WINTER BROTHERS/VINTERBRØDRE (Hlynur Pálmason 2017)
HLYNUR PÁLMASON: WINTER BROTHERS/VINTERBRØDRE (2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/9me.jpg
Cold conflict, odd job
Reviewed by Jessica Kiang in Variety at its Locarno debut: "An isolated Danish limestone plant," Kiang notes, "provides a surreally bleached-out backdrop for a strange, exceptionally crafted 'lack-of-love' story." "First there is the darkness of a limestone mine, lit only by helmet flashlights and the occasional shower of flinty sparks from a pickax connecting with rock. And then there’s the comparative dazzle of the processing plant, bleached white by a settling of lime dust and snow. Somehow these conflicting images are rendered equivalently bleak and scuzzy in Hlynur Pálmason’s challenging, deeply weird and yet peculiarly compelling directorial debut, in which a tiny community of Danish workers, clustered around a factory in the middle of nowhere, feels so isolated and remote it could well be on the surface of the moon.. . " This unique director's intentions are not always totally clear, but the action revolves around the clashes of two brothers who work at the plant, and the dubious practice by protagonist Emil of making ultra-strong hooch from chemicals filched on the work site.
aa
Maybe as Kiang asserts, this film reps an "impressively original, auspiciously idiosyncratic debut" - it can be read that way with its intense, authentic limestone mine locations and macho workers, and the various sui generis sequences Pálmason inserts. These include a pissing contest; male frontal nudity, and a fight almost to the death between the two nude brothers; a card trick and a chemical trick of water to wine or clear to dark liquid; a singularly odd manner for a boss to punish a worker; a story about a mine worker's dog loyal to the death; running video lessons by an English soldier that teach Emil how to fire an M1 rifle in combat, a skill he threatens to use.
In compliance with narrative necessity, the rifle at least gets fired, and there are strategically smashed windows. One can't help admiring the deadpan calm of Elliott Crosset Hove, the actor who plays Emil, whose resemblance to Stan Laurel gives his vicissitudes a lightness they might otherwise lack. Aki Kaurismäki might have done good things with him and with this material, had he chosen to take it on, and been Danish instead of Finnish.
However, all these elements fail to jell. The idiosyncratic scenes don't fit at all. But Kaurismäki would have known how to deal with that. What is needed is a narrative structure that makes the criminal hooch and the love triangle fit together more effectively. A striking setting, some decent actors, and oddball incidents aren't enough to meld it all together. However, there is, of course, plenty of talent and ambition here.
Winter Brothers/Vinterbrødre, 100 mins., debuted at Locarno, Aug. 2017; 17 other festival showings including Toronto, Vancouver, and London, and screened for this review as part of the 2018 Museum of Modern Art and Film Society of Lincoln Center joint series, New Directors/New Films.
ND/NF showtimes:
Thursday, March 29, 9:00pm [FSLC]
Saturday, March 31, 2:00pm [MoMA]
THE GUILTY/DEN SKYDIGE (Gustav Möller 2017)
GUSTAV MÖLLER: THE GUILTY /DEN SKYDIGE(2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/9le.jpg
JAKOB CEDERGREN IN THE GUILTY
Tense, absorbing Danish police emergency call drama marks a "crackerjack feature debut"
The Guilty was reported on earlier in Filmleaf's 2018 Sundance thread: you can read Mike D'Angelo's Letterboxd review that says Möller does "a solid if unremarkable job of sustaining visual interest while confined to a single bland location, and generates considerable suspense from noises heard tinnily through the protagonist's earpiece." They aren't heard all that tinnily, though: the auxiliary soundtrack is as full throated as it needs to be to enrich the mainly one-person drama.
An accomplished, spare tour-de-force, all the action concerning a crisis confined to a police office call station and one man, a demoted officer struggling to save a woman being abducted by her ex-husband. D'Angelo confesses to finding aspects of the story implausible, and going back and forth on the film but with a positive conclusion overall: "Thought Möller had won me back over at the end, but then he adds a cheap additional misdirection (for which I did not fall), and I got annoyed at the contrivance again. Crackerjack feature debut, though." It has been bought by Magnolia, and it got the Sundance World Cinema Audience Award. Also reviewed in Variety, Hollywood Reporter, The Village Voice, The Verge, and other publications.
This film invites comparison with Tom Hardy in Stephen Knight's 2013 Locke as a telephone tour-de-force. Anything like this is like a radio play, not at all a bad association: radio plays used to be wonderful and they stimulate the imagination more than TV or movies.
Actually Locke is in some ways more limited and others richer. Both are excellent dramas. While The Guilty plunges us in the effort of phone emergencies duty cop Asgar (Jakob Cedergren) to save a woman who has been abducted by her ex-husband in his van, Locke, while suspenseful too - that's the nature of the genre - is more a character study from the start. Tom Hardy's protagonist is a wrongdoer, like Asgar, the cop suspended from street duty with his partner Rashid (Omar Shargawi) pending a court hearing tomorrow. And tomorrow is initiation of the biggest project of architect Locke's career, which involves laying foundations for large buildings, and it has to be run by his assistant because he must go to a London hospital for the birth of his child - to a woman not his wife. He's expected at home tonight to be with his family to watch an important football match, and he won't be there either. His effort to juggle all these things and keep them from tumbling down on him is the nail-biter.
In the juggling of multiple valences the Hardy vehicle - which one can't imagine working without him - resembles the stage play Michael Shannon did in 2011 about the failing theatrical agent, Mistakes Were Made. All these works are a matter of juggling multiple strands around a single main speaker on the phone (or phones) in front of us and keeping our attention riveted. They are all portraits of the man.
Asgar becomes desperate to save Iben (Jessica Dinnage), the abducted wife, from Michael (Johan Olsen) but doesn't know the location of his van, only the district (New Zealand, Copenhagen). And that's not all he doesn't know. In this respect, The Guilty is more single minded, simple, and focused on a single set of events than the other two stories. It also seems, somehow, more "real." When watching Shannon and the arguably even more gifted Hardy I was constantly repeating to myself, "Wow, isn't this guy talented!" WithThe Guilty, I was not. This is a tribute to the scenario as well as to Jakob Cedergren's acting, which allows him to disappear into the part of Asgar, to keep it from feeling like an aria.
Guilty/Der Skyldige, 85 mins., debuted Jan. 2018 at Sundance; it was also sown at Rotterdam, Göteberg and Sun Valley, and it was screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films Mar. 2018. This is Möller's first feature; in 2015 he made a 28-min. short film about a woman seeking to leave a closed psychiatric ward.
ND/NF showtimes:
Friday, March 30, 6:00pm [MoMA]
Saturday, March 31, 6:30pm [FSLC]]
AZOUGUE NAZARE (Tiago Melo 2017)
TIAGO MELO: AZOUGUE NAZARE (2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/9ke.jpg
VALMIR DO COCO IN ASOUGUE NAZARE
A drama of popular clashes between Christian and more primitive satanic rituals in Brazil is colorful but a bit rough
Reviewed at Rotterdam in Hollywood Reporter by Neil Young, who explains the basics - how Azougue Nazare shows cultures clashing "with a reverberant clang" in this "promisingy energetic" - emphasis on "promisingly" - first feature. Specifically the conflict is between annual spectacles of a primitive tribal nature and the local Pernambuco (in NW Brazil) strain of evangelical Christianity.
The special element is Maracatu, a local tradition of an elaborately costumed celebration like the Mardi Gras Carnival, and based on roots in Brazil's time of slavery. The trouble is Tiago Melo wrangles his authentic local performers and musicians with unequal skill, and fails to develop the Christian evangelical side as clearly, or integrate his various subplots, which include a pretty young woman who wants to leave her locksmith husband, and a major performer in Maracatu, a big fat black man (Valmir do Coco), whose wife wants to have a baby by her elderly evangelical minister because a dream has told her so.
It's nice ironic twist, if filmmaker TIago Melo were as good as telling a story as Marcel Camus of the classic 1959 film Black Orpheus. But then, Camus had beautiful local stars (the Orpheus was a champion footballer) and a Greek myth. Even Carlos Diegues' updated 1999 local version of Camus's film, Orpheu, though beautiful, could not quite capture the earlier film's magic. Nothing in Azougue Nazare develops that kind of emotional power; only two peripheral actors are attractive, and there is no clear and unified central story. Neil Young acknowledges some of the cast of Melo's movie "are not the most gifted of thespians," but neither is Melo the most gifted of writer-editors. This is colorful indeed, but all pretty rough.
Azougue Nazarre, 80 mins., debuted at Rotterdam, where it won the Bright Future prize. It was screened for this review as part of the Mar. 28-Apr. 8, 2018 Museum of Modern Art-Film Society of Lincoln Center joint series, New Directors/New Films.
ND/NF showtimes:
Friday, March 30, 6:30pm [FSLC]
Saturday, March 31, 7:30pm [MoMA]
UNTIL THE BIRDS RETURN/EN ATTENDANT LES HIRONDELLES (Karim Moussaoui 2017)
KARIM MOUSSAOUI: UNTIL THE BIRDS RETURN/EN ATTENDANT LES HIRONDELLES (2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/9ne.jpg
MEHDI RAMDANI AND HANIA AMAR IN UNTIL THE BIRDS RETURN
Fitting in and standing out in the Maghreb
The Maghreb countries, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, have been so deeply influenced by outside cultures that their inhabitants suffer sometimes from split personalities. The title of Karim Moussaoui's debut feature even has a, to us, secret Arabic title. While its French and English names refer poetically to birds, the Arabic more prosaic one is "طبيعة الحال" (ṭabi'at al-ḥāl) or "The Nature of the Situation."
The film is also split into three unrelated segments, which shift back and forth between European influence and local in style and content. The first one shows a property developer whose spacious apartment, shared with his wife, would be elegant and sophisticated in Paris. Their conversations shift back and forth between French and Algerian Arabic in every sentence. When he speaks to his somewhat lazy son to urge him not to give up pursuing medicine, they speak mostly in Arabic. When he speaks later with his stylish daughter who has studied in France and vows to go back there ("It's too complicated here"), they speak only in French, with not a word of Arabic.
When the developer gets caught on a diversion road, he witnesses the violent beating of a man, about which he can do nothing. His alienation from it is shown by the fact that he never even reports it to the police after his flat tire has been fixed and he has come home. Along that deserted road are rows and rows of empty new buildings evidently never completed like many one can see in Cairo since the time of Sadat.
The second segment, with its attractive, alienated couple, might evoke Antonioni. They wind up on a long drive cross country, and are ex lovers. She is now promised to another, but they drift back together. They go to a big empty nightclub where she persuades musicians to play and reveals herself to be an excellent belly dancer. He reluctantly joins in. Later they encounter a lively group of musicians (Raïna Raï) whose playing might suggest the folklore-rock blend of the famous Moroccan group, Nass El Ghiwan.
The final segment brings up old ugly memories when a well-respected doctor is accused by a woman living in a shanty town of complicity in her mass rape during the revolution. And her son, too metaphorically for words, is a mute boy who cannot bear to be touched and speaks only in high-pitched, plaintive cries. This will haunt the doctor. But this episode too is invaded by lively local music, this time when the doctor is involved in a wedding. Instead of the spacious French-style apartment of the property developer, or the wide spaces of the car trip, the screen is filled with the oppressive, cacophonous celebration of a typical folkloric Magrebi wedding, and we can't say if the big doctor's jaunty dancing and forced smile convince anyone.
How does all this fit together? It doesn't. But while there is a kind of sympathetic fallacy in making work that exhibits the flaws one's trying to describe, the filmmaker shows skill as a storyteller and creator of mood.
Reviewed in Hollywood Reporter at Cannes by Jordan Mintzer ("An intriguingly crafted look at contemporary Algeria"), who described the film as bringing together the country's "troubles both past and present" by exploring " the damaged emotional landscape of his homeland." Cannes critics compared Moussaoui's style to Abbas Kiarostami and Leos Carax.
"Separated into three stories that are less connected than they are complementary," Mintzer writes, "the film features various characters from different backgrounds searching for a form of attachment in a country left divided by years of sectarian conflict — most notably the civil war that engulfed Algeria throughout the 1990s. While some parts are stronger than others, through its twists and turns Bird gradually builds into a tender portrait of a place, and a people, looking for ways to come together. A premiere in Cannes' Un Certain Regard sidebar should help push it into foreign festivals and markets," Mintzer concluded.
Until the Birds Return/En attendant les hirondelles, Arabic title "طبيعة الحال" (ṭabi'at al-ḥāl) or "The Nature of the Situation," 113 mins., debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, May 2017; six other international festivals and four countries theatrical release. French release 8 Nov. 2017; AlloCiné press rating a very positive 3.8 with high praise from Libération, Cahiers, and Le Monde. This is another film the Anglophone critics didn't get: Metascore an insulting 57%. Screened for this review as part of the MoMA/FSLC 2018 New Directors/New Films. A KimStim release
Showtimes:
Friday, March 30, 8:30pm [MoMA]
Saturday, March 31, 3:30pm [FSLC]
CLOSENESS/TESNOTA (Kantemir Balagov 2017)
KANTEMIR BALAGOV: CLOSENESS/TESNOTA (2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/9oe.jpg
A dose of family, in bright boxy color
Balagov's colorful intensity forces itself upon us from the start. The opening scene is of a sister and brother, whose flirtation and dirty talk may define the title for us: this is a world of family and tribal intimacy.
The title states a theme worked out narratively and visually in Balagov's intense, slow-moving film about a Jewish family in Russia. It's in squarish Academy ratio, which is claustrophobic in itself, with that effect amped up by intensifying the color of the images and making them mostly closeups, so close sometimes it's hard to see the people in the shots. The closeness is family and tribe. The opening scene is a too-intimate one between the grown brother and sister. The family is Jewish. She is a tomboy who works in their father's garage and prefers overalls. He is about to be married to his love, Lea. She has a secret lover, from an obscure tribe whom her parents might not approve of and who might not approve of her. They meet clandestinely, often in a car. Then her brother and Lea are kidnapped and held for ransom. The Jewish community, led by the rabbi, are unable to raise all the ransom money. They decide to sell the garage and its contents and this will mean they will have to move. The are constantly moving and they had begun to fit in, but that's over. Only when the brother comes back the issue becomes: will he go with the family? Will Lea? Will his sister?
All of this matters so intensely that it pushes all else away, each one thing occupying the small crowded box of the screen at a time and making it seem as if there is nothing else. Thus Balagov captures the beauty and oppression of a rich ethnic family life in a small, encroached-upon tribal community struggling to exist against the world.
Many including audience members at the Cannes Un Certain Regard original screening of this film have objected to the use of a real "snuff film," showing Russians being threatened, tortured, and killed, which goes on for several minutes. This is just the most oppressive and drawn-out passage of a film that tends, for some of us, to feel oppressive and drawn-out for much of its nonetheless distinctive and in its own way beautiful run-time.
Reviewed by Jessica Kiang as part of Un Certain Regard at Cannes in Variety: "An ethically indefensible choice mars Russian first-timer Kantemir Balagov’s otherwise impressively tough-minded debut," she began, pointing to the use of what might be considered a real 'snuff film' in its contents. "Even without its most controversial segment," Kiang said, this is "a demanding, difficult watch, presents an unavoidable [ethical dilemma}" whether to consider this inclusion remotely acceptable, of at midpoing a lengthy excerpt from a "scratchy and degraded VHS tape" of the kind we know from ISIS, of "anti-Semitic Islamist violence and murder." Tara Brady of The Irish Times explains it is "actual footage from the 1999 Dagestan massacre - in which Chechens torture Russian soldiers.". "the sequence goes on for a long time," Kiang writes, and the press notes indicate its not just realistic but real. .
Closeness is a tough-minded, rigorously composed, quite brilliantly acted story of the challenges of everyday religious prejudice and ethnic divides in the bleak heart of Russia’s North Caucasus, and in many ways Balagov’s uncompromising but stylized social realism rewards as much as it punishes. But in including this real video — essentially a snuff movie — within a fiction narrative and not announcing it as such, a line is crossed. . ." But Tara Brady concluded with: "A divisive and discombobulating new talent has arrived on the Croisette."
Closeness/Tesuta 118 mins., debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes May 2017. Opened theatrically in France, very well received (AlloCiné press rating 4.1) Reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films, FSLC and MoMA, Mar. 2018.
Showtimes:
Saturday, March 31, 4:30pm [MoMA]
Sunday, April 1, 4:30pm [FSLC]
SCARY MOTHER /SASHISHI DEDA (Ana Urushadze 2018)
ANA URUSHADZE: SCARY MOTHER/SASHISHI DEDA (2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/9pe.jpg
NATO MARVANIDZE IN SCARY MOTHER
Genius and madness are often linked, perhaps because genius is outside the norm. Plain folks may not understand it. When a brilliant writer approaches the surreal, who can follow? One of the accomplishments of Georgian director Ana Urushadze's debut feature is the way we remain unsure to the end of the middle-aged mother working on a troubling manuscript, expressing a long-repressed desire to write, has lost it, as her conventional husband says, or is creating a work of incomparable originality, as her friend the stationary store owner fervently believes.
Her husband says in the opening scene that his wife looks disheveled and worn out. Yes, she does, a bit; but throughout she is capable of maintaining an upright, elegant look as well. Urushadze maintains a nice level of clarity and a firm narrative line. Much credit is due also to Ramaz Ioseliani, the admirable actor playing Nukri, the stationary store owner, who not only champions Manana (Nato Murvanidze), but sets up a room for her in the back of his store as a retreat - and he has no ulterior motives. He really is trying to find Manana a publisher, and nurturing what he feels is an extraordinary new work of literature.
Anri (Dimitri Tatishvili), Manana's upright spouse, thinks what she has written is extreme pornography. So do some of the publishers who have looked at her 150 finished pages (she has to find an ending). But didn't they say that about Henry Miller and William Burroughs?
To us Manana may seem crazy at times, certainly. But isn't that because she is in the white heat of creative fervor?
Urushadze makes her film turn more and more into a thriller, a mystery, and a chase, admirably speeding up the tension. She introduces a fourth hand in the game: Jarji, Manana's father, who is translating the manuscript, without knowing yet that it is hers. He is played by the quite extraordinary Avtandil Makharadze, who builds up a maniacal energy of his own. Meanwhile Manana has three handsome children, two boys and a girl, all upright and fine. Where does her explosion of creative power come from? Jarji, no doubt.
The film was reviewed at Antalya Film Festival (competing) by Jessica Kiang in Variety. She described the theme of Urushadze's "darkly daring debut" as " A middle-aged Georgian woman finds freedom, ferocity and freakiness in writing her first novel" and noted, "The vast, largely unmapped terrain of a middle-aged mom’s creative life gets a witchily weird, uncompromisingly assured showcase in Georgian director Ana Urushadze’s exhilaratingly offbeat oddity. [The film's] cerebral chilliness, emotional remove and narrative abstruseness might make it a hard sell in that context. . .this is nevertheless a startling debut that wholly earns its place as standard-bearer for one of the most exciting and distinctive national cinemas to have emerged in recent years." This is indeed a fresh and original and well-made film.
Scary Mother/Sashishi Deda, 107 mins.,debuted at Locarno, won a prize at Sarajevo, also at Atalya, and was, not surprisingly, Georgia's Best Foreign Oscar entry for 2018. Screened for this review as part of FSLC and MoMA's New Directors'/New Films series, March 2018.
ND/NF showtimes:
Saturday, March 31, 9:00pm [FSLC]
Monday, April 2, 6:00pm [MoMA]
AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (Hu Bo 2018)
HU BO: AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (2018)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/9te.jpg
WANG YUWEN, LI CONGXI, YU ZHANG, AND PENG YUCHANG IN AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL
Extraordinary first film, by a young director too soon lost
This four-hour, intimate, almost real-time epic follows several people of different ages at the end of their tether who converge finally at the train station heading for the same escape, the city of Manzhouli where they say an elephant simply sits and ignores the world. The style made me, like others, think both of Edward Yang (A Brighter Summer Day) and Jia Zhang-ke (Unknown Pleasures), and this profound, ambitious work of an impressive new filmmaker takes on a tragic resonance because he committed suicide, at 29, so all this promise will never be realized again. A sad astonishment.
Reviewed at Berlin in Hollywood Reorter by Clarence Tsui: "An Elephant Sitting Still began with a myth — and ended up becoming a myth itself. Revolving around four characters shaken out of their small town stupor by an enigmatic tale about a lethargic pachyderm, the film attained instant cult status among critics at the Berlinale, where it premiered in the Forum sidebar, because of the suicide of its 29-year-old novelist-turned-director Hu Bo last October." Tsui notes a debt to s Krzysztof Kieslowski and Bela Tarr for its fatalistic worldview and "omnipresent tracking shots."
Another reviewer (actually several, the present writer included) saw elements of Edward Yang and Jia Zhangke. Tsui adds, "Elephant isn’t exactly the film maudit suggested by the difficult circumstances from which it emerged. Long and a bit unwieldy, and self-consciously philosophical in parts, yes, but Hu's first (and sadly last) feature weaves together its narrative threads clearly and sturdily." In Sight and Sound Giovanni Marchini Carnia calls the film "A shattering, soul-searching debut (and one-off)."
Writing for the site Filmstage from Berlin, Zhuo-Ning Su makes some astute observations about this film's strengths and weaknesses, notably how the director "writes microscopically, detailing the characters’ circumstances and choices at every turn, but addresses at the same time something on a much larger scale–an ancient civilization slowing losing its human touch." Zhuo-ning uses some marvellous phrases, calling the film a "grand tapestry of sorry." He's also right on the film's faults, that the "time element" may not be well-considered, making too much happening on the same day, and the "intellectual exposition," the expressions of the hopelessness and meaningless of existence, are unnecessarily repetitive. I simply find the film visually unsatisfying at some points, and too murky in the interiors by half. The much-admired long takes and long tracking shots might have been curtailed, in the interests of economy and toward the achievement of a more manageable run-time. But great talents are sometimes unwieldy and hard to contain.
In any case, the film and the stories it tells haunt you.
The way the camera doggedly, but deftly, follows the people around is somehow both obsessive and calm. In classic fashion, it is an eye: you are there. The world around is indifferent, yet penetrated with violence, cacophonous. It's nowhere and everywhere in contemporary China, dreary, vast, in rapid flux yet somehow also deserted-seeming. There is violence and indifference everywhere.
The narrative follows four main characters. There is a family that wants to put the grandfather, Lao Jin (Congxi Li), a retired man who doesn't look very old and is perfectly agile, into a home for the aged to make more space. And this man loses his dog when it is attacked by another dog that causes its death. A teenage boy, who emerges as the main protagonist, is Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang), a 17-year-old who stands up for himself and his buddy against the menaces and accusations of the local school bully, which results in a shoving match and the bully's fall down a cement stairway, apparently leaving him dead. Wei Bu's classmate and crush, Huang Ling (Wang Yuwen), is dating the married vice-principal to escape from her cruel mother. Yu Cheng (Yu Zhang), a slick, goodlooking petty hoodlum type, in the area and vaguely connected to the others, we learn later has slept on this momentous day with his best friend's girl, and sees his best friend jump to his death when he knows. The neatly woven action eventually brings these four people together on the way to Manzhouli.
Elephant Sitting Still, 234 mins., debuted at the Berlinale. Also shown at New Directors/New Films, where it was screened for this review. The late filmmaker, a Beijing Film Academy graduate, had also directed a couple of award-winning short films and published two novels.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/hubo.jpg
HU BO
COCOTE (Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias 2017)
NELSON CARLO DE LOS SANTOS ARIAS: COCOTE (2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/OTM2.jpg
A clash of images and rituals
The Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias is drunk on sound and images. He enjoys sliding between color and black and white and different size formats, between still, wide pans and uptight agitated coverage of intense local gospel meetings amped by drum beats, depicting a clash of Catholicism and West African mysticism.His use of sound early and late in Cocote, his debut feature, isn't just ethnographic but radical and dramatic. In purely cinematic terms the viewer shares the intoxication of this interwoven ethnic, ritual, and visual blend - until it begins to clog the intended narrative a bit. Because there is a narrative, and an intensely driven, even if blocked one.
Alberto (Vicente Santos), the stifled, conflicted protagonist, a tall, awkward black man, is a gardner on a wealthy estate. He is also an evangelical Christian. We see only the wide, distant shot of the very large pool, which bookends the film. News of his father's death takes him to his rural "pueblo." Here he learns his father has been brutally murdered, decapitated, probably by a policeman. He is moved to revenge. But that goes against his Christian faith. So does the requirement that he attend pagan ceremonies rooted in Dominican Vodou that are part of the local obsequies for his father.
Never mind that Alberto is blocked morally and emotionally. The film itself is sidetracked by a wealth of documentary footage of those ceremonies and of impassioned, repetitive preaching that the director must have, understandably, thought too good to leave out, but somehow does not have quite the skill to include and still maintain narrative rhythm and suspense.
The synthesis of ethnographic documentary and scripted drama is an intoxicating but uneasy one. There is a situation here, more than a plotline. The real locations and people never cease to feel alive and exotic, but the revenge story keeps getting submerged, and it doesn't feel right. But it isn't entirely wrong either, though: Alberto is being urged to revenge by his family, but it goes strongly against his gospel Christianity, so he really is stuck. Perhaps if Alberto were stronger as a character all this would work better. As it is, as a first feature by a previous maker of a documentary and several shorts, this is a promising sign of ambition and passion that's been justifiably compared to the films of Glauber Rocha and fiction of Roberto Bolaño.
Cocote is a study of class and power. After an hour of glorious images, documentary vibrancy, and narrative stagnation, Alberto meets up with someone who may be his father's killer, a cop who explains that helps but means nothing against the powerful. It sounds as violent a world as anywhere in Latin America, as Mexico among the cartels.
The climax feels rushed into the last fifteen minutes - though there is a beautifully ironic, and differently documentary, final sequence of rich folks talking falsely sociable nonsense around that big pool.
Cocote, 107 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 2017 in the Signs of Life section, winning the Best Film Award, and the film has been in a half dozen other international film festivals, including Toronto, Hamburg, Mar del Plata and Miami. It was screened for this review as part of the 2018 edition of the Museum of Modern Art-Film Society of Lincoln Center series, New Directors/New Films. A Grasshopper Film release.
In New Directors/New Films:
Tuesday, April 3, 6:15pm [FSLC]
Wednesday, April 4, 8:15pm [MoMA
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/OiP.jpg
THE GREAT BUDDHA + (Huang Hsin-yao 2017)
HUANG HSIN-YAO: THE GREAT BUDDHA + (2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/IuYo.jpg
CRES CHUANG AND BAMBOO CHU-SHENG CHEN IN THE GREAT BUDDHA
Forbidden pleasures
Huang Hsin-yao's catch-all titled The Great Buddha is the most clever and witty film in this year's New Directors series so far and likely to remain so. For some reason it reminded me of the droll Mexican minimalist Fernando Eimbcke of Lake Tahoe and Duck Season, though really its emphasis on electronic game-playing and its well-thought-out nexus of religious hypocrites, crooked politicians, minor fat-cats and low-level losers is different; so is the self-reflective irony of the filmmaker introducing himself before th film starts to roll, and interrupting with commentary. Maybe it's the drollery and sympathy for underdogs that's the link with Eimbcke. Anyway the pleasure felt similar.
The dangerously scrawny Belly Button (Bamboo Chu-Sheng Chen) and bespectacled Pickle (Cres Chuang) are a perfect pair of loser buddies: they couldn't be more invisible, and that's why entering their imaginative world feels special and their quietly combative intimacy feels real. Pickle is the night security guard for a little factory that produces Buddhas, including one big one that's featured in the spectral final scene where it's the center of a cultish celebration. But it looks like a fly-by-night place. Do these guys have any life or friend than each other? Belly Button is a scavenger who lives in a shack. He reminded me of the father in Kurosawa's Do-des-ka-den. PIckle moonlights in a funeral band to help care for his aging mother. That his status matches Belly Button's is shown by his sharing girlie mags with sticky pages and receiving and consuming with only mild complaint partly frozen, expired bento meals dumped by convenience stores. Pickle at least has a job and a mother, but as Maggie Lee points out in her review for Variety written at Taipei, Belly Button gives himself a sense of status by bullying or looking down on Pickle for his naivete about most things and general nerdiness.
Into this yucky world comes a dangerous entertainment: watching the factory boss' dashcam memory card images from his new Mercedes, Belly Button's idea of entertainment to fill in for a broken TV. Now this is a medium new to feature films. But it turns out to be a great one. The images of The Great Buddha proper are black and white; the dashcam ones are in lurid digital color. The metaphor is one aspect, the rest is sheer visual pleasure. The trouble for the surreptitious snoopers is most of the memory card videos are nothing. But a few times they hit pay dirt.
Pickle's boss Kevin Huang (Leon Dai) is sleazier and more evil than they had imagined. The dashcam card shows him in, shall we say, compromising positions with several women, not his wife.
Another aspect, a subplot that's not insignificant but never gets in the way of the loser drama, is the big Buddha, and the cult that visits and the annoying woman who critiques the Buddha, on which her group is to take delivery. And some appearances of local officials, throwing their weight around.
The new formats, including the self-reflective voiceover, the dashcam adventure, and the passages increasingly depicting boss Huang as a creepy loser who yet deserves some sympathy for the hairpiece toupee he always wears, are the highpoints of this inventive and droll production that's none the less for being an expansion of a prize-winning short. I must rely on Maggie Lee for the information, not a surprise however, that the two underdogs' dialog reps "vulgar banter" that's "wickedly funny", and that in Huang's personal voiceover, "choice use of puns and obscenities in Taiwanese dialect is a source of constant delight as well as insight into his protagonists’ inner thoughts." The "+" in the English title is a reference to the iPhone6, she also explains. I am sure much more is to be gleaned in repeated watches of this thought-provoking and ingenious film, which not surprisingly is heralded by Lee as the best in a year of resurgence of a recently dormant Taiwan cinema, and the big prizewinner at the local Oscar equivalents.
The Great Buddha +, 104 mins, in Taiwanese and Mandarin, debuted at Taipei, and was subsequently included in ten or so other international festivals including Toronto, Busan, Tokyo and Palm Springs, opening on the Internet in Canada and the US in Feb 2018 after Jan. limited releases. Screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center 2018 New Directors/New Films series.
.
ND/NF showtimes:
Tuesday, April 3, 8:45pm [MoMA]
Wednesday, April 4, 6:30pm [FSLC]
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/OTM3.jpg
BLACK MOTHER (Khalik Allah 2018)
KHALIK ALLAH: BLACK MOTHER (2018)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/OTM5.jpg
Jamaica in a visual tone poem
Khalik Allah's short documentary feature is in the nature of a long poem of cross purposes about Jamaica, land of the director's maternal grandfather, with many motion picture snapshots of local people from different times accompanied by multiple voices speaking about life, motherhood, God, Rasta and ganja, and other germane matters but not specifically lined up with the faces we see. There are country people and city people, prostitutes and holy man, though the overwhelming focus is on the poor. There is black and white and color, Super-8mm, HD video, and Bolex footage, there is meditative thought of death and it all ends with the birth of a child, the whole being organized into three trimesters following the pregnancy. This is not the kind of documentary that gives you specific information, but it may lead you to fall back on your own related memories in a more personal way. It is highly evocative, but negotiating the non-correspondence of related images can also ultimately be wearying.
According to Christopher Gray of Slant, writing from the True/False documentary festival in Columbia, MO, this film follows quite logically from Allah's first, which used the same technique of germane but out-of-synch images and testimony in an impressionistic montage, the 2015 Field Niggas being focused on drug addicts, prostitutes, and cops in a single intersection in Harlem. Gray adds that Beyoncé's Lemonade film works similarly, and Allah was its director as well.
Black Mother, 75 mins., was screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center 2018 series New Directors/New Films.
ND/NF showtimes:
Wednesday, April 4, 6:00pm [MoMA]
Saturday, April 7, 6:00pm [FSLC]
DJON ÁFRICA (João Miller Guerra, Filipa Reis 2018)
JOÃO MILLER GUERRA, FILIPA REIS: DJON ÁFRICA (2018)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/OTM6.jpg
Picaresque ramble of a party boy searching for his father
João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis are some more documentary filmmakers who've turned to a fiction feature based on their own material, and the focus of their last non-fiction effort, a young man of Cape Verdean origins born in Portugal. There are several classic themes wrapped up in this easy-going movie, which is more on atmosphere and the occasional colorful character than interesting plot twists. Yes, this is a bit of a picaresque tale, even an Odyssey - its hero is seduced from time to time by pretty women and intoxicating drink - and he gets seriously sidetracked and relieved of his wallet. Miguel (Miguel Moreira), also known as Djon África (Djon pronounced "John") or Tibars.
He's using electric clippers on the sides in the opening scene, leaving only some thin, stylish dreadlocks, making his look halfway between rasta and rap. Miguel is a big, easygoing school dropout of 25 with jutting lips and big gap teeth, and he's strong to be hired on construction sites, where he makes money he saves up for his first trip to the Cape Verde island archipelago off the West Coast of AFrica, to find his father, whom he's never seen. Even on the plane, in sequence that is half fantasy, he is surrounded by pretty Cape Verdean young women, and freely imbibes grogue, the strong national drink.
This is the pattern, and since he speaks the language and moves freely, Miguel slides right into the sunny world he meets. A big party leads to being fleeced by the pretty ladies, who disappear next morning. Eventually he winds up hired on a ferry boat by a tough old crone puffing a ciggy who keeps an old cow and some goats up in the hills. She hires him to do the work, in exchange for board, but no WC, because there ain't none. There is a gentle magic in these sequences, and they provide an engaging picture of a pleasant place with good-looking people, however crooked the government, as they tell him, may be.
There's no more to it than that.
Written by Pedro Pinho, director of The Nothing Factory, also playing in the New Directors festival.
I wonder if anyone would think of Pedro Costa, of Colossal Youth (SFIFF 2007) and other films, the preeminant film chronicler of Cape Verdeans in Portugal. A darker, more realistic picture comes from him, perhaps.
Djon África, 95 mins., debuted at Rotterdam, Jan. 2018, in the 2018 Hivos Tiger Competition, and bought for international distribution before that by the Paris based Still Moving . It was screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center 2018 New Directors/New Films series.
ND/DF showtimes
Wednesday, April 4, 9:15pm [FSLC]
Friday, April 6, 6:00pm [MoMA]
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/JhnK.jpg
MIGUEL MOREIRA
GOOD MANNERS (Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas 2017)
MARCO DUTRA, JULIANA ROJAS: GOOD MANNERS/AS BOAS MANEIRAS (2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/OTM8.jpg
Lesbian love and lycanthropic childbirth in São Paulo
Well, this is a humdinger, and on top of being a lesbian vampire-werewolf movie with social overtones, eye-candy Brazilian mise-en-scene and São Paulo locations, it wants to be a musical, and probably would make a darn good full-fledged one, given half a chance.
The movie, arguably a little long, is in two self-sufficient parts, before and after the childbirth, which is the first big scene-stealing special effects display, to be followed by plenty more.
The story initially explores the unexpectedly intimate relationship across race and class that develops between the rich white pregnant socialite from the country Ana (Marjorie Estiano), whose unplanned pregnancy and refusal to lose it has exiled her from her family in a spacious (and festively decorated) condo in the center of São Paulo, and Clara (Isabél Zuaa) the handsome, cropped-haired black woman, trained as a nurse, but with an uncertain past, whom she hires as a nanny and housemaid. As the two women grow closer, their rapport turns first affectionate and intimate, then sexual, then more fraught and complicated, and in the end shockingly macabre.
It's hard to know where to begin, and this movie, blending art house and genre features in a very sui generis manner, is too good to want to spoil it by revealing many details. The first thing that charms, aside from the two attractive ladies and their somehow inevitable sympathy, is how great things look. Ana's condo is decorated in an understatedly fantastic manner. Outside, the big modern buildings of São Paulo glow deliciously. Then there is the glow of the night skies, and the great big moons. Dutra and Rojas are not into drabness. Everything is a visual delight.
I don't think we've ever gotten sympathetically close to a young boy who's a werewolf before, so you get concerned about him. This no doubt is why Neil Young, of Hollywood Reporter,* writing from Locarno, said this movie's "most obvious antecedent" is "Tomas Alfredson's 2008 Swedish kiddie-vampire smash Let the Right One In." As Joel, Miguel Lobo is a sweet, delicate kid, whose fur pelt that time of the month seems an embarrassment. There is another key support character in Clara's harmonium playing, singing landlady Dona Amélia (Cida Moreira). Everything here seems unique and inevitable, including the dedicated songs, some of them duets. You kind of want to see this again - soon - and with friends.
Young thinks this needed to be trimmed truly to compete with Alfredson's film. And Good Manners indeed has structural complications, maybe irreparable ones. But it doesn't matter. It's still original and a delight.
Good Manners/As Boas Maneiras, 135 mins., debuted at Locarno, and was included in an unusually large number of festivals - over forty. Screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center 2018 New Directors/New Films series, It is a Distrib Films US release.
ND/NF showtimes:
Thursday, April 5, 8:30pm [MoMA]
Friday, April 6, 8:45pm [FSLC]
_______
*Jay Weissberg gives a fuller account of the film in Variety.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/JhnL.jpg
MIGUEL LOBO
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/AS6t.jpg
NOTES ON AN APPEARANCE (Ricky D'Ambrose 2018)
RICKY D'AMBROSE: NOTES ON AN APPEARANCE (2018)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/AxsA.jpg
BINGHAM BRYANT IN NOTES ON AN APPEARANCE
Gone boy
Ricky D'Ambrise, who wrote and directed this short feature, is evidently part of a little group of young people in Brooklyn involved in making literate, talky, low-keyed films which flirt with themes of mystery and the occult. We note the common thread among others of Bingham Bryant, who co-directed For the Plasma a couple of years ago and plays the young man, David, who disappears in this one. Bryant also produced a 2016 film about two Argentinians in New York called Dear Renzo. There are links with Alex Ross Perry, and the credits cite a number of New York film critics, as well as Film Society of Lincoln Center programmer Dennis Lim, who chose the present film for inclusion in the New Directors series that gives it its debut. New York movie writer Glenn Kenny plays a minor role as a morgue assistant.
Notes on an Appearance is more about the disappearance of a young unemployed man from Chappaqua, NY, called David (Bryant), who at one point was in Milan and sent some postcards from there. There is some old footage. There are many shots of tables with snacks or breakfast. Given that this is a film by and about young people, and caffeine has never been in higher regard with this demographic, coffee is a constant item in these shots. There are also shots of diary entries by David, as well as his cards, and rather arcane references to a controversial political theorist called Stephen Taubes, an elaborate creation of this film, whom David has been hired to gather research on for a biography of Taubes by David's friend Todd (Keith Poulson), who has a fellowship that allows him to work on it full time.
Taubes is made to seem more real than David, with severalTimes news articles about him shown, a photograph, and an obituary, and even an article about him by Louis Menand in The New Yorker. And there is a dryly staged meeting of three young literary critics before a small audience. D'Ambrose likes to create or recreate his world at one remove. Taubes' reputation and influence after his demise is nearly as important as the physical disappearance of David.
The invented documents are "paper" rather than electronic, ostensibly because one of the characters most concerned by the disappearance is a doctoral candidate who's an archivist, gathering material for somebody else who is writing a biography of Taubes. But it's also true that "paper documents" probably have a quaint and appealing historical flavor for twenty-somethings weary of their own tiresome Internet- and device-driven generation. D'Ambrose recognizes there's something more genteel and pleasant, perhaps, about a world free of smartphones and such, even though this film's world is the present.
The characters speak in little scenes of dialogue shot up close with blank backgrounds. The action is seen as being an arcane "search" for the missing David, but the process lacks urgency, and the solution to the mystery doesn't come through the young clique's efforts.
This is a "minimalist" film, its spare style making a virtue of the necessity of a very low budget. It's an exercise in style, with something a little European about it, a hint of W. G. Sebald, perhaps; something intellectual, something that avoids the visceral or genre or emotional, with its dry invented worlds of a vanished young man and invented public figure. There is a delicate aesthetic, with the academy ratio images in pale colors and a little fuzzy at times. Greg Cwik of Slant notes that this film falters when it comes to the disapparance of David. Despite his use of a haunting, broody soundtrack, D'Ambrose's approach is too meditative and too far from basic genre techniques to generate tension. What he's best at (as Cwik says) is playing thoughtfully, unhurriedly, with locations and objects. Sometimes, though, this film seems to be grasping for an elegance and complexity of style D'Ambrose, despite reportedly some very interesting shorts under his belt, still lacks the means or the chops to achieve. Notes on an Appearance is valuable for what it seeks to be rather than for what it is.
Notes on an Appearance, 60 mins., showed in the Forum section at Berlin Feb. 2018 and also in the Spirit of Fire Film Festival in Russia. It was screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center 2018 New Directors/New Films series, its North American premiere.
ND/NF showtimes:
Friday, April 6, 6:30pm [FSLC]
Saturday, April 7, 6:30pm [MoMA]
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/OTM9.jpg
THOSE WHO ARE FINE (Cyril Schäublin 2017)
CYRIL SCHÄUBLIN: THOSE WHO ARE FINE/DENE WOS GUET GEIT (2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/TMyy.jpg
A chilly world of security, and scams on the elderly
The Swiss don't normally make movies. This is a cold gray one, but it has a central theme that's human. It casts a light on despicable scams on older people, robbed of money. Two central sequences, all set in Zurich, focus on a young woman employed at a call center selling insurance or Internet service by day who uses her phone skills in her own time to bilk old ladies, claiming to be their granddaughter in desperate need of quick cash. Then she comes to collect it in a park pretending to be the relative's friend acting in her stead. The first time she succeeds. The second she has been tracked by police working with the old lady, and they take her away.
But in between is a lot of dry footage of security guards, and such, and a man acting as the gatekeeper to a bank, the other to an insurance company. And the call center, of course, and all this talk we hear is boring and borderline nonsensical. That's the point, I guess: to hint, partly, at the sheer alienation of modern life, but also at how many of the everyday details of money and identity and corporate gatekeeping are wearying numerical garbage everybody has to negotiate.
The spirit of Michael Haneke hovers over this short feature, but it hasn't the resonance or depth of characterization of his work; though its chilly style is accomplished and unified, it seems more like a needlessly, if skillfully, expanded short.
Which it may be. The 34-year-old Schäublin, his bio says, studied Mandarin and Film at the Beijing Central Drama Academy, which sounds pretty brave, and then attended the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB). Last year he and Silvan Hillmann founded the production company Seeland Filmproduktion GmbH. This first feature is an accomplished and promising one, if it seems somewhat in search of a unified shape. In Swiss German dialect. Jessica Kiang in her Variety review calls this a "clinically intelligent, laceratingly pessimistic feature debut."
Those Who Are Fine/Dene wos guet geit, 71 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 2017, receiving Special Mention from the Jury. Screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center 2018 New Directors/New Film series.
ND/NF showtimes:
Thursday, April 5, 9:00pm [FSLC]
Saturday, April 7, 1:45pm [MoMA]
THE NOTHING FACTORY (Pedro Pinho 2017)
PEDRO PINHO: THE NOTHING FACTORY/A FÁBRICA DE NADA (2017
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/AXsS.jpg
Labor dispute at an elevator factory outside Lisbon comes to life - almost
Portuguese documentary filmmaker Pedro Pinho's three-hour feature - with musical numbers toward the end - might be the most interesting failure of the year. Though it's won festival prizes, regular audiences won't have the patience for it, nor should they, because it's an experiment that's overong, its handling of issues of capitalism and collective factory ownership still left nebulous even after endless discussion.
But the topics get a chance to breathe, and then some, and given their complexity and importance, that's a good thing. Ultimately how this movie was made and why are more significant than the unwieldy result. You could build a film course around it: you'd just need to make clear to your students that this isn't an example of a good film, just one that's fruitful to study and compare with cinephile favorites like Ken Loach and Miguel Gomez, Loach being germane for the worker-centric social realism, Gomez for the documentary-fiction element and focus on Portugal's economic crisis. And this reps a rare example of a neorealist musical - at the end, that is, mixture of genres being another useful subject for film study.
Pinho bases his story (the title drawn from the play De Nietsfabriek by Dutch writer Judith Herzberg) on the Fateleva (Otis) elevator factory in Portugal, which was actually taken over by the workers and run collectively from 1975 to 2016. He uses actual workers, rather than professional actors. But in his version, the worker takeover begins in the present time. The owners try to seize the assets, and the workers block them.
They have no union, as such, but they have solidarity, and a creepy Human Resources lady sent in to try to lure key workers into a buyout of individual jobs fails. Then, the question is how to proceed. They get a lawyer, to deal with the cops. Many heated and lengthy discussions follow.
Much of the film is occupied with debates among the workers, and others, about how to proceed. There is - troublingly, Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian feels, and I'd agree it jars - the occasional self-reflective onscreen appearance of a film director as a character, telling the non-actors how to go, do it again, make it simpler and more basic this time, things like that.
There is a lengthy debate of capitalism and marxist theory re factory takeovers mostly in French, why, we're not told; but that discussion is like plunging into a searching economics seminar that takes as its scope the whole future of human endeavor. It's thought-provoking in a way that a neater scene with tighter dialogue could not be, and it's a key example of how this movie is fascinating and instructive while still unmistakably a dramatic failure.
Most of the actors, though vivid individuals, whose feelings we are given time to feel, don't get depicted in depth. The exception is Ze (José Smith Vargas), his adopted son, nicknamed Mowgli, and his girlfriend Daniele (Daniele Incalcaterra), who's Brazilian. Them we follow home. And they, especially when Mowgli is involved, truly come to life.
But one might compare this to Laurent Cantet's 1999 film Human Resources, about a factory strike in France, in which there's a wrenching, incredibly dramatic and human and specific conflict that develops between a working class father and his educated son who's just joined management staff. Pinho is too wound up in the improvised general debates to think of developing the ideological and practical conflicts in terms of individual personalities.
Here is a proposal: the natural perceived length of a movie is an hour and a half to two hours. If you make one that's longer, a sense of protracted time will be produced in the viewers. In this case, the three-hour length and the series of long drawn-out discussions among the workers has the effect of making the action seem real-time. But that effect becomes unwieldy, because you can't convey the series of steps required for a worker takeover of a factory in lengthy real-time segments. Hence Pinho's Nothing Factory, though absorbing for long stretches, ultimately gets bogged down and goes nowhere - except into song.
The Nothing Factory/A Fábrica de Nada, 177 mins., debuted at Cannes MAY 2017 and won the FIPRESCI Prize; at about 20 other festivals including Munich, Toronto, Vienna, and Busan. Screened as part of MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center's New Directors/New Films series for 2018.
ND/NF showtimes:
Saturday, April 7, 2:00pm [FSLC]
Sunday, April 8, 4:30pm [MoMA]
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/TNzz.jpg
HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING (RaMell Ross 2018)
RAMELL ROSS: HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING (2018)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ZmTy.jpg
Vivid snapshots, kinetic energy
RaMell Ross has made a revealing and intimate short documentary feature about people he lived with and observed in Hale County, Alabama, where Walker Evans and James Agee made their book about white dust bowl poverty at the end of the Thirties, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This is a vastly different world, first of all because those Ross observes in his film are African American and well fed. He came to teach photography and coach basketball, a title tells us. He observed with his video camera for five years. He identifies half a dozen people, teens or young adults. They work in a catfish factory, raise a family, play basketball or football, learn to walk, die of infant sudden death syndrome, worship and sing, go to college. There is a world here, and Ross' camera is nimble, his editing rapid and surprising. Is this a "new cinematic language" as Bilge Eberi wrote in the Voice? I don't think so. It's just a new personality, a new camera eye.
Certainly the intimacy, the confidence acquired, impress us, and the kinetic and frenetic events, such as Daniel, a young college basketball player practicing his outside shot over and over with the camera so tight up on him we see only arms and shoulders. Also memorable and troubling, a tiny girl walking back and forth for minutes rapidly in a small room like a caged animal, or a hyperactive child. A remarkable sustained shot with the camera still shows a whole basketball team in uniform in a staging area moving, working off each other, flopping around, their long young bodies partly like one body, yet each an individual.
As with many new films presented as documentaries, this one poses the problem of limits. Ross tells both too little and too much. His "fractured" editing, as Eberi calls it, despite identifying of some people, blocks narrative expectations, echoes a contemporary world of short attention spans and constant interruptions. It finally made sense to me as the work of a still photographer turning to the motion picture. While often the motion is the point, observed with fascination, it is also beside the point. Because if you freeze the frames, the connected subjects, without narrative logic, make pictures at an exhibition by a keen observer who loves and knows his subjects. His editing follows shock logic or poetic logic. But he does not chronicle and inform us as a documentary filmmaker does, closely following lives, providing extensive details. As intimate as Hale County This Morning is, it tells only so much, and the larger story of these lives and their place in the fraught world of African Americans today is left untold.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening, 76 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2018. It was screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center 2018 New Directors/New Films, where it was the New York Premiere and Closing Night film.
ND/NF showtimes
Saturday, April 7, 8:30pm [FSLC]
Sunday, April 8, 2:00pm [MoMA]
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/Xpx.jpg
Photo by Walker Evans from James Agee's Let US Now Praise Famous Men
OUR HOUSE/WATASHITATCHI NO IE (Yui Kiyohara 2017)
YUJI KIYOHARA: OUR HOUSE/WATASHITACHI NO IE (2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ZmTz.jpg
Multiple occupancy
It's hardly a surprise to know the young Yuji Kiyohara, whose feature film debut this is, studied under Kiyoshi Kurosawa. This is a variation on his own varied and very prolific work, which so often plays with families, ghosts, and haunting mysteries. Kiyohara's movie is subtle and haunting. It doesn't quite work but neither do some of her master's. The subject is an original one: a house, in which two different sets of women are simultaneously living, unaware of each other. This can only be happening of some of them are not really there. Ghosts.
At first Our House will read just as a story that's garbled or confusing. What am I missing? you ask yourself. Have I misidentified the characters? One reason for this is that Kiyohara's tale is more bland and understated than her master's would likely be. Both sets of characters seem ordinary and matter-of-fact. As Japan Times' regular reviewer Mark Shilling points out, this seems like "timidity," and seems "reluctant (or unable) to deliver the scares of a good genre exercise," which would strike a commercial producer as faults. But, he adds, this is her intention.
Moreover, as Shilling also notes, she seems to be "channeling Yasujiro Ozu as well as Kurosawa." Indeed, the camera angles, and the use of a traditional Japanese house, strongly evoke Ozu. The first couple of characters are Kiriko (Yukiko Yasuno), and her 13-year-old daughter, Seri (Nodoka Kawanishi), who are cheerful and ordinary. The second, parallel inhabitants eventually, are strange and lonely. Toko (Mei Fujiwara) meets Sana (Mariwo Osawa) on a ferryboat when Sana has woken up with amnesia, remembering her own name but nothing about herself. Toko takes her home (to the house we've seen Kiriko and Deri occupying). Sana, who initially is made up to look pale and ghostly, is the tip-off that weirdness, however restrained, is afoot. There are a few interplays between the two sets of occupants, as well as a man who flirts with Sana in a cafe and causes much confusion and doubt when he shows up at the house.
Our House is a promising effort, and Kiyohara shows conviction and already refined technique, knowledge and respect for Japanese cinematic traditions. But, as hinted by the minimal running time, it feels slight. It needs some kind of payoff, some more flare and energy in the writing to make more powerful, even if chiefly meditative, use of this material.
Our House/ わたしたちの家 /(Watashitachi no ie), 80 mins., debuted at the PIA Festival Sept. 2017, also showing at Tokyo, Belin (Forum), and Hong Kong. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films 2018.
ND/NF showtimes:
Friday, April 6, 8:30pm [MoMA]
Sunday, April 8, 3:30pm [FSLC]
NERVOUS TRANSLATION (Shireen Seno 2018)
SHIREEN SENO: NERVOUS TRANSLATION (2018)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ZmTx.jpg
A childhood vision from the Philippines in the late Eighties
A meditative, and rather repetitive, but nonetheless haunting, depiction of a childhood in the Philippines in the lae Eighties dominated by what now seem quaint technologies, especially audio cassette tapes played on an aging boom box - it needs to be cured of its habit of "eating" the tapes; and VCR tapes. This is a film that celebrates the way old means of reproduction can evoke lost memories from the times when they were used. This film is a strong evocation of Shireen Seno's childhood in the Filipino diaspora focused on Yael, an eight-year-old, primarily when she is at home by herself after school and in a few family gatherings.
This is partly a secret world, as Yael (Jana Agoncillo) plays tapes that were sent to her mother, Val, by her father from a Persian Gulf country where he is working. When a tape gets broken, Yael repeats her father's words, which by now she has memorized. But Yael gets in trouble for accidentally erasing precisely the "private" part of a tape made for Val. She secretly plays and replays these tapes. And at other times she pursues "happiness" as touted by a TV advertisement. All this constitutes evocation of loneliness and longing of a child for her overseas Filipino employee father, missing during her childhood.
At other moments, in sequences worthy of the artist Laurie Simmons, Yael enters the world of a doll house, an immersive, meditative one, and works in the dollhouse kitchen. Perhaps the most memorable scenes are ones in which Yael painstakingly cooks toy meals in tiny pots and pans over a toy stove, using real, painstakingly chopped food,the stove fueled by a small candle; she pours the resulting, tasty traditional dishes into tiny doll containers. They take so much effort, but would provide only a mouthful even for a child. The mood is one of patience and loving care. The meals are prepared in response to her father's longing expressed on the tapes for traditional Filipino food. This is a labor to preserve memories of memories of memories. In another sequence of touching childish longing Yael goes to a shop looking for an advertised pen labeled a pen whose tagline is "for a beautiful human life" as if that can remedy her longing and resentment.
Seno sticks close to the childhood world, offering only fleeting clues of the late-Eighties turmoil in Marcos' Philippines or from the late-eighties outside world, hinting at societal turmoil following Ferdinand Marcos's ouster and complicated adult relations, in which men loom large and mysteriously.
This depiction is faithful to its childhood point of view, so much so that it seem sometimes stunted, and above all repetitious and confused. But the vision here is distinctive, certainly.
Nervous Translation, 90 mins., opened in the Philippines Nov. 2017. It showed at Rotterdam Jan. 2018 and later at Groningen. Screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center 2018 edition of the New Directors/New Films series.
ND/NF showtimes:
Saturday, April 7, 8:45pm [MoMA]
Sunday, April 8, 1:00pm [FSLC]
DRIFT (Helena Wittmann 2017)
HELENA WITTMANN: DRIFT (2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ZmTw.jpg
Helena Wittmann, Germany, 2017, 96m
German with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Filmmaker-artist Helena Wittmann’s subtly audacious first feature follows friends Theresa, a German, and Josefina, an Argentinian, as they spend a weekend together on the North Sea, taking long walks on the beach and stopping at snack stands. Eventually they separate— Josefina eventually returns to her family in Argentina and Theresa crosses the Atlantic for the Caribbean—and the film gives way to a transfixing and delicate meditation on the poetics of space. Self-consciously evoking the work of Michael Snow and masterfully lensed by Wittmann herself, Drift is by turns cosmic and intimate.
Thursday, April 5, 6:30pm [FSLC]
Saturday, April 7, 4:00pm [MoMA]
A VIOLENT LIFE/UNE VIE VIOLENTE (Thierry de Peretti 2017)
THIERRY DE PERETTI: A VIOLENT LIFE/UNE VIE VIOLENTE (2017)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/AzA.jpg
JEAN MICHELANGELI IN A VIOLENT LIFE
Diffuse drama mixes crime and ideology in Corsica
Thierry de Peretti's debut, Les Apaches (R-V 2014)was a movie about an act of group vandalism that goes very wrong, an incident on Corsica where young outsiders clash with rich property owners. The filmmaker tackles a more ambitious subject the second time around and it's less of a success. The topic is a group of men who carry out large scale vandalism in the name of Corsican independence - from France, from the mafia, and the trajectory of a young man from a good family who enters this world.
The resulting melange of gangsterism and political idealism is one less familiar in a modern day story like this than in the Seventies. Here, the the scruffy and slightly remote protagonist Stephane (Jean Michelangeli), is a kind of GQ revolutionary, a good-looking young bourgeois whose Corsican origins lead him to carrying out crimes at first only to please cousins and without any caring. These get him two years in prison, and the prison is like a spartan school in nationalist politics, after which Stéphane is not just a member of a gang but ideologically committed.
But all that is in flashback. The present moment is the funeral of a childhood friend and gang member that Stéphane comes back for despite having a target on his back.
De Peretti has his own way of working, as was evidenced in his debut feature, Apaches. It doesn't work as well this time, because the mixture of revolutionary and gangsterish themes here - this somewhat limp and meandering movie - can't evokes genre expectations the filmmaker isn't capable of satisfying as do directors like Uli Edel in The Baader Meinhof Complex or Marco Bellocchio in Good Morning, Night/Buongiorno notte or Olivier Marchal in the 2011 A Gang Story/Les Lyonnais (Rendez-Vous 2011). And De Peretti makes his story unreel in a too-complicated manner that keeps momentum from building and confuses the viewer and diffuses the effect.
Sme Anglophone critics have felt this as I did, that De Peretti's film lacks strength of organization and drive. But it did well enough with home (French) reviewers. For example Thomas Sotinel of Le Monde Wrote (as quoted in AlloCiné) that "Thierry de Peretti creates out of political and criminal violence in Corsica a remarkable intimate tragedy."
A Violent Life/Une vie violente, 107 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2017, releasing theatrically in France 9 Aug. 2017 (AlloCiné press rating a strong 3.7). Also shown at Caborg and Reykjavik. It was screened for this review as part of the MomA-FSLC 2018 New Directors/New Films series. A Distrib Films release.
ND/NF showtimes:
Monday, April 2, 6:15pm [FSLC]
Tuesday, April 3, 6:00pm [MoMA]
