pets, their dogs, cats, canaries, turtles or lizards as it may be, and treat them with kindness? It's nice, and more convincing, to see a film made from the point of one of these people. A recent favorite of mine was Andrew Haigh's Lean on Pete, also a road movie, but focused on a fifteen-year-old boy (Charlie Plummer) who steals a horse he loves to save him from being sent to the glue factory because his racing days are over. Though the "Lassie" movies may be corny, so is making a donkey the protagonist of an art film. When Ryan Leston, in his Slash Film review of Eo said this film "is essentially a movie that's Forrest Gump if Forrest was a donkey," it struck a chord with me, a discordant, damning one.

Eo, 85 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes May 2022 and has shown in 35 festivals or special series since, including the NYFF Main Slate. Its limited US theatrical release by Janus Films began Nov. 18, 2022. Watched at Landmark's Elmwood Theater Dec. 9, 2022. Metacritic rating: 83.

LAURA POITRAS: ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED (2022)

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[B]NAN GOLDIN TODAY IN ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED[/B]

Committed biography

Laura Poitras's big new documentary focuses on several subjects, all united by her good friend the photographer and activist Nan Goldin. Goldin narrates, starting with her unhappy childhood in the Boston suburb of Arlington overshadowed by the suicide at 18 of her older sister, who threw herself in front of a train. It's more than hinted that Goldin's parents' upbringing of both sisters was damaging. The life is one thread, growing into the other thread of her art, lurid-beautiful confessional photographs that in turn grew out of her lifestyle, the hard drugs subculture of the Bowery in New York in the Eighties, and the intimate lives of her many friends, including photographer David Armstrong, whom she'd known since they were in their teens in Arlington, Mass.

The snapshot aesthetic of these images at first was rejected by gallerists she showed her bundles of photos to. Nonetheless they were the fruit of a keen aesthetic eye, and a dogged determination. Whatever else she was doing she was snapping, like Larry Clark, the photographer-speed freak in Seventies Tulsa whose ever-present camera his fellow addicts learned to respect. But while Clark's technique wasn't Ansel Adams, his images were classically austere black and white. Nan's were intense, gooey color, not to the gallerist's taste. (As a devotee of classic photography one may have set Nan Goldin's work aside, despite buying Sally Eauclaire's 1981 The New Color Photography.) Finally someone told Nan to bring more, she came with a boxload, and her career was launched.

The slideshow with music "Ballad of Sexual Dependency" (including Velvet Underground, James Brown, Nina Simone, Charles Aznavour, Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Petula Clark) also became a book. Now Goldin's work is in many museum collections. This inclusion becomes significant in Poitras' documentary because later, Goldin became addicted to OxyContin, and after what sounds like multiple rehabs, together with a group of artists, activists, and people living with addiction in late 2017 she founded the activist organization known as PAIN or P.A.I.N. Sackler, focused first of all on "the toxic philanthropy of the billionaire Sackler family," who, PAIN's website says, "ignited the opioid overdose epidemic with their blockbuster drug, OxyContin."

The unity of Poitras' film arises in part from the fact that the activism Nan Goldin has led against the Sacker family, pressing, ultimately with success - a positive outcome of the film - for multiple museums to stop accepting donations from the Sackers and, importantly, to take down the Sackler name in so many museum spaces, the "Sackler Galleries," "Sackler Wings," and the Temple of Dendera in the Metropolitan Museum in New York - these demonstrations have been staged in great museums, the Met, the Guggenheim, outside the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre, the Smithsonian, the Victoria and Albert, you name it - and they have been artistic happenings in themselves. The one at the Guggenheim, with its little clouds of "prescriptions" quoting a Sackler prediction that their new drug would cover the country, is particularly visual, but so are the showers of plastic pill bottles with custom PAIN labels, floating in the pool of a museum atrium. The Louvre was the first to take down the Sackler name from its museum spaces, but then the Guggenheim followed, and many others. Unfortunately, the US opioid epidemic continues to increase.

Nan Goldin is an engaging and articulate figure and everything this film has to say about her, her life, her work, and her campaign against opioids, is important and relevant and has a hard, intense edge to it. On the big screen the famous slides of the life in the Bowery take on the luminosity and beauty they were always meant to have. There is also a segment about AIDS. It is good, and important, to hear from David Wojnarowicz, the painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist, and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art, a contemporary of Goldin's who lived in the East Village and died of AIDS in his thirties. (His wonderfully titled book Memories that Smell Like Gasoline is back in print.)

With all this going on, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is both a personal and a collective work. It stands as a kind of collaboration between Poitras and Goldin. One might be tempted to say this is a departure - till one realizes that the 2014 Citizen Four is also a kind of collaboration, with Edward Snowden. This film doesn't have quite the immediate drama and thrust of that one, but it has plenty of thrust and drama nonetheless. Toward the end, there is news of how the Sackler family has salvaged its wealth through siphoning off money and then declaring bankruptcy of their company, Purdue Pharma. The legal proceedings including an online session in which two Sackler family members are forced to be confronted by alleged victims, including Goldin. But despite all this, the film is neither a documentary about the opioid crisis nor a demonstration of the Sacklers' complicity in it. It's a film about Nan Goldin's life, art, and activism.

All The Beauty and the Bloodshed, 113 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 3, 2022, where it won the Leone d'Oro, the first top prize of the festival to be awarded to a documentary since Gianfranco Rosi's 2013 Sacro GRA. The film has been shown in over two dozen major international festivals, including Toronto, London, and (Oct. 7) New York, where it was the Centerpiece Film. US theatrical release Nov. 23, 2022 (NYC), Dec. 2 (LA). Screened at AMC Kabuki Dec. 11, 2022. Metacritic rating: 90%.

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NAN GOLDIN (ARCHIVAL) IN ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED]

NOAH BAUMBACH: WHITE NOISE (2022

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Baumbach goes big

The obvious link of White Noise with Noah Baumbach's first film, The Squid and the Whale (NYFF 2005), is the pretentious academic father, and the questioning children. But in other ways this bold, risk-taking new venture is another big step forward, as Noah Baumbach's terrific last film, Marriage Story (NYFF 2019), also was. This is the writer-director's first adaptation, and it's of a famous novel by Don DeLillo from 1985, also his first movie made on such a grand scale and with such a big budget and with such wild comic absurdity. It could be a grandiose failure: White Noise has for forty years been considered unfilmable. Welll, he's done it, and while not all of it works, especially not the last part, it was worth it. And I'd advise you to get on Netflix and enjoy it.

There are delights and complexities here never seen in a Noah Baumbach movie. This is the kind of picture you want to go back to. There's a lot going on and so much of it is rich and fun. The cynicism and satire and self-congratulatory cleverness of DeLillo's novel are all there - but with them a touching warm-heartedness and a caring about a family and a marriage we've never seen before in the director. Robbe Collin of the Daily Telegraph aptly describes White Noise as akin to "an early Steven Spielberg film having a nervous breakdown" and its frequent overlapping-dialogue passages have widely been linked to Robert Altman's style. But above all it's Don DeLillo, filtered, some think brilliantly, some think not enough, through the sensibility of Noah Baumbach.

The story is hard to summarize. It's about a lot of stuff, from messy families to academic pretension to toxic waste and environmental degradation to - the big one - fear of death. Things revolve around a small college in Ohio where J.A.C. Gladney (Adam Driver, with a paunch), known as Jack, is a professor of Hitler Studies who can't speak German, but is nonetheless widely celebrated for his theories, which delve into power and fame and the oddities of personal development - that Hitler was a mamma's boy and studied art - and overlook the Holocaust. Jack lives with Babette (Greta Gerwig, curly-blonde mophead), aka Baba, who teaches physical therapy. They have four children (all excellent), three by previous marriages (both are on their fourth), one, little Wilder (Henry and Dean Moore), their own.

Jack has several colleagues, the important one Murray Siskind (a droll Don Cheadle) is a professor who likes to talk about films of accidents and car crashes, and celebrates them as symbolic of American optimism. The satire of Eighties academic pretension flows freely. A whole lot else is going on in the thee-part division of the novel, first of all centering on the "airborne toxic event," then "Dylar," an experimental drug to ease fear of death (but with dire side-effects, like inability to distinguish words from things), then a crazy-fantastic finale with philosophical explorations that don't work but whose botched revenge-murder reminds me of Peter Sellers brilliant improvised finale for Kubrick's Lolita.. All through there is a return to a big supermarket as the place these consumer-crazed citizens take refuge in, with a glorious musical finale in the big A&P over the closing credits. The last section makes hilarious use of two excellent German actors, Barbara Sukowa as Sister Hermann Marie and Lars Eidinger as Mr. Gray.

The CGI and crowd-wrangling and disaster-staging are all new and great fun for a director who dealt in intimacy and family relationships before this. The gigantic crash of a big rig tanker truck driven by a drunk and loaded with gasoline into a train carrying toxic chemicals is the central event you've got to stage big-time, and Bauambach does it very nicely indeed: the black cloud of the pricelessly entitled "airborne toxic event" is in fact gorgeous. So also in their way are the car lineups and Eighties actioner-style backup crashes into metal garbage cans, the station wagon floating down the river with the Gladneys in it, the public and private voices fumbling and reshuffling advice and cover stories, just like Covid, as has been widely commented. This is the time when Sam Nivola shines as son Heinrich, the adolescent's rationality setting off Jack's uselessness and denial.

It's been a criticism of this precisely period mid-Eighties film that it's simply dated, and it's also been praised for getting the period just right, and achieving special relevance right now. It's all a bit true and who knows how this movie will age? It may be never better than right now. But it's also going to be fun in future watchings to w0rk out how the film's improvisations extrapolate and translate DeLillo's novel in movie form. It's enjoyable to see how - this comes in the Sam Nivola part - the satire on intellectual fakery indirectly celebrates intelligence. The last part isn't a success but the warmth and sympathy for this couple only grows. Baumbach strongly anchors DeLillo's picture of American's disquietude (their inability to find comfort or escape their mortality through their things and gadgets, in Driver's and Gerwig's humanness. This is a story/book that's mean and nasty and cynical but has a strong thread of love in it. It's this complexity that makes Baumbach's White Noise curiously endearing and memorable. The critical response has been mixed, reflected in a Metacritc rating of only 66%. But I can see why Mike D'Angelo in his "Year in Review" on Patreon makes this film his no. 5 of 10 but also mentions it as the "Outlier' and "Most Underrated," "the finest direction of Baumbach's career" and the movie he's currently most ready to go back to and resample.

White Noise, 136 mins., premiered at Venice Aug. 31, 2022 and debuted in the US in the New York Film Festival as the Opening Night Film Sept. 30 and showed at a dozen other festivals including London, Tokyo, Miami and Lisbon. Limited US theatrical release Nov. 25. From Netflix, US streaming release Dec. 30. Screened for this review online Jan. 1, 2023. Metacritic rating: 66%. AlloCiné press rating 3.7 (74%).

DAVY CHOU: RETURN TO SEOUL/RETOUR À SÉOUL (2022)

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PARK JI-MIN IN RETURN TO SEOUL Thomas Favel/Aurora Films/Sony Pictures Classics

An aggressive search for identity

When Koreans drink together (as they do a lot: watch any Hong Sang-soo film), it's the custom that they pour each other's soju or whatever reciprocally into each other's glasses, never straight into their own. When Frédérique Benoit (Park Ji-min), AKA Freddie, is told this, she grabs the bottle, pours the soju into her own glass, and chugs it. Who does that? This behavior turned me against Freddie from the start. It took most of the movie to win it grudgingly back.

Freddie was born in Korea, adopted by a French couple and raised as French. (Her birth name is revealed to be Yeon-Mi, meaning "docile and joyful,' a rather obvious irony.) Now 25, she is visiting Seoul for the first time since infancy, basically on a whim. She likes vacationing in Japan, we learn later in a Skype conversation with her mother, but many flights were cancelled for a typhoon, she wanted to go somewhere, so here she is.

Her mother had so much wanted to go with her, and is very disappointed. But impulsiveness is the rule with this young woman, who is pretty and vibrant, but also obnoxious and confrontational. She is so outside the norm in the Korean bar, accompanied by Tena (Guka Han), the timid French-speaking acquaintance from the hostel where she's staying who acts as her mollifying French-Korean interpreter, that her presence must be electrifying. One baby-faced boy is attracted to her and she sleeps with him. The next morning the naive, dazzled kid wants to be hers forever. She tells him to get lost. Later there is Maxime (Yoann Zimmer), a French boy she's actually been going around with she tells: "I can erase you from my life with the snap of a finger." Nice.

Director Chou, who is French-Cambodian and reports he was inspired to make this picture by the experience of a friend, may have also worked off the personality of first-time actress Park Ji-min, whose energy, charisma, and sexiness are admittedly compelling and help fill in gaps in the writing. The experience of coming back to Korea and seeking out one's birth relatives through the adoption agency can feel momentous but also painful and tedious, as was shown in Malene Choi's The Return (NYAFF 2018), which mixed documentary and fictionalized elements to show what happens to several returned young Korean adoptees. It has to be done, but do we need to be the audience for it?

This issue eventually is avoided because this film, which has good tech credits and actors, is mainly a portrait of this eccentric, troubled young woman, with her adoptee story just a pretext. The score by Jérémie Arcache and Christophe Musset is rich and supple. It takes charge in that opening café scene when Freddie dances, "gyrating," Amy Nicholson says in her admiring New York Times review, "as through [she] doesn't care if she doesn't see anyone in Seoul ever again." The cinematography by Thomas Favel shines with deep glowing colors and pleasing bluish blurs in the Seoul nightclub scenes. But Freddie will soon go through the Hammond adoption agency and meet with her biological father, played by Oh Kwang-rok, an air conditioning repairman with an extended family.

Her father like Freddie behaves wildly when drunk, and is prone later on in the relationship to nagging, maudlin expressions of guilt and a desire to control. Right off he tells her, through timid Tena, that he wants her to live in Korea and he will find her a husband. As Nicholson puts it, the early encounter with him "feels both momentous and aggressively dull."

The "momentous" but "aggressively dull" aspect of Korean adoptee-reunion stories is escaped by this film's odd structure and its focus on the attention-getting personality of Freddie. Return to Seoul makes repeated sudden, clear-cut several-year leaps forward, taking us all told into Freddie's early thirties. It shows her only in Korea and briefly at film's end in Romania on a hike and hotel stay identified only in the closing credits. There is nothing about her life before in France. As we progress, Freddie changes, but not in clear-cut or progressive ways. Her relation with her birth father and his family continues, with her relying on some Korean she has finally learned and on English as a lingua franca. Now she is doing some kind of international work. Later she is on a computer date with an older man called André (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing of Mia Hansen-Løve's Le père de mes enfants), who tells her he is in the arms business and she would be great in it "Because you have to be able to not look back."

By this time she has lipstick smeared on and hair pushed down: it's not such a great look, but it's a change. Later, she meets with her Korean dad's people once again (Oh Kwang-rok, who had minor roles in Park Chan-wook's "Vengeance" trilogy, is a vivid actor) and tells them she is now, in fact, indirectly in the "defense" business for Korea.

Over several years she continues trying to make contact through the adoption agency with her birth mother. And this momentous, nearly wordless event finally does take place at the agency itself, in a safe, careful ritual that is very well acted out and reproduced in this film. This is a hushed, memorable scene, photographed very close without clearly showing the mother. Freddie is at last subdued by the momentousness of the reconnection.

Some have showered Return to Seoul with superlatives. It feels as though Chou has let his lead actress run away with it somewhat. But in the times when it and she calm down, the initial aggressiveness and offense fade into an intriguing mystery so one admits this director may know how to make movies (his two previous ones have won awards).

Director Chou has certainly gotten around the "aggressive boredom" of discovering that the Korean adoptee has (in the Times reviewer's words) "been robbed of a life she doesn't actually want to live." What most of all seems to attract Freddie to Korea, as Boyd van Hoeij suggests in his The Verdict review, is that it's so easy for her to shock people there, looking like a local and yet acting so different, "simply by saying something that goes against the grain or would be considered not done." But despite the vivid performances, nice score, and beautiful cinematography, the jumps forward are hard to parse and Freddie's unclear development make the film for van Hoeij "feel long and repetitive" and "the lead character is just too exhausting to watch." I agree: Return to Seoul is an uneven watch. There is fascination and elegance here, but there is also that. Wendy Ide wrote in Screen Daily that the film "is unconventional and at times abrasive" but has "a seductive, searching quality" and "a swell of melancholy" which makes for "an engaging, if unpredictable journey." It has been well marketed and well received. Not everyone will like it. My jury is still out.

Return to Seoul/Retour à Séoul, 115 mins., debuted at Cannes in Un Certain Regard May 22, 2022. (A previous Chou film won a prize at Critics Week in 2016.) Over 44 international festivals listed on IMDb including Toronto Sept. 8 and New York Oct. 13. Cambodia's entry for Best International Oscar entry. Metacritic rating: 88%. Opens (Sony Pictures Classics) New York and Los Angeles Feb. 17, 2023.

MATI DIOP: SAINT OMER (2022)

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GUSLAGIE MALANDA IN SAINT OMER

Mati Diop's impressive but frustrating first fiction feature arouses more questions than it answers

Saint Omer - well known 41-year-old Senegalese-French documentary filmmaker Mati Diop's first fiction feature - is drably titled: it's only the name of the town where the trial takes place. This is a minimalist kind of courtroom drama film. It presents only a handful of witnesses. Most of the talking is done by the judge, the defendant, and the defense lawyer. Most oddly, little light is shed upon the crime. Is this a trial at all? The defendant has already fully confessed to her premeditated crime of going from Paris to a small town and leaving her 15-month-old daughter on the beach to drown in the rising tide. Nonetheless in its patience-straining way, Saint Omer is riveting courtroom stuff. And then it frustrates us at the end by delivering a message but not a decision. Mati Diop is a tease. Did she learn from Claire Denis, a master of vivid withholding, while playing a major role in Denis' 35 Shots of Rum?

This film is maddening and irritating, yet has been heralded as innovative. It draws attention especially in its introduction of a central character, Rama (Kayije Kagame) who comes to observe, not participate, a teacher and successful novelist attending the trial with the intention of making it into her next novel (a publisher is lined up). She is a powerful figure (and Kagame has a dark, strong, intense presence) who is no less effective through being largely silent in some of the key shots of her. Rama is the audience representative and the stand-in for Mati Diop, the filmmaker, who attended the actual trial of Fabienne Kabou for infanticide on which Saint Omer is based. Skillful use is made of silent images of Rama, whose reactions - and identification - are intense. She connects with the accused's mother Odile Diatta (Salimata Kamate), meeting with her during the trial and lunching with her. All this is like Truman Capote being a major character of In Cold Blood. It's the much later legacy of the Me Journalism of the Seventies, I guess. At the outset of the trial, the judge orders all "journalists" to leave the courtroom. I kept wondering, why is a novelist planning a book and (as we see later) recording the proceedings on her smart phone, not excluded?

Even though, or rather because, she remains mysterious - most of all to herself - the accused Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) remains the main character. Malanda, though as is noted is "invisible" and even is dressed and lit to seem to "disappear" into the background of the wood paneling behind her in the courtroom, speaks in a quiet, assured (even while expressing uncertainty, not knowing), holds our attention. Whois she, what is she? She has claimed sorcery and spells are behind her act. But the defense says she is deranged and needs treatment, not punishment. Much prior evidence emerging in what appears only to be part of her recorded testimony emphasizes that she is a habitual liar. Even she acknowledges this.

Arguably too much is made of Rama. As Anthony Lane notes in his New Yorker review, Laurence would have been interesting enough by herself. There is something naïve and factitious about showing Rama lecturing on Marguerite Duras and the passage in her script for Hiroshima Mon Amour elevating French women humiliated for having Nazi/German lovers to semi-martyr status, and watching Maria Callas as Medea in Pasolini's film, lifting child murder to the level of myth. Mati Diop's intense reaction to the trial, leading to this fiction, or fictionalized, film is explained by her actual multiple points of similarity with the accused: she too of Senegalese, mixed-race descent with a white boyfriend, and pregnant to boot. (In real life she reportedly had a small child, but making the child still in Rama's womb and her having nausea and discomfort adds a creepier, scarier note.)

What's interesting - what will be remembered about this film - is the mysteriousness and illogic or Laurance's answers to questions in the trial. She says early on she doesn't know why she murdered her child but hopes the trial will show her. She's smart, we're told, and speaks elegant French - though noting the latter too much, given that she's from Dakar, Senegal, will be taken as condescending, like the university prof. who testifies he advised her not to do a thesis on Wittgenstein but something more appropriate to her "culture."

A. lot of Laurence's testimony seems to be closely drawn from the actual Fabienne Kabou trial, but it seems calculated to make her even more puzzling than the original was. A 2016 Le Monde article about the final sentencing describes Fabienne: "One expected a woman drowned in solitude, abandoned to her torments of mother under the indifferent glance of her companion; one saw appearing a tough, authoritarian, deceitful and lying accused." Of her much older white companion, father of the baby, Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly) in the film, the article says he "was seen at the beginning of the hearing as morally guilty and ... turned out to be the exact opposite of the portrait that had been drawn up[;] everyone had the feeling of having been deceived, betrayed by the accused." If this is true, this not the impression of the two the film leaves us with.

But the major point/criticism to be made is that Diop doesn't show us the results of the actual trial at all. You will learn from news stories that the defendant was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment, lowered to fifteen at appeal. All we get is the impassioned (and fanciful) summing up of the defense, Maître Vaudenay (Aurélia Petit). There is no summing up of the prosecution (Robert Cantarella), and no decision from the red-robed judge (Valérie Dréville) .

We have been held riveted for two hours, riveted and uncomfortable, and then we have been cheated. Is this a "new, innovative" variation on a trial movie or a perversion of one? Does Diop consider the French court system a racist, colonialist travesty? But that could be a dangerous assumption. Maybe you should see the film and decide for yourself, though.

Saint Omer, 122 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 7, 2022, and was included in over two dozen international festivals including Toronto, New York, Busan and Vienna. French theatrical release Nov. 23, 2022. AllCiné press rating 4.2f (82%). US limited release Jan. 13, 2023. Screened for this review at AMC Bay Street Jan. 18, 2023. (Metacritic rating 90%).

SHAUMAK SEN: ALL THAT BREATHES (2022)

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SALIK REHMAN IN ALL THAT BREATHES Credit: CitySpidey

"One shouldn't differentiate between all that breathes"

This is a remarkable documentary that, while appearing unpretentious and ordinary and really quite drab on the surface, unfolds entirely in its own way, with its own look, feel, edits, and rhythms and tinkly orchestral score. One doesn't even like to call it a "documentary." It's a film. It draws us into its world and in doing so it takes its time. Often a great documentary creeps up on you and must be a slow gathering of details, a gradual astonishment. So it is with All That Breathes. I had a sense that this would be special since missing it in the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival, and it turned out even better than expected.

All That Breathes is a film about three men in perhaps one of the worst parts of the city of Delhi. Brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, and Salik Rehman, their cousin who works with them are all of Muslim origin. Things are becoming discriminatory under the Hindu nationalist and increasingly dictatorial Narendra Modi and if they're outlawed, they muse, they haven't the credentials that would get them into Pakistan. Their life project is saving black kites. These birds replace vultures in consuming waste. Mountains of garbage would grow without them. More of them are falling from the sky: the air of Delhi is the most polluted in the world, for the birds, as for humans, increasingly unsustainable but it may be their numerousness and proximity to the millions of the city that is their undoing.

The brothers and sometimes grumpy with each other and break out in verbal battles. But they say it's not them. It's what's happening in the sky that causes these little fracases. Mostly they work peacefully together. They have done so since they were "teenage bodybuilders" and discovered the kites and their need for first aid, and they applied information on muscles and tendons they'd gathered that way to the muscles and tendons of the birds. As boys they'd been taken to throw meat to the kites by their father, and knew it was deemed good luck. As youths they'd rescued small animals but they gradually focused on kites because regular bird hospitals rejected them for being neat eaters. Now their bird hospital in incorporated as a charity called "Wildlife Rescue."

They also assemble soap dispensers for income, and the older brother, toward the end, goes to the States to study for a while, leaving brother and cousin to hold the fort till he returns. We have glimpsed and heard of violence and houses set afire quite nearby as well as demonstrations against violence. The brothers work on. Their urgent effort to save the kites is a still point of reason and wholeness in what we may dimly perceive as an apocalyptic and crumbling capitol city. A motif of the artfully askew All That Breathes is the oneness of men, and the unity of man and nature, which here seem both impossible, and inevitable. Beside a torn up street, a terrapin crawls. Along a flooded street, cattle walk. We even glimpse a wild pig. Nature is alive and well after all in this overpopulated city.

An unseen eye and an unseen voice and a camera that likes to slide slowly across a scene provide us with views of the brothers and their work surroundings. The first thing one may notice is hands holding one of the big birds and the firm, gentle, practiced touch. Placing the bird somewhere, carefully. Plying apart the feathers to examine a wound, a weak limb, a spot of blood.

Their digs are shabby but somehow cozy. The younger, thinner cousin, Salik Rehman, is on a balcony when a kite comes by and grabs his glasses. It flies off with them. It does not come back. He talks about those lost glasses for a while, rather to his cousin's annoyance. Another time two of the guys strip and swim out into the river to rescue a wounded kite that will be eaten shortly if they doh't save it. Nadeem Shehzad directs them. Surprisingly, the seemingly more fit Salik runs out of energy and panics, caught in the middle of the water. But they make it back.

As suggested, these activities in themselves may seem inconsequential, but it's the focus they show, and the patient rhythm. It turns out the black kites of Delhi are often injured by glass-coated strings used for the other, human, sort of kites, those flown in the air by people. The birds of prey have grown more numerous due to large slaughterhouses in the city. (I get this and much more from a copiously illustrated local article in CitySpidey. They are falling out of the sky in greater and greater numbers, but also this bird hospital is known to more and more people. Selek Rehman is bringing more and more of the cardboard boxes used to hold the sick or injured birds every day. A NYTimes article helps get more funding and a lovely white "open cage" up on the roof has been created.

The work at Wildlife Rescue strives for non-invasiveness, for preservation. The style of this film likewise is to help things along without ever seeming to intrude. It's an unusual combination, and the gentle tuning in to the naturalist's view is unusual too. All That Breathes lives up to that cliché: it takes you somewhere you've never been before. I wouldn't want to tell you too much about it, but there's no danger: no review can capture the unique style and mood of this lovely and thought-provoking film.

All That Breathes debuted at Sundance Jan. 2022 winning the grand jury documentary prize, and it went to Cannes, winning the the Golden Eye award. Numerous festivals, awards, and nominations followed. It will be released on HBO later in Jan. Metacritic rating: 86%.

KELLY REICHARDT: SHOWING UP (2022)

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MICHELLE WILLIAMS, HONG CHAU IN SHOWING UP

An artist prepares for her show

I previously wrote about Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women (2016-NYFF): "If Reichardt achieves authenticity and a sense of real time in these sad, dreary tales, there's also a lack of economy and a lack of verve, almost a stubborn clumsiness. And so this time it's tempting to side somewhat with Rex Reed in the Observer, who commends the acting in this film but condemns Reichardt's style. "Nothing ever happens in her movies," Reed says, "but a handful of critics rave, they end up on the overstuffed programs at film festivals like Sundance and are never seen or heard from again." That isn't really true. But this is a failed movie with one powerful thread, and I wish Reichardt's 2014 Night Moves had gotten all the attention that her 2010 Meek's Cutoff did."

This is the way it has gone for me, perhaps for others. Reichardt is a significant American auteur. Ever since what technically may have been her third film (2006), Old Joy (though nobody saw the first two), critics and cinephiles have had a lot of time for Reichardt's films, even when they were very often stubborn and resisted attention. There are only half a dozen, but have appeared regularly, mostly at three-year intervals; this new one shows no delay from the pandemic. All have stayed in the mind, nagged like Meek's Cutoff, excited like Night Moves, even touched like First Cow. The new one nags, bores, and annoys, but it won't go away. And though one strains to see why Reichardt wanted to make it, its realness leaves one impressed. It's a vivid slice of life. Was it worth slicing? Maybe here there is a lot about today's minor, struggling artist that is so specific it could wind up being enlightening.

Though sharing qualities of being stubborn, specific, and resisting conventional rewards, Reichardt's films have gone in different directions. She has shown a gift for carefully researched and offbeat dips back into early nineteenth-century America with the 1845-set western-traveling Meeks Cutoff and the 1820 pre-Oregon First Cow - the first hard to take, the second hard to resist. This time she doesn't go far: Oregon and art. (She has taught film for some years at Bard, in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, a school with a strong art focus. Most of her films have been shot in Oregon.) The protagonist of Showing Up is a grumpy, dumpy single woman artist, Lizzy (Michelle Williams in her fourth Reichardt joint) preparing for a show of her small baked figurative sculptures while dealing with "the daily dramas of family and friends."

Léa Seydoux also drabbed-down for her lead in Mia Hansen-Løve's recent One Fine Morning. But with Léa, the radient beauty shines through. Michelle's doesn't: she loses herself in unappealing, unfriendly Lizzy. She doesn't seem to look at us, or anybody. She looks at, and touches, almost caresses those odd sculptures of hers (actually made by the Portland-based artist Cynthia Lahti). They are about two feet tall, or less, of women contorted or gesturing extravagantly. An extreme, expressionistic outgrowth of the school of Rodin, they seem unfashionable, out of date (who makes figurative sculptures anymore?). Isn't this part of the point? Though she doesn't quite say it, Lizzy probably doesn't expect her sculptures to be appreciated.

Lizzy grouses most of all with Jo (Oscar-nominated Hong Chau), her neighbor and negligent landlady, since the latter is s taking weeks to repair Lizzy's water heater. But Jo's an artist too - her work is big and colorful; we glimpse it - and has two shows coming up. Both are connected with a local Portland art school; Jo teaches, Lizzy works in an office, her mother the director. Jo points out her rent is low. She hasn't got it too hard. Her sculptures get baked in a kiln at the school by a friendly, cheerful guy, Eric (André Benjamin). Her father (the resurgent Judd Hirsch again), himself a potter, now, he insists, retired (his work looks handsome), is sprightly and cheerful.

Who arguably doesn't have things so good is Sean (John Magaro, who played the lead role of Cookie in First Cow), Lizzy's brother, who's an artist too. Lizzy may think her parents considered him more talented than she, but he has fairly serious mental issues; his behavior is unpredictable, and he's certainly not happy.

All this is what Showing Up is "about" - along with the obvious MacGuffin of a wounded pigeon Lizzy's cat brings in that she and Jo wind up trading places in caring for. The beauty of the film is how spot-on all the details are. But while Kelly Reichardt films have been fights for survival, the urgency level here is like, whether there is too much cheese on the table at Lizzy's show reception, and then, whether her crazy brother will eat it all up.

Showing Up, 107 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes May 27, 2022, also in the Main Slate of the NYFF Oct. 5 and shown in a dozen other international festivals. US theatrical release by A24 April. 7, 2023. Metacritic rating 84%. Surprisingly, Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle gave it a rave. He always seemed to hate everything and have very conventional tastes. Screened for this review at Landmark Albany Twin April 28, 2023.

JAFAR PANAHI: NO BEARS (2022)

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JAFAR PANAHI (RIGHT) IN NO BEARS

The oppressed Iranian filmmaker's fifth clandestine film is a dry multi-layered puzzler

I wonder how Pauline Kael would have reviewed the films of Jafar Panahi, Iran's most famous filmmaker. She did have the balls to pan a sacred cow of a film like the exhausting Holocaust documentary Shoah. Panahi too is a sacred cow. He, or the character with his name in his latest film, No Bears, the fifth made clandestinely since he was forbidden by the government to make films, is a muted, ironic figure, the tight-lipped protagonist, the understated star of his own work. Jafar Panahi is a real life hero. Despite imprisonment, house arrest, and being banned in 2010 from making films for 20 years, he has managed to go on making them, and refuses to leave the country. But when he is showered with praise, how much can we separate the filmmaking from his well-deserved glow as a hero of artistic resistance to the oppressive regime of the mullahs?

Maybe Jafar Panahi's films could be more entertaining. It might seem impossible to make a fun movie about an oppressive country like Iran, but this was disproved last year when Panahi's own son, Panah Panahi, released his first feature, the hilarious, stimulating, meaningful and sad Hit the Road. His father Jafar's new one is many-layered and complex in ways that reviewers are delighted to parse. It offers rewards for seasoned fans. But its entertainment is of a very dry and subtle sort, if entertainment there is.

Nonetheless No Bears, which shows Jafar Panahi, or "Jafar Panahi," struggling to direct a film remotely from an Iranian village near the Turkish border, where the cast and crew are, is an impressively smart and understated film. Its blending of fiction and documentary elements is a feature of the director's style that goes back to his first work. For example, a clip he shows in This Is Not a Film records a girl being filmed on a bus who tears off a fake leg cast yelling that she refuses to participate in this charade. This is essentially what a couple does in No Bears: they are playing a version of themselves (or their film selves), a dissident couple, Zara (Mina Kavani) and Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Penjei), who have escaped the country, but the wife protests that the in-film version they're being asked to enact is a whitewashed image of her far worse sufferings in ten years of struggle and she won't go on with it. Is this outburst true to life, or is it the fiction? We don't know.

This film has been described as revolving around "two parallel love stories." The first involves the troubled mature couple in the film-within-the-film who are, or were, seeking to escape the country. The other is a young couple in the village "Panahi" is staying in, Gozbal (Darya Alei) and Soldooz (Amir Davari). Accused of holding back a photo on a digital disc depicting a couple said to be in love, while the girl is being set up for arranged marriage to another, the No Bears "Panahi" denies that he made any such photo. He is asked by the village chief (Naser Hashemi) to go to a place called "the oath room" where he will swear to this, but he is assured parenthetically that this place is just a village tradition, and it is "okay to lie." That kind of says it all: this is a country where oaths and morality are a big deal, but lying is a common, assumed practice.

The interest, the dry fun, of No Bears is its confusing mix of urban and rural and of documentary and fiction. It is all fiction: the "real" "Jafar Panahi" seen here is a bit less like the "real" Jafar Panahi than in his previous four clandestine films. He is not making this film about the couple seeking to escape the country, but a film about making such a film. In the meantime there is much static from the "actual" location, where "Panahi" is, a small village (not actually where it's said to be). "Panahi" is renting a large room in the village, but his "host" is constantly looking for excuses to make him leave. There is trouble in the village, the fracas over the contested wedding, and "Panahi" is in the middle of it because of allegedly having photographed the would-be "bride" with her real "lover." A little boy claims when "Panahi" was taking his picture with several other boys, he saw "Panahi" photograph the couple. There is also more commonplace buffoonery of a sort Panahi seems to like now, when "Panahi" must climb a ladder trying to connect with wi-fi (the reviewer for Slant has said this is a ripoff from Kiarostami). All the sophistication of good digital cameras, slim laptops and smartphone, clashes with the rustic walls, obligatory glasses of tea, and the feeble wi-fi of a village.

This contrast between the primitive and the modern is in your face here. The village is rife with "traditions" and rigid conventions about marriage. The old ladies serving "Panahi" provide excellent cooking, but with the shaky internet, the rental "host" a constant annoyance and the challenged would-be groom in a constant menacing rage, disorder is just round the corner. The latter individual delivers a prolonged rant in the "oath room" scene that illustrates something Iranians in films often seem to excel at: orally haranguing and abusing each other.

But the urban, and urbane, "Panahi" never loses his cool. His dry restraint stands as a reproach to all the misbehavior and his own mistreatment. He stands aloof; and beyond that lurks the courage of the real filmmaker who has endured so much harassment from the Iranian government and remained productive through it all - though post-No Bears, he was in prison again, initially along with the other top Iranian filmmaker, Mohammad Rasoulof (the third is Asghar Farhadi). (In early Feb. 2023 he was released from prison.)

Panahi's first clandestine film, the 2011 This Is Not a Film, was smuggled out of the country on a flash drive in a loaf of bread and shown at Cannes, the New York Film Festival (where I reviewed it), and in forty other festivals, winding up on many best movie or best documentary lists. The subsequent three and this one have likewise received top honors from critics and festivals. Mohammad Rasoulof was recently on the Venice jury. This in part is a triumph of digital technology and the internet, also celebrated indirectly in No Bears, with "Jafar Panahi" directing a film from across the Turkish-Iranian border, which dramatically he refuses to cross.

The title No Bears, is symbolic of a rejection of naïve village traditions embracing ignorance. The village chief talks about the danger of bears to "Panahi," but then says the menace of the ursine critters is only a superstition: there are "no bears." Martin Luther King famously declared that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Hopefully it bends toward rationality and artistic freedom too, even in Iran. But there is more gloom than hope in No Bears. Jessica Kiang wrote in her Variety review that where his earlier clandestine films celebrated "the liberating power of cinema," this is a darker one where Panahi "slams on the brakes." In his Slant review Sam C. Mac, noting the devotion to "meta" in Panahi shows his debt to his mentor Abbas Kiarostami, points to what is also my main objection in No Bears: that it's overburdened by an "increasingly convoluted plot" developed to illustrate its themes, and is not, despite what some critics have said, as visually interesting as his other recent films. But it is part of an œuvre that we cannot overlook.

No Bears 106 mins., in Farsi (Farsi title خرس نیست/Khers Nist), debuted at Venice Sept. 9, 2022 and was shown in about 50 other international festivals, including Toronto and New York. Its official US theatrical release was Dec. 23, 2022 in New York City (Film Forum). It premiered on the Criterion Channel Apr. 18, 2023, where it was screened for this review.

Metacritic ratings of NYFF 2022 Films and links to reviews

Opening Night
“White Noise”
Dir. Noah Baumbach
Metacritic: 66%

Centerpiece
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”
Dir. Laura Poitras
Metacritic: 90%

Closing Night
“The Inspection”
Dir. Elegance Bratton
Metacritic: 73%

NYFF 60th Anniversary Celebration
“Armageddon Time”
Dir. James Gray
Metacritic: 74%

“Aftersun”
Dir. Charlotte Wells
Metacritic: 95%

“Alcarràs”
Dir. Carla Simón
Metacritic: 85%

“All That Breathes”
Dir. Shaunak Sen
Metacritic: 87%

“Corsage”
Dir. Marie Kreutzer
Metacritic: 76%

“A Couple”
Dir. Frederick Wiseman
Metacritic: 74%

“De Humani Corporis Fabrica”
Dir. Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Metacritic: 90%

“Decision to Leave”
Dir. Park Chan-wook
Metacritic: 84%

“Descendant”
Dir. Margaret Brown
Metacritic: 87%

“Enys Men”
Dir. Mark Jenkin
Metacritic: 77%

“EO”
Dir. Jerzy Skolimowski
Metacritic: 85%

“The Eternal Daughter”
Dir. Joanna Hogg
Metacritic: 80%

“Master Gardener”
Dir. Paul Schrader
Metacritic: 59

“No Bears”
Dir. Jafar Panahi
Metacritic: 92%

“The Novelist’s Film”
Dir. Hong Sangsoo
Metacritic: 82%

“One Fine Morning”
Dir. Mia Hansen-Løve
Metacritic: 85%

“Pacifiction”
Dir. Albert Serra
Metacritic: 79%

“R.M.N.”
Dir. Cristian Mungiu
Metacritic: 75%

“Return to Seoul”
Dir. Davy Chou
Metacritic: 88%

“Saint Omer”
Dir. Alice Diop
Metacritic: 91%

“Scarlet”
Dir. Pietro Marcello
Metacritic: 69%

“Showing Up”
Dir. Kelly Reichardt
Metacritic: 81%

“Stars at Noon”
Dir. Claire Denis
Metacritic: 64%

“Stonewalling”
Dir. Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka
Metacritic: 84%

“TÁR”
Dir. Todd Field
Metacritic: 92%

“Trenque Lauquen”
Dir. Laura Citarella
Metacritic: tbd

“Triangle of Sadness”
Dir. Ruben Östlund
Metacritic: 63%

“Unrest”
Dir. Cyril Schäublin
Metacritic: tbd

“Walk Up”
Dir. Hong Sangsoo
Metacritic: 86%

ALBERT SERRA: PACIFICTION (2022)

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MAGIMEL CHAUFFEURED ON JET SKI IN PACIICTION

Benoît Magimel triumphs winging it as a slimy French colonial bigwig

Benoît Magimel played the corrupt, manipulative son of gangsterish political boss Gérard Depardieu in the intricately plotted 2016-1018 French TV series "Marseille." Now he is Catalan auteur Albert Serra's Tahiti would be high roller High Commissioner De Roller in the drolly named Pacifiction, a slow-burning drama with almost no conventional plotline at all, that pacifies us and intrigues us instead with its deeply unnerving, vaguely surreal mood-picture of colonial wickedness, what Bradshaw called "its stealthy evocation of pure evil." It's beautiful, and Magimel's improvisations that ooze with slimy charm and weave double-breasted linen façades of invisibility and fake good will never disappoint. If the film works for you, and it worked for me and for many others, you will be on the edge of your seat at well over two hours scrutinizing the beautiful dark images of the Tahitian night in search of a climax that never quite comes but whose premonitions will haunt you with their teasing lack of resolution.

Serra's previous films have involved historical figures "hanging out," Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, then Casanova meeting Dracula (2013), or just slowly dying in the case of Louis XIV embodied by Jean-Pierre Léaud (2016). His last film (2020), which I haven't seen, and was less well received, consists of "bucholic debauchery" of pre-revolutionary French aristocrats. Pacifiction, the most complex and satisfying of Serra's films that I've seen, is set in the present and refers hauntingly to the nineties when France - not exactly on Tahiti, but on many outlying islands - From 1966 to 1974 blew up 41 nuclear weapons in above-ground tests in French Polynesia, grossly underestimating the fallout and human toll of cancer and deformed offspring for generations to come. Now there is a rumor going around that a return to nuclear testing on the islands is being planned.

In Pacifiction High Commissioner De Roller appears in many settings. Mostly he charms or wings it as a collaborator. Notably he must also encounter Matahi (Matahi Pambrun), a young local firebrand who warns him about coming demonstrations against nuclear testing. It's not a friendly meeting, but even this time De Roller comes up close and talks in a low voice, making it feel like he and Matahi are collaborators. Elsewhere he denies that any such thing is afoot; assures that he will do everything he can to make sure it doesn't happen; or he says he is an underling and knows nothing; or, to cohorts, in confidence, says he doesn't care; toward film's end with his silent Sancho Panza, Lois (Lluís Serrat, who played that role for Serra in 2006), he declares that it's going to be more than testing, it's going to destroy everything, and they're going to be long gone and don't give a damn.

A trouble is that as evidenced by Lois, except for an elegant, tall, trans person called Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau) who wants to become De Roller's assistant and does so, and that quickly passed over moment of challenge from Matahi Pambrun, there's rarely anybody on the highly colored 4K screen sipping fruity drinks or riding chauffeured jet skis as interesting as Magimel. But Magimel as De Roller is a cipher too, just a fascinating one.

Perhaps it's how undefined the figures are that makes them haunting, part of the mystery this film weaves. There's a Portuguese, Ferreira (Alexandre Melo), turned up hung over and without a passport. Is he an enemy or a victim? There's the often-referred to "Admiral" (Marc Susini), seen drunkenly dancing at the sleazy nightclub De Roller drops in on, whose proprietor Morton appears in a cameo by Sergi Lopez. There's Mike (Mike Landscape), an American, seen with Fereira, clearly not friendly towards De Roller. These and others are never defined and remain troubling ciphers.

As Guy Lodge writes in his Variety review, with De Roller, "whether he’s appeasing local community leaders to pave the way for a new luxury casino development, paying tribute to a visiting French novelist attempting a Gauguin-style creative exile, or simply making small talk with fellow patrons at the sleazy neighborhood nightclub...every encounter is a negotiation and a performance." It's the endless slow unrolling of these that makes Pacifiction, as Lodge says, as do many, "Curiously hypnotic."

Widening the description, A.O. Scott of the New York Times called the film "John le Carré by way of David Lynch" and "a feverish and haunting but also wry and meditative rumination on power, secrecy and the color of clouds over water at sunset." Yes, it also ruminates on the, for us city dwellers, almost unhealthy lushness of tropical greenery, tropical rain, intensely tinted tropical skies. Their beauty is cloying, and Serra seeks out carefully here, with premeditation, the enhanced creepiness of vast moral evil when observed in a setting of postcard-perfect loveliness.

The slowness is part of Serra's working process. His declared method is to shoot fast and play out slow. Many hours of film were shot in only four days. The shooting was supervised by dp Artur Tort in 16mm. with three 4K Black Magic Pocket Cameras with zoom lenses with cameramen working autonymously. The successive scenes are all autonymous too, not fully defined as relating to each other. They are spliced together, the way the surrealists made their "Exquisite Corpse" foldups of separate drawings whose connection the artists didn't know. Binding Pacifiction's image-world is what Lee Marshall of Screen Daily calls "a rich soundscape that pushes the oneiric envelope and takes certain scenes into paranoid-thriller genre territory." There is a restrained, satisfyingly spooky score by Marc Verdaguer and Joe Robinson that becomes particularly effective with the empty, haunting final images.

The methods are willfully unconventional: at least Serra means them to be. And how it all fits together depends as much on our imaginations as this artistry. This is the beauty of Beenoît Magimel as an actor. Kept ignorant of script, with storyline an outmoded concept, Magimmel contributes the unifying source of a series of Rorschach blots that almost mean something. We put them together in our minds helped by the conviction Magimel brings. Kurt Brokaw in The Independent admiringly described this "slowest slow-burner in many a season" as "a picture that coils around you and then starts squeezing in," working "on the disturbing premise that what happened in a distant past was a prelude to what’s going to happen again." The result, in another rave, this time from Christian Blauvelt of IndieWire, is that this is "the art film of the year," but perhaps also Serra's most accessible.

Pacifiction/Pacifiction-Tourment sur les îles, 162 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes May 26, 2022. It was also shown at Munich, Jerusalem, Melbourne, Beijing and dozens of other international festivals, including Toronto, New York (in the Main Slate), Vienna, Tokyo and Taipei. The film has won great admiration among French critic s; not so much with the French audience. Its AlloCiné press rating is 4.0 (80%); audience rating 2.7 (56%). Magimel won the César for Best Actor, becoming the first male actor ever to do so a second year in a row, 2022's being for Émanuelle Bercot's Peaceful/De son vivant. Metacritic rating: 75%. Pacifiction received limited US theatrical release February 17, 2023. It now is on Mubi and Amazon Prime video.

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STILL FROMPACIICTION

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BENOÎT MAGIMEL, PAHOA MAHAGAFANAU IN PACIFICTIONA

PAUL SCHRADER: THE MASTER GARDENER (2022)

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JOEL EGERTON AND SIGOURNEY WEAVER

Familiar ground

There's a certain danger for reviewers to write about this film as part of a trilogy and not look at it too closely for itself. It's certainly a must for fans of the writer-director who've seen the much admired First Reformed and the less so Card Counter. (For the record I admired the second just as much as the first, and enjoyed it considerably more.) They're all about tormented and "lonely" men who are looking for expiation and revenge for a burdensome past, Ethan Hawke's Toller in an old church, Oscar Isaac's Tillich in a succession of gambling casinos, now Joel Egerton's Narvel Roth as chief horticulturalist of the ancestral garden of a southern mansion. All three actors give terrific performances. Egerton is so tightly wound you tense up watching him.

Norvel, as cunningly crafted by Egerton, is great as a singular object. But the last prong of the trilogy doesn't work as well as either of its two predecessors. One trouble is that by now there is more to the trilogy than there is to this film. This despite Sigourney Weaver's being terrifyingly off-putting as Roth's boss lady-mistress, Miss Haverhill (or Norma), and Quintessa Swindell being beguiling as Maya, the young biracial woman, Norma's grandniece brought in as a gardening trainee by Norma's command and soon very close to Norvel. Queen, knave, pawn? These seem like chess pieces, the grand colonial mansion and its grounds like the board, the action magnificently assured but artificial, the finale murky, like much of the photography of the dp for the whole trilogy,Alexander Dynan. Why must the scenes, except for some tacked-on shots of flowers in bloom, be so dark? And while we're at it, why must each protagonist in the trilogy wind up seated at a desk tormentedly writing into a journal every single night? Does Schrader get to be as mannered and repetitious as Bresson? There's a risk of self-parody here. I understand there was laughter when the first tormented-journal-writing shot came on screen at the New York Film Festival.

There's still plenty of excitement in Master Gardener. Norvel seems about to explode, Norma is haughty and sexy, and we begin to see what's going on when Norvel takes his shirt off and reveals a perfectly sculpted torso covered over with beautifully executed fascist tattoos. Yes, he's a recovering racist (and we actually dip into a 12-step meeting) - though I, at least, never quite got what his special relation with his parole officer was or what he actually has done. Instead, we get constantly lectured in voiceover by Norvel about the history of gardening, which is boring and repetitious and feels like filler. Whatever Schrader's relation to horticulture (or not) he makes it seem a tacked-on element here, whether Norvel is teaching his pupils to snort loam to get the ancestral feel of soil or brandishing stem-clippers menacingly at poor white southern baddies. But there is tension, every time Norvel climbs up on Norma's palatial porch and pets her family pooch, or sits down for lunch with Maya. Eventually there will be the obligatory violence, and also retaliation, redemption, and love. But though Egerton is utterly convincing as a fierce repressed personality the writing doesn't work out Norvel's sin and salvation with enough diligence and at the end there wasn't, for me, enough emotion, or enough that felt real going on.

Master Gardener, 111 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 3, 2022 and showed next month in the Main Slate at the NYFF, featuring also in two dozen other international festivals. Limited US theatrical release began May 19, 2023. Metacritic rating: 63%

PIETRO MARCELLO: SCARLET/L'ENVOL (2022)

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JULIETTE JOUAN, LOUIS GARREL IN SCARLET

Prince charming falls from the sky

TRAILER

The respected, eccentric Italian documentarian Pietro Marcello garnered further fame and admiration through his large-scale 2019 Italian language adaptation of the Jack London novel Martin Eden. Now for a second feature, set a little later in the early twentieth century right after World War I, he switches to the French language, and a smaller canvas. L'envol ("flying away"), is freely adapted from Scarlet Sails, a 1923 Russian novel by Alexander Grin. Described as a fairy tale for adults and children alike, it is two stories, both earthy and fanciful: the coming of age tale of Juliette (Juliette Jouan, in a striking debut, with four younger actresses), a girl of peasant origins who rises to higher things and finds a romantic boyfriend who literally falls from the sky; and the travails of Raphaël, her soulful, earthbound dad, who "works with wood," but never gets his due as a fine craftsman.

The new movie is thick with Marcello's documentary atmosphere, hybrid use of new 16mm footage and (ever more skillfully) blended-in archival film background, and elaborated with some musical numbers à la Jacques Demy with songs by the Lebanese-French composer Gabriel Yared. A lot to chew on, at times a bit much but sometimes impressively original and rich in texture - if not enough to hide the conventional storyline and some corny romantic moments, or the fact that despite vivid surfaces, there are lacunae in the narrative. Flaws aside, you don't normally get anything this rich and unique at the cineplex, and if you can see it in a theater, you my all means should.

The opening half hour is dominated by two well-weathered and salty adults. First is Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry, the ogreish father in Giradudie's Staying Vertical) who looks like John C. Reilly only squatter and uglier and with a limp that's sometimes more of a jaunty hobble. He wanders into the village, apparently left over from the Great War, and meets Madame Adeline (actress-director Noémie Lvovsky, in earth-mother mode and having a grand time). She is the landlady of his former house, living in it now and caring for a little girl she tells him is his daughter, all that's left him since his wife, it appears, is dead.

Why and how that happened and whether the child is really legitimate, since the gone wife was violated by someone in town, are things to be hashed over in those opening segments when the the only music is Raphaël's plaintive but vigorous little accordion. A lot of this may not matter so much later - sometimes Marcello seems to lose sight of the big picture - but it's all thoroughly absorbing while it's going on. We're in that mix of authenticity and high camp of Claude Barri's 1980's Pagnol remakes, with Marcello's own documentary edge added and Marco Graziaplena's closeup-intense and lushly colorful 16mm cinematography heightening Thiéry's and Lvovsky's compelling if slightly hammy performances.

There's a fairytale element throughout in addition to the down-to-earth tone, traced through magic along with the film's feel-good storyline. Madame Adeline practices necromancy and "seeing" and draws little Juliette into it. This strain sounds a deeper note in the white-haired worker of spells (known as "La magicienne") who dwells in the forest and river, played by French cinema's no. 1 earth mother, Yolande Moreau, who as it happens played Noémie Lvovsky's mother in Lvovsky's own Camille Rewinds a decade ago. Contrast these kinds of women's rural spell-weaving with the practical magic Raphaël can simply work with his hands, repairing and tuning an old piano and making finely crafted dolls he sells in the city, when his carpentry skills aren't appreciated locally. But whether or not the spells work, Raphaël is doomed to have a hard time. Eventually as the years go by the dolls go out of style, replaced by metal and electrical toys. What happens to Juliette is harder to pinpoint and her character, though cherished, is less fully developed. She flourishes, sings, plays the piano, swims, and is happy, although she is scorned as a "witch", not entirely explicably, by the villagers.

These problems remain - Juliette's low reputation, Raphaël's struggle to earn a livelihood - but the focus shifts in the second half to romance. Juliette's prince charming appears in the dashing, handsome form of Jean (a mustachioed Louis Garrel, charming as always), a young "adventurer" who comes out of the sky when his one-engine prop plane is brought down by a carburetor problem. He says in his defense that he is not an adventurer but works, using his plane. But what he actually does is never explained.

Jean and Juliette first meet in a studied romantic set piece while both are bathing alone in the river, with her singing. She takes the lead and kisses him. He is smitten. He learns in the village later how they mock and exclude her and her family. Why she has this reputation is as unclear as what has become of her earlier intellectual promise, except that when Raphaël gives her a choice as a young girl whether or not to go away for a better education she decides to stay.

Much later Raphaël, still desperate for work after all these years, is awarded the challenging job of making the figurehead for a boat, painstakingly hand-carving it out of a large block of wood. It's admittedly an archaic ornament, a last sad hope of proving to the village wood craftsmen, as he's tried to for years, that he's gifted at "working with wood" and worthy of employment. But he is at the end of his tether and his physical strength and this turns out to be too much for him.

Though Juliette is first to kiss Jean, she drives him away - and then regrets it. All this haas something to do with red sails that appear beyond the forests, and magic, or hexes, that will bring Jean back to Juliette in a downed plane, and Madame Adeline's muscular spells get Jean's smashed legs working quickly again, after his second, rougher descent from the sky. Jean and Juliette are united now. Marcello's film remains true to its earthy fairytale style.

This may float your boat, or it may not. I was all in early on, absorbed by Thiéry and Lvovsky's gnarly vividness and the hybrid recreations of period. Later the narrative was marred somewhat by what reviewer (in Playlist) called a "muddled pace." In the love of vivid moments, narrative links are forgotten. But Marcello has produced another wholly sui generis film, which at its best moments is headily atmospheric and a delight to the eye and ear and Garrel and newcomer Jouan make a lovely couple.

Scarlet/L'envol,, 100 mins., debuted in Cannes Directors' Fortnight May 18, 2022. Also Rome, Vienna, Seville, Stockholm and other festivals, Metacritic rating: 74%.AlloCiné press rating 3.2 (64%). US theatrical release by Kino Lorber beginning June 9, 2023. Now playing in New York (IFC Center) and in Los Angeles from Jun. 23, 2023. Coming to the Bay Area July 7.

HONG SANG-SOO: WALK UP (2022)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/tphss.jpg
HAE HYO-KOWN AND JEONGSU IN WALK UP

TRAILER

A director, his women, and a building

The clever and impossibly prolific Hong Sang-soo's Walk Up is the second of two films included in the Main Slate of last year's New York Film Festival. It's distinguished from many similar Hong joints by its use of a small "tower" building of flats that seems to provide a lot of the structure of the screenplay. The sequences of scenes run through time from the bottom to the top floor of the building. Walk Up shows the director in top form. Walk Up is restricted as usual to static scenes, with fixed camera, of talking, mostly sitting at a table sipping alcoholic beverages, but (as has been pointed out) this time with a great deal happening in the plot line - just not on screen. This is an even more clever and inventive film than usual - but beware: it's disorienting and confusing, the little tower building almost becoming a puzzle palace.

It undercuts the entertainment value how surreal and disorienting Walk Up is. As more than one critic has said, you don't know at the end if any of it happened. You also may not be sure of the time sequence. There's too little to hold onto. At least that's how it was for me. Other experienced Hong-watchers may not be bothered, and may enjoy the familiar skewering for male (and female) ego and the playing around with the familiar Hong theme of a (successful, festival-darling) movie director whose life and career may or may not be in serious trouble but whose promiscuous flirtations with women never flag. However, the sudden leaps forward in time (and to another floor, and the male protagonist's being with another woman) took away from the ordinary human value of the experiences on offer, for me at least.

Walk Up is more purely enjoyable at first because the confusing leaps and lack of guidelines haven't yet begun. We are watching at first several women, and later one man, the director, who assumes a central position. The man is the movie director Byungsoo (Hae-hyo Kwon, a handsome grey-haired actor, seen before in Hong films but not in the lead till now). We meet the tall Ms. Kim (the long unseen star Lee Hye-yeong, also featured in Hong's recent Novelist's Film and In Front of Your Face), the building's landlady, and, some writers have argued, rather a villain as her manipulative actions and lack of respect for the privacy of her tenants play out.

Ms. Kim is also an interior designer, and Byungsoo brings his shy, previously estranged daughter, Jeongsu (Park Mi-so), who was studying painting bur wants to shift to Ms. Kim's more practical field and study with her. He arrives in an immaculately tended old Morris car, which becomes another character, like the building. The conversation goes on after Byungsoo gets a phone call and abruptly goes off for an "important meeting" and never comes back in that sequence. This and the sequences after it differ from the usual Hong scenes in that wine is drunk in fine glasses rather than beer or soju in cups, though it's replenished from a convenience store and eventually Byungsoo, seeking comfort, winds up back to beer and soju. Needless to say, whatever the tipple, the ladies in the first sequence get tipsy while they discuss art, business, and life.

Upstairs is a small, reservations-only restaurant run by Sunhee (Song Seon-mi). Another sequence is a long conversation, later in time, up there between her and Byungsoo, who is not at all displeased by the fact that Sunnee turns out to be a total, adoring fan of his movies - though the audience may see a tongue-in-cheek element in her professed way of watching his films at home: drinking, and rolling around on the floor. It becomes obvious that Sunnee and Byungsoo click, and are about to become an item. It turns out now that Byungsoo's career isn't going so well, as his big project of two years has just been rejected by investors. He considers whether, during an artistically static period, it might be unseemly to attend festivals celebrating one's own work.

There are several more stages, levels, sequences to come. In the next one Byungsoo is living with Sunnee, and not doing any work. His daughter Jeongsu turns out to have rather rapidly quit the training program in interior design with Ms. Kim for something else and effectively disappeared. Earlier, a young waiter for Sunnee who likes to be called "Jules" (Shin Seok-ho) has told Jeongsu what a tough customer Ms. Kim is, and Ms. Kim's sporadic appearances and lack of cooperation over leaks, etc. show she's indeed far from the landlady you'd want or the kind of person you'd trust.

Later still there is a conversation between Byungsoo and Jiyoung (Cho Yunhee), an estate agent who may be a new relationship for him or possibly Jeunsu's mother. By this scene, time sequences have become disorienting. In this sequence Jiyoung provides Byungsoo with supportive, affectionate care and gemütlichkeit: she grills meat for him and serves him soju, feeds him expensive wild ginseng with honey, and buys him special expensive cigarettes. He is unwell now, but never till this been so well cared for.

Jonathan Romney, in his Screen Daily review, notes how the black and white camerawork, which like the writing, directing, and editing, is all done by Hong himself, takes moments to linger on the all white walls, stairwell, and an interestingly shaped kitchen curved like something by Frank Lloyd Wright, and suggests that this intimacy with interiors makes this Hong film the one most closely linked yet with the work of the Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu. (Mayabe he's just showing off what is clearly an architecturally interesting building.) Romney names the theme of Walk Up as that of a director trying "to find a place to truly belong," which does indeed make sense of this film's shifting sequences.

It remains to refer to the enthusiastic Variety review by Jessica Kiang, one of the best writers covering festivals these days. Kiang, whose review is highly recommended as an adjunct to watching this film if you like reading reviews, suggests that Walk Up satisfies the urges of those of us who walk around streets at dusk and long to enter into the living rooms that glow in front of us as lights go on inside: we are peeking into people's living rooms. It is Kiang who particularly emphasizes and details what a "villain" Ms. Kim is. She is not bothered by the fact that when the film's over we're not sure how much of it's really "true" and how much is "just Hong, through Byungsoo, trying on different lives for size." After all one should grant that there is and perhaps has always been and element of the inexplicable and contradictory in Hong's films. It's in the improvisatory and rapid way he works. And while he thrives chiefly in the festival world and not that of (dwindling) commercial cinemas, he remains a unique and fascinating filmmaker to watch.

Walk Up 97 mins., debuted Sept. 15, 2022 at Toronto; NYFF Oct. 2; opened in Korean cinemas Nov. 3, 2022. US release Mar. 24, 2023. Starts at the Roxie, San Francisco, Fri., May 5, 2023. Metacritic rating: 86%.

HONG SANG-SOO: WALK UP (2022)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/tphss.jpg
HAE HYO-KOWN AND JEONGSU IN WALK UP

TRAILER

A director, his women, and a building

The clever and impossibly prolific Hong Sang-soo's Walk Up is the second of two films included in the Main Slate of last year's New York Film Festival. It's distinguished from many similar Hong joints by its use of a small "tower" building of flats that seems to provide a lot of the structure of the screenplay. The sequences of scenes run through time from the bottom to the top floor of the building. Walk Up shows the director in top form. Walk Up is restricted as usual to static scenes, with fixed camera, of talking, mostly sitting at a table sipping alcoholic beverages, but (as has been pointed out) this time with a great deal happening in the plot line - just not on screen. This is an even more clever and inventive film than usual - but beware: it's disorienting and confusing, the little tower building almost becoming a puzzle palace.

It undercuts the entertainment value how surreal and disorienting Walk Up is. As more than one critic has said, you don't know at the end if any of it happened. You also may not be sure of the time sequence. There's too little to hold onto. At least that's how it was for me. Other experienced Hong-watchers may not be bothered, and may enjoy the familiar skewering for male (and female) ego and the playing around with the familiar Hong theme of a (successful, festival-darling) movie director whose life and career may or may not be in serious trouble but whose promiscuous flirtations with women never flag. However, the sudden leaps forward in time (and to another floor, and the male protagonist's being with another woman) took away from the ordinary human value of the experiences on offer, for me at least.

Walk Up is more purely enjoyable at first because the confusing leaps and lack of guidelines haven't yet begun. We are watching at first several women, and later one man, the director, who assumes a central position. The man is the movie director Byungsoo (Hae-hyo Kwon, a handsome grey-haired actor, seen before in Hong films but not in the lead till now). We meet the tall Ms. Kim (the long unseen star Lee Hye-yeong, also featured in Hong's recent Novelist's Film and In Front of Your Face), the building's landlady, and, some writers have argued, rather a villain as her manipulative actions and lack of respect for the privacy of her tenants play out.

Ms. Kim is also an interior designer, and Byungsoo brings his shy, previously estranged daughter, Jeongsu (Park Mi-so), who was studying painting bur wants to shift to Ms. Kim's more practical field and study with her. He arrives in an immaculately tended old Morris car, which becomes another character, like the building. The conversation goes on after Byungsoo gets a phone call and abruptly goes off for an "important meeting" and never comes back in that sequence. This and the sequences after it differ from the usual Hong scenes in that wine is drunk in fine glasses rather than beer or soju in cups, though it's replenished from a convenience store and eventually Byungsoo, seeking comfort, winds up back to beer and soju. Needless to say, whatever the tipple, the ladies in the first sequence get tipsy while they discuss art, business, and life.

Upstairs is a small, reservations-only restaurant run by Sunhee (Song Seon-mi). Another sequence is a long conversation, later in time, up there between her and Byungsoo, who is not at all displeased by the fact that Sunnee turns out to be a total, adoring fan of his movies - though the audience may see a tongue-in-cheek element in her professed way of watching his films at home: drinking, and rolling around on the floor. It becomes obvious that Sunnee and Byungsoo click, and are about to become an item. It turns out now that Byungsoo's career isn't going so well, as his big project of two years has just been rejected by investors. He considers whether, during an artistically static period, it might be unseemly to attend festivals celebrating one's own work.

There are several more stages, levels, sequences to come. In the next one Byungsoo is living with Sunnee, and not doing any work. His daughter Jeongsu turns out to have rather rapidly quit the training program in interior design with Ms. Kim for something else and effectively disappeared. Earlier, a young waiter for Sunnee who likes to be called "Jules" (Shin Seok-ho) has told Jeongsu what a tough customer Ms. Kim is, and Ms. Kim's sporadic appearances and lack of cooperation over leaks, etc. show she's indeed far from the landlady you'd want or the kind of person you'd trust.

Later still there is a conversation between Byungsoo and Jiyoung (Cho Yunhee), an estate agent who may be a new relationship for him or possibly Jeunsu's mother. By this scene, time sequences have become disorienting. In this sequence Jiyoung provides Byungsoo with supportive, affectionate care and gemütlichkeit: she grills meat for him and serves him soju, feeds him expensive wild ginseng with honey, and buys him special expensive cigarettes. He is unwell now, but never till this been so well cared for.

Jonathan Romney, in his Screen Daily review, notes how the black and white camerawork, which like the writing, directing, and editing, is all done by Hong himself, takes moments to linger on the all white walls, stairwell, and an interestingly shaped kitchen curved like something by Frank Lloyd Wright, and suggests that this intimacy with interiors makes this Hong film the one most closely linked yet with the work of the Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu. (Mayabe he's just showing off what is clearly an architecturally interesting building.) Romney names the theme of Walk Up as that of a director trying "to find a place to truly belong," which does indeed make sense of this film's shifting sequences.

It remains to refer to the enthusiastic Variety review by Jessica Kiang, one of the best writers covering festivals these days. Kiang, whose review is highly recommended as an adjunct to watching this film if you like reading reviews, suggests that Walk Up satisfies the urges of those of us who walk around streets at dusk and long to enter into the living rooms that glow in front of us as lights go on inside: we are peeking into people's living rooms. It is Kiang who particularly emphasizes and details what a "villain" Ms. Kim is. She is not bothered by the fact that when the film's over we're not sure how much of it's really "true" and how much is "just Hong, through Byungsoo, trying on different lives for size." After all one should grant that there is and perhaps has always been and element of the inexplicable and contradictory in Hong's films. It's in the improvisatory and rapid way he works. And while he thrives chiefly in the festival world and not that of (dwindling) commercial cinemas, he remains a unique and fascinating filmmaker to watch.

Walk Up 97 mins., debuted Sept. 15, 2022 at Toronto; NYFF Oct. 2; opened in Korean cinemas Nov. 3, 2022. US release Mar. 24, 2023. Starts at the Roxie, San Francisco, Fri., May 5, 2023. Metacritic rating: 86%.