-
New York Film Festival 2019
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/plm8.jpg
New York Film Festival 2019 (Sept. 27-Oct. 13). Opening, Centerpiece, closing night films.
FILM FORUM THREAD
Links to Reviews:
Atlantics/Atlantique (Mati Diop 2019)
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Juliano Dornelles 2019)
Beanpole Дылда (Kantemir Balakov 2019)
Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe 2019)
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt 2019)
Girl Missing, A (Koji Fukada 2019)
I Was at Home, But. . . (Angela Schanelec 2019)
Irishman, The (Martin Scorsese 2019) Opening Night Film
Liberté (Alberto Serra 2019)
Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello 2019)
Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach 2019) Centerpiece Film
Moneychanger, The (Federico Veiro 2019)
Motherless Brooklyn (Edward Norton) Closing Night Film
Oh Mercy!/Roubaix, une lumière (Arnaud Desplechin 2019)
Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria (Pedro Almodóvar 2019)
Parasite 기생충 Gisaengchung)(Bong Joon-ho 2019)
Portriat of a Lady on Fire/Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Céline Sciamma 2019)
Saturday Fiction 兰心大剧院 (You Lee 2019)
Sibyl (Justine Triet 2019)
Synonyms/Synonymes (Nadav Lapid 20190
To the Ends of the Earth (Koyoshi Kurosawa 2019)
Traitor, The/Il traditore (Marco Bellocchio 2019)
Varda by Agnès (Agnès Varda 2019)
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa 2019)
Wasp Network (Olivier Assayas 2019)
Whistlers, The/Gomera (Corneliu Porumboiu 2019)
Wild Goose Lake, The 南方车站的聚会 (Diao Yinan 2019)
Young Ahmed/Le jeune Ahmed (Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne 2019)
Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello 2019)
-
The 57th New York Film Festival Main Slate
(Officially announced August 6, 2019)
Opening Night
The Irishman
Dir. Martin Scorsese
Centerpiece
Marriage Story
Dir. Noah Baumbach
Closing Night
Motherless Brooklyn
Dir. Edward Norton
Atlantics: A Ghost Love Story/Atlantique
Dir. Mati Diop
Bacurau
Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles
Beanpole/Dylda
Dir. Kantemir Balagov
Fire Will Come
Dir. Oliver Laxe
First Cow
Dir. Kelly Reichardt
A Girl Missing よこがお
Dir. Koji Fukada
I Was at Home, But…
Dir. Angela Schanelec
Liberté
Dir. Albert Serra
Martin Eden
Dir. Pietro Marcello
The Moneychanger/Así habló el cambista
Dir. Federico Veiroj
Oh Mercy!//Roubaix, une lumière
Dir. Arnaud Desplechin
Pain and GloryDolor y gloria
Dir. Pedro Almodóvar
Parasite 기생충
Dir. Bong Joon-ho
Film Comment Presents
Portrait of a Lady on Fire/Portrait de la jeune fille en feu
Dir. Céline Sciamma
Saturday Fiction
Dir. Lou Ye
Sibyl
Dir. Justine Triet
Synonyms/Synonymes
Dir. Nadav Lapid
To the Ends of the Earth 旅のおわり世界のはじまり
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa
The Traitor/Traditore
Dir. Marco Bellocchio
Varda by Agnès
Dir. Agnès Varda
Vitalina Varela
Dir. Pedro Costa
Wasp Network
Dir. Olivier Assayas
The Whistlers/La Gomera
Dir. Corneliu Porumboiu
The Wild Goose Lake 南方车站的聚会
Dir. Diao Yinan
Young Ahmed/Le jeune Ahmed
Dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Zombi Child
Dir. Bertrand Bonello
NYFF Special Events, Spotlight on Documentary, Convergence, Shorts, Retrospective, Revivals, and Projections sections, as well as filmmaker conversations and panels, will be announced in the coming weeks.
Tickets for the 57th New York Film Festival will go on sale to the general public on September 8. Festival and VIP passes are on sale now and offer one of the earliest opportunities to purchase tickets and secure seats at some of the festival’s biggest events, including Opening and Closing Night. Learn more at filmlinc.org/NYFF57Passes. Press and industry accreditation for NYFF57 is open now and closes August 16th; apply here.BEA
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/NY57FF.jpg
-
PAIN AND GLORY/DOLOR Y GLORIA (Pedro Almodóvar 2019)
PEDRO ALMODÓVAR: PAIN AND GLORY/DOLOR Y GLORIA (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/pc5.jpg
ANTONIO BANDERAS IN PAIN AND GLORY/DOLOR Y GLORIA
Bright moments: Almodóvar's beautiful summing up
My sense of Almodóvar has always been overwhelmingly visual. Does anybody make more bright-colored movies? In content Pain and glory is darker and more self-absorbed than usual, more of a summing up. Yet the surface is as much cheerful eye candy as ever, its visual delight acquiring the special poignancy of the clown suicidal behind his ludic mask. The utensils on a kitchen counter are all bright red. When somebody pulls out a cell phone, it's red, or wrapped in red. Each shirt the protagonist wears is a different multicolored pattern, except for the robin's egg blue polo shirt he starts out with. But this is a man whose life has gone stale and who has run out of inspiration.
His name is Salvador, he is a illustrious filmmaker in a creative crisis. He's blocked, he's in all sorts of pain, and he's doing heroin to deal with his sufferings, physical and mental. He chokes all the time, and for that, nothing helps. This is caused by an unusual ailment, detected later, to do with his vertebrae.
Salvador is played by a deliberately worn and aged-looking Antonio Banderas, in a low-keyed performance that won the Best Actor award at Cannes. Alberto Iglesias won the Cannes soundtrack award. This is one of the director's most important films, even if it may truly please only his most ardent fans, and yet displease some of them because it's atypical.
Pain and Glory is the segmented picture of a complicated life. From the way Almodóvar started out in the provinces you'd never have known he'd become Spain's most famous movie director and the darling of the Madrid cultural scene. And here, it is hard to see the moody, blocked filmmaker in the small son of impoverished parents who wind up living in a cave house.
Hardship is downplayed in a masterful opening scene of little Salvador (Asier Flores) with his mother (Penelope Cruz) and other women singing as they do the wash by a stream, wishing they were men so they could swim naked. This luminous sequence is like a musical. Even the cave house the poor family moves into turns out to be flooded with sunlight - a part of it has no roof. The boy gets sunstroke - or is he just love-struck? - reading while he sneaks looks at Eduardo (César Vicente), his "first object of desire" - a ready-made Almodóvar movie title.
Eduardo is a handsome, strapping young workman who's illiterate, till little Salvador, who loves books and writing, is called in to give him lessons. The exchange is that Eduardo puts up tiles (bright colored) and whitewashes the cave. He gets so dirty doing that one day he asks Salvador, while his mother is away, to let him take a bath in a tub, and hence the boy gets treated to a spectacular display of beefcake. Eduardo probably knows what he's doing. Handsome young men are usually aware when they're being admired.
Creating what will become a kind of Rosebud, Eduardo, who's artistic, does a drawing of young Salvador reading that long gets lost but then turns up by chance many years later and is bought by the blocked, or perhaps now unblocking, filmmaker. Isn't he unblocking, since he's making this film? Pain and Glory eventually begins to reflect back on itself - another Almodóvar trademark being deft plot construction that, like psychedelic color, delights despite, or even because of, its artificiality.
A voiceover sequence very early in the film where the mature Salvador lists his multiple ailments, which include back trouble, tinnitus, and depression, to name only a few, is illustrated by a dazzling series of bright-colored diagrams and symbols. If he's sad, he doesn't let us see it in his choice of visuals. If only Power Points were like this, students would stagger out of lectures high on imagery. (Even the opening credits sequence of this film is memorably elegant, simple, and gorgeous.)
The movie's sketch of the family side concludes later with the grownup Salvador sweetly caring for his aged mother (Julieta Serrano), a sequence among the film's most mundane yet most poetic. There is no detailed, practical picture of the protagonist's creative life or his love life except in reference to his most famous film, Sabor, from thirty years ago, the lead actor he's been estranged from all those years, and a long lost lover who was a heroin addict. The grownup portion of the film is about Salvador's lingering unease, hypochondria, troubling physical ailments, and writer's block. Hope appears through reunions with the actor and the lover. Salvador finds the actor Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia) and they collaborate on a new performance called "Addiction." By coincidence (Almodóvar's plots also have a fairy tale aspect) the former lover, Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), long a resident in Argentina but in town to collect an inheritance, sees "Addiction," realizes it's about him, and seeks out the author, even though it was presented anonymously.
Alberto, the actor, and Salvador seem two egocentric basket cases when a restored print of Sabor is shown and they can't manage to show up for the post-screening Q&A and only answer some questions for the emcee on the phone broadcast to the audience. It's an enthusiastic crowd, an ego boost to the director, and at the end he is about to have the choking problem solved. Somehow this ending seems hopeful, happy, sad, and scary all at once: it's overwhelmingly emotional, and satisfying if you want a good cry.
In his Hollywood Reporter review Jonathan Holland complains repeatedly that Pain and Glory isn't funny enough, hardly funny at all. This is true. But the surface of the film is continually pleasing. And Banderas' low keyed performance gets to you. In my case I have always liked best when Almodóvar was quiet and magical, especially in Talk to Her. Perhaps the giddy comedy he developed so fluently in the Eighties was a mask to hide whatever was going on inside. Anyway after 36 films the director has a right to be serious. Yet at the same time, Pain and Glory has Almodóvar's distinctive look and structure. It may take repeated viewings to perceive that it's a triumph. But obviously there were inklings at Cannes.
Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria 113 mins., it opened in Spain Mar. 22, 2019, then as mentioned debuted in Competition at Cannes in May, winning Best Actor and Best Soundtrack awards. Other festivals included Sydney, Melbourne, Taipei and Munich, Toronto. Showing today at the NYFF. US theatrical release from Oct. 4, 2019. Current Metascore 82%.
-
WILD GOOSE LAKE, THE 南方车站的聚会 (Diao Yinan 2019)
DIAO YINAN: THE WILD GOOSE LAKE 南方车站的聚会 (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/09j.jpg
FROM DIAO YINAN'S WILD GOOSE LAKE
Noise, color, romance and doom
With this new film, which was in Competition at Cannes, Diao Yinan establishes himself as some kind of Asian B-noir master, I suppose, yet while he touches all the bases, something feels missing, or he is just trying too hard. Nonetheless there are pleasures in The Wild Goose Lake (whose Chinese title means something different, South Station Gathering), pleasures of the senses above all, sight and sound.
In her Variety review Jessica Kiang rightfully credits Dong Jinseng, the cinematographer, with visual beauties that are almost but not quite as gloriously artificial as Wong Kar-wai's films and Chris Doyle's work. She notes the "whole sequences in neon pinks and garish reflected blues." And the sound design and score are just as essential, making the images "throb with particular sleaze" behind "B6’s clanging, dramatic score." This score isn't crudely obtrusive, like a modern American comic book thriller, but selective - though there are clangs and bangs like a John Cage symphony that filled the Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln center cranked up to the max, all the more to be appreciated from my front balcony seat. Sound design and set design are also top notch.
What the movie's all about logically comes second, though unlike Diao's Berlin prize-winning previous film Black Coal Thin Ice, there is a well-worked-out and clear plot line. There's a - noisy, vivid - fracas at a gathering to train a gang of motorcycle thieves and assign them districts to work in. It's infiltrated by cops and one gets shot. This basis provides plenty of action and noise. The shooter becomes a police fugitive. His flight bookends the whole, and a soulful prostitute who comes to get, or rescue him. He plans to turn himself in so his wife can get the reward - though I never quite saw how that could work. The meeting of the wanted Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge), to the with Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun Mei, the Black Coal, Thin Ice star as well) in heavy rain, just one cluster of intense but renewed noir clichés, sets the tone of romantic doomed B-gangster movie artiness Diao strives for, and mostly achieves.
Some devices, or genre routines, are so enthusiastically worked as to be almost silly, perhaps intentionally so. The largely young and Chinese Alice Tully Hall audience laughed a lot, but not too much; they were having a good time, not scoffing. How often does somebody ask for a light so we can her the clack and click of the classic Zippo lighter? A unique running joke is the colorful T-shirts worn by the (often doomed) young men, which are pointed to when an undercover cop is called out and told to switch his designer T for something drabber. See Kiang's review for a listing of all the other wonderful things that go on, including Zhou Zenong's twisty dance to bandage his wounded torso without help.
But this points to an artificiality and lack of what classic noirs have, emotion. It's impressive how Diao renders both intimate and (tackily) epic-scale sequences with equal panache, but the stars aren't quite charismatic (or even good looking) enough. This relationship can't match the doomed romance of Jia Zhang-ke's superb Ash Is Purest White, nor can Gwei Lun Mei quite match Jia Zhang'ke's wife and muse Zhao Tao in that and other films. Diao's well-developed plot leaves no room to breathe, to pause and savor the doom. Still, there is a lot for us to savor, and one walks out with pleasingly intense visions of glowing neon and clanging noises in one's head.
The Wild Goose Lake 南方车站的聚会, 113 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition, with seven other top festivals (some to come) listed on IMDb. Reviewed here as part of the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival (Sept. 29, 2019). Theatrical debut to be in France Nov. 27. Current Metascore 74%.
-
SYNONYMS/SYNONYMES (Nadav Lapid 2019)
NADAV LAPID: SYNONYMS/SYNONYMES (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/ldwc.jpg
QUENTIN DOLMAIRE, TOM MERCIER, LOUISE CHEVILLOTE IN SYNONYMS
Nationality malaise as a form of madness
Synonyms is a bracing, invigorating film with an explosive young star (found in acting school) and a series of astonishing high-energy, highly-verbal set pieces. They only begin to pall toward the end when things go on a bit too long and as you realize Lapid isn'g going anywhere, that the astonishment hides a certain emptiness. It's surprising to learn the movie's autobiographical because its protagonist is borderline crazy, maybe full-on crazy. But Lapid's treatment of his own experience is free and fanciful and riffs off the distinctive abilities of the lead who's little like him. He has reimagined himself as an idealistic superhero.
Yoav (Tom Mercier, a 26-year-old Israeli* whose actual father is French) arrives in Paris from Israel, enters a large unoccupied apartment and takes a shower. The movie revels in Mercier's well-built, well-hung young body throughout: he has a background as a judo champion and dancer. One of his main assets is his intense physicality and boldness (no apparent hesitation about frontal nudity), which in fact is the picture. Once out of the shower, he discovers that his clothes and his whole big sack of possessions are gone. He runs around frantically from one big empty room to the other naked, freezing. There seems to be no heat. Was there hot water? The movie is vague about details, including how the protagonist speaks French so well.
The movie will return to the fact that Yoav, though he goes out and bangs on other apartment doors, begging in French in vain for help, he never descends to the street and instead returns to the bath tub. Cut to a young (very) French couple who discover him lying there asleep or unconscious. Émile (Quentin Dolmaire of Desplechin's My Golden Days) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), partially revive him and carry him out to the big posh nearby apartment they share. The situation that develops may remind you of Bertolucci's The Dreamers, but without the period flavor and graceful ménage à trois interactions of Eva Green, Louis Garrel, and Michael Pitt. In its deliberate unreality, its young seekers, and its eccentric declarations Synonyms suggests Godard films like La Chinoise. The shock-value set pieces also somewhat resemble Ruben Östlund's 2017 The Square.
The opening is shot with vigorous handheld photography whose deliberate brutality conveys a sense of Yoav's dislocation, and is marked by Mercier's sheer exhibitionism. He's a dazzlingly confident , go-for-broke actor whose skill is only undermined by a certain blankness. He's as much a performance artist as a dramatic actor. But is his whole nature perhaps symbolic of Israel itself, bold, brave, intense, but essentially rudderless and heedless? Underlying the whole film there is the implied sweeping, if superficial, critique of Israel. Yoav turns out to have come to France intending to abandon his native country though a decorated soldier. He has no other real plan but to cease being Israeli, stop speaking Hebrew, and become French. He calls Israel "nasty, obscene, ignorant, idiotic, crude and mean-spirited" (méchant, obscène, ignorant, hideux, vieux, sordide, grossier, abominable) and a string of other expressive derogatory adjectives he pronounces with pleasure in the poetic sound of the French words.
"It can't be all those at once," Émile says. "Choose." All this is in French, and Yoav refuses to speak Hebrew throughout except for one humiliating "artist's model" gig and declares his intention to become French. However he gains no other French friends besides Émile and Caroline, though he bonds with a tough, violent Israeli security guard called Yaron (Uria Hayik). He goes to live in a tiny chambre de bonne where he survives on ultra-cheap meals of pasta and canned tomato sauce, whose preparation is dwelt upon almost fetishistically. Eventually Caroline comes there and sleeps with him, overlapping Émile's decision that she should marry Yoav so he can become a French citizen. Godardian, absurdist scenes of a citizenship class follow, along with sequences of semiviolent macho Israeli encounters, some involving the Israeli embassy, and meetups by Skype and in person with Yoav's parents, whom he directs with polite firmness to leave him alone.
The movie presents one scene after another featuring Yoav, in no particular order. Émile, the son of a wealthy industrialist, and his girlfriend Caroline, who plays the oboe in a local arrondissement orchestra, adopt Yoav and want to protect him. One of the movie's most obvious weaknesses is the thinness and wanness of the two French characters. Émile is a would-be writer, who has written 40-odd pages of a novel, but lacks energy and invention. Caroline's main character trait is that she plays the oboe. Yoav begins spouting stories in his odd but curiously fluent French, to augment which he acquires a "good, but light" French dictionary at a bookstore. The film is dominated not only by Mercier's physical presence but by his harsh, confident male Israeli voice, spouting French. He often recites series of words he likes with similar sound, or similar meaning - hence the title. Sexy, graceful, strong, and somehow sensitive, Mercier is always attractive, though with his pointed nose and little mouth he's not handsome.
Instead of mal de pays, longing for homeland, Yoav has the opposite, a kind of nationality malaise. The specific details of why one might be discontented with his native land, its racism, its chauvinism, its militarism, its brutal repression of the Palestinian people, are things Yoav never goes into, though there is a telling scene in French citizenship class where the teacher proudly vaunts the "laïcité," the secularity of France. But this lack of detail reenforces Synonyms' Godadian, Brechtian fable quality. Yoav repeatedly tells Émile how his father told him as a boy the story of Hector and Troy, but refused to reveal to him how it ends. He tells other stories of his life, in an intense, fable-like style, and announces he "gives" these stories to the story-deficient would-be fabulist Émile, who accepts them gratefully.
Yoav becomes increasingly crazy as the oddball distinctiveness of Tom Mercier's personality and thespian skills is slowly but surely ramped up. When asked a profound question about Israel, redemption through nationality vs. inner change at a NYFF Q&A, Lapid answered "Sometimes I just have to say I am only a filmmaker." This movie is notable for its effective theatricality and gritty cinematic qualities - as well as the spot-on editing by the director's mother that's so breathtakingly flashy at times you don't know whether to cheer or jeer. It's not noted for its calm and thoughtful exploration of ideas, or for a meaningful plot line beyond the stunning initial premise.
I enjoyed this film - it's fresh, has an unforgettable opening, and holds your attention much of the way - but in the end I was left wanting more. It may be best discussed by Israelis: its theme is one worth their taking seriously. But it has reminded me that I found Lapid's first two films, both of which I reviewed as part of Lincoln Center film events, were similarly bold and striking yet crude, vague, and lacking structural coherence.
Synonyms/Synonymes, 123 mins., in French with some Hebrew and English, premiered at the Berlinale, winning the Golden Bear top feature prize. Opening a fortnight later in Israeli cinemas, it was slated for nearly two dozen other festivals, including Toronto, New York, and Mill Valley. Watched at a NYFF screening Oct. 1, 2019. It opened in France in March with a fair critical reception (AlloCiné press rating 3.4, but top praise from Cahiers du Cinéma and Les Inrocks). Coming to US theaters Oct. 25, it has a current Metascore of 85%.
_____________
*See more about Mercier in Haaretz.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/n7l.jpg
NADAV LAPID AT NYFF Q&A [CK photo]
-
OH MERCY!/ROUBAIX, UNE LUIÈRE (Arnaud Desplechin 2019)
ARNAUD DESPLECHIN: OH MERCY!/ROUBAIN, UNE LUMIÈRE (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/hgby.jpg
SARA FORESTIER AND LÉA SEYDOUX IN OH MERCY!
A sumptuous but pointless detour for Desplechin
The director departs from bourgeois intellectual families and love affairs to focus on a slow police procedural focused on the death of an old woman, set n his poor, crime-ridden hometown of Roubaix near the Belgian border, and made in declared admiration of Hitchcock's The Wrong Man.
Everything here is beautifully done - yet misguided. The main focus is on the sordid murder of a helpless old woman by a lesbian couple, Marie (Sara Forestier) and Claude (Léa Saydoux), and the captain in charge of the investigation, Commissaire Yacoub Daoud, played by the estimable Roschdy Zem. There is the obligatory rookie detective on the case, Louis Cotterel (Antoine Reinartz). The first hour is spent on other things, a half drunk man caught out in a fake insurance claim, a house fire seen to be arson, cocky young men evading he police, Daoud's angry nephew in prison and his love of horse racing, which Cotterel turns out to be good at betting on.
And still the process of getting Marie and Claude to confess to their murder takes an hour that seems very long. We see the cops work in threes separately on each of the two suspects, a woman and a good cop-bad cop, with Daoud always playing the quiet, restrained good cop. Earlier he has confirmed to Cotterel the rumor that he always knows who is innocent and who is guilty. But such a sixth sense is hardly needed for Marie and Claude because there is so much evidence of murder and of their presence before they[re brought in for questioning. So there is no mystery and nothing interesting to discover. Then when they have separately and together both confessed, with the tougher Claude holding out longer, we have to watch them taken to the crime scene to act it out in more detail. I found this scene, which is gruesome yet trivial, a true banality of evil moment, particularly hard and unrewarding to watch.
This would seem to misunderstand what makes us interested in dramas that depict detailed police investigations. Who cares whether both women had their hands on the poor old lady's neck as she was strangled? This is indeed a detailed introduction to French police methods, but not in a way that holds our interest. It is true that Desplechin departs from the conventional, but only in minuscule ways. Jay Weissberg observed in his Variety review that Daoud is the interesting character, not the women (both actresses rather wasted, especially Seydoux). There's a hint of more to come (as if this were a series pilot) in the news that all Daoud's family have all returned to the "bled", to North Africa, while he's chosen to stay here where he grew up. There could be more about Cotterel, perhaps an emotional trajectory of the relationship between rookie and oldtimer as in Xavier Beauvois' moving The Little Lieutenant .
At the same time the film excels in its rich cast details, nuanced depiction of Roubaix at and just after Christmstime (with a memorably drab shot of street decorations coming down). But somehow this doesn't read as any kind of portrait of Roubaix beyond what we're told at the outset of its former vigor and present poverty and decline.
Desplechin is one of the best and most distinctive contemporary French directors when he's got the right material. The 2015 My Golden Days was great; last time's Ismael's Ghosts was a misfire. This is another of the latter: so much good work, with the wrong material.
Oh Mercy!/Roubaix, une umière,/ 119 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, released in France in Aug. 2019, with very good reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.7); apparently only in four other festivals, including New York and Vancouver. Screened for this review as part of the NYFF, Oct. 2, 2019. Metascore 51%.
-
FIRST COW (Kelly Reichardt 2019)
KELLY REICHARDT: FIRST COW (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/tgfe.jpg
JOHN MEGARO AND THE COW IN FIRST COW
A particularly intense study in Reichardt's taut minimalism
Set in 1820, 25 years before the time of the director's Meeks Cutoff (NYFF 2010), First Cow, about what would become Oregon and beavers and men on the frontier, is a dreamy, cramped, primitive, sad scene of hostile people scrambling... slowly... to survive. Two men cling to each other, the temporary trappers' cook Cookie Figowitz (John Megaro) to King Lu (Orion Lee), a well-traveled Chinese man fluent in English Cookie finds naked fleeing angry Russians.
He helps him and they part, but meet again later, which leads to their sharing a tiny cabin. Together they quietly enter into a business venture to sell tasty buttermilk biscuits laced with honey to the locals in the market. But this tasty, lucrative trade, a hot success in this wild uncivilized place where home cooking is so missed, depends on a supply of milk poached at night from the newly-arrived sole cow in the region, which belongs to the British trapping firm overseer known as the Chief Factor (Toby Jones). This theft is a dangerous game that poses a looming threat over the rest of the tale. The partnership and cohabitation, intensified by the risky venture that makes it feel delicate and doomed, makes us ponder the film's epigraph from William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. Is it even more, a desperate, lonely love?
The scene is full of vague but intense class strictures: the shyness of Cookie, his secondary status to the macho trappers; the outlier Chinese man he feels safe with, the pompous Chief Factor, the local grandee.
One is continually struck with a sense of things missing, the intentional minimalism of Reichardt's style, the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, eschewing wide horizons, the many scenes in such low light you can barely make things out. The cakes Cookie bakes, using ingredients King Lu assembles, such a tiny thing to make their fortune, in small batches. This is Slow Food cinema too, a thing not for everyone, but a delight to the devotee.
I kept thinking of Jarmusch's Dead Man, for some reason: it must be set much later, but it evokes raw frontier primitivism too. . . differently, though, with lots of snappy dialogue, humor, and a richer narrative. Yet in the end First Cow wins out in this comparison in certain important categories: sincerity, genuine pathos. I also thought of Young Adult novels. Perhaps too tilted toward the tragic, but this has that quality of showing boys what the frontier life was like, how a man can cook, that it's wrong to steal.
It is in fact difficult to imagine the ideal audience for Kelly Reichardt, which may change from film to film. I respected the subtlety of her debut Old Joy, but seem to have most enjoyed her most conventional film, the 2014 almost-thriller about terrorists, Night Moves. Actually, she can appeal to any fan of uniquely crafted independent films. It's like enjoying being smothered, or at least that's the feeling this time. This is a particularly intense, intimate version of her style, though you know where it is going, and toward the end it moves toward conventional suspense - nicely ending in the air, with an unmistakable but hopefully not too neat visual rhyme with the opening.
First Cow is again freely adapted with the writer Jonathan (or Jon) Raymond, her collaborator for most of her features, this time from the first work of his she read and his debut, The Half-Life. But that book is composed of two stories 150 years apart, and this is just the earlier one, plus a contemporary opening of the finding of two old skeletons shallowly buried side by side, a foreshadowing. Besides, in the book the joint venture is extracting castoreum, a beaver musk highly prized in China. I have not read the book, but I think I would still prefer the simpler version of this film. The minimalism strains the patience at times, but through it Reichardt creates a mood here that haunts and lingers.
First Cow, 121 mins., debuted Aug. 30, 2019 at Telluride, showing also at the New York Film Festival (where Reichardt, Megaro, and Lee were present at Lincoln Center Oct. 3 for a Q&A - watch it HERE - with festival programming director Dennis Lim); it comes to US theaters, distributed by A24, Mar. 6, 2020. Metascore went from 76% at the time of this review to 89% since its US theatrical release.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/k5r.jpg
KELLY REICHARDT AND CAST OF FIRST COW INTERVIEWED BY DENNIS LIM AT NYFF Q&A [CK photo]
-
MARRIAGE STORY (Noah Baumbach 2019)
NOAH BAUMBACH: MARRIAGE STORY (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/pl8.jpg
SCARLET JOHANNSON AND ADAM DRIVER IN MARRIAGE STORY
A dramedy for all seasons
This is not just a shift from looking at divorce from the kids' to the parents' point of view, but a dramatic example of how far Baumbach has come as a writer-director since fourteen years ago when his early feature The Squid and the Whale, also about divorce, debuted at the New York Film Festival. He seems so much more fluent, powerful, and at ease here. Squid was witty, snide, subtle, keenly observed. It also seemed a bit snobbish and parochial. It was content with being minor. It was also very "East Coast." Though the battle between the coasts is dramatized here, with the husband, Charlie (Adam Driver) struggling throughout to have his disintegrating nuclear family defined as New York-based, not only is this a battle that he is continually losing, but most of the movie action actually takes place in L.A.
Beyond that, this is a warmly accessible and insanely enjoyable as any American film this year. Quite possibly Baumbach's best work, certainly in some sense the stars', Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver's best. There is a double aria knockdown verbal yell-fest that's the mother of all marriage squabbles, also a stunning combined tour de force for Driver-Johannson , the director and the crew. The two and a quarter hours go by swiftly. Never before has Baumbach better melded humor and emotion.It's particularly exciting, not to say thrilling, to encounter a film that's at once so accessible and so well-made and specific. Hopefully this time Baumbach can be enjoyed by his widest audience yet, and this can be appreciated by many as one of the best movies of the year. It's the director's tenth feature, and it's a ten out of ten.
The structure is simple and forceful. It's bookended by two statements where Charlie, then Nicole (Johansson), describe what they like and admire about each other - an activity done at the directive of a mediation coach. Charlie is a successful New York theater director, Nicole is an actress. They are breaking up. Things are going to get heated, painful, maybe hostile. This list-making is to ground them in a sense of the good things, the reasons they got together in the first place. The film returns to these lists at the end in a neat and touching way. Throughout, neatness may overwhelm Baumbach's usual subtlety, but there is plenty of wit, and raw emotion trumps sentimentality - the rawness often reflected in the intimacy, sometimes calculated roughness, of the visual style, enhanced by shooting on 35mm.
Any sense of the generic is avoided by the specific focus on the bicoastal issue and the custody and divorce law questions tied to it, while the comedy and the pain are jointly grounded in the work, equally hilarious and cruel, of the divorce lawyers Nicole and Charlie eventually engage. When they're splitting (but still friendly) Nicole goes to Los Angeles to star in a TV series and takes their eight-year-old son Henry (Azhy Robertson) with her.
The balance of sympathy seems to lean toward the male side here. Nicole's TV series remains sketchy. Charlie's theater group comes more to life, with Wallace Shawn highlighting colorful scenes. A play Charlie has developed, a version of Euripides' Electra, is about to go on Broadway. Charlie has to go back and forth to California. During this time he gets a MacaAthur "genius" award totaling $625,000 over five years in quarterly installments.
The divorce threatens to be disastrous for Charlie and his company. He may throw a lot of the grant money to the divorce lawyers, which he wants to use to pay credit card debut and expenses of the company. All the trips to California - and setting up additional residence there - he blames for the failure of the Broadway Electra.
The original plan was for just the two of them, Charlie and Nicole, to sit down and work things out. But Nicole's ditsy former actress mother (Julie Hagerty) talks her into seeing an ace divorce lawyer, Nora (a lean, mean Laura Dern). This means Charlie has to get one and he winds up with the very human but slightly over-the-hill Bert (Alan Alda), because he thinks the high powered lawyer he sees at first (a splendid Ray Liotta) is too expensive and too aggressive.
Public and private, monetary and emotional: the sparring of the lawyers, finally seen in the dreaded divorce court, is a simultaneously hilarious and frightening objective correlative of the squabbling of the couple whose love has turned to hostility or indifference. If the hotshot lawyers miraculously don't finally quite prevail, we see how destructive the mechanism they represent can be.
There is raw emotion and raw language here, but it's wonderful how often Marriage Story evokes some updated version of a screwball comedy. While there's an illusion to Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage that implies Charlie's company may have put on some version of that, this movie plainly isn't directly about the agonizing emotional breakdown of a relationship - except in the moments when it is. It shows the emotional pain more subtly, perhaps more touchingly, mostly by indirection, or by proxy.
This is specifically about American divorce. The title might have been "Divorce Story"; it might even better have been simply "Custody." Because a lot of the focus is on whether the family is defined as California- or New York-based, and what visitation rights Charlie gets with Henry. The Squid and the Whale focuses on teenage boys beginning to see through their pretentious intellectual father played by Jeff Daniels. Here sympathy is with the father. But the spotlight is often on little Henry, who quickly starts liking his California school and classmates, which were supposed (Charlie thought anyway) to be temporary. But while Henry leans toward the new location, it's balanced: he still loves his dad too.
In fact balance describes Marriage Story throughout and is what's so remarkable about it. Baumbach isn't always the most economical of writers. There are details of Henry, or of Nicole's family, that seem unnecessary. But what stands out is how painful, real emotion and hilarious satire coexist in the writing - and the always enjoyable and honest acting. This seems unusual, till you realize it's the mark of classic comedy. It's almost Shakespearean. Can one bestow a higher complement than that? And there are even musical elements, with both principals performing from Sondheim's Company. It's a dramedy for all seasons.
Marriage Story, 136 mins., debuted at Venice 29 Aug. 2019, featured in 8 or 10 other festivals including Telluride and Toronto; showing as the Centerpiece Film at the NYFF Fri., Oct. 4, 2019. Theatrical release Nov. 6, 2019, followed by digital streaming by Netflix Dec. 6. Metascore currently 95%.
-
SIBYL (Justine Triet 2019)
JUSTINE TRIET: SIBYL (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/plmy.jpg
VIRGINIE EFIRA IN SIBYL
An embarrassment of riches
Sibyl is a disappointment after Victoria, Triet's highly amusing previous film with the same star, Virginie Efira. I was surprised to find people consider Sibyl a comedy. It's more like an account of how a woman in recovery from alcoholism returns to drinking, and why: is that a funny subject?
Too much is going on here, and it's hard to know how to take it. There's a good basic topic (if this can be said to have one): a psychiatrist who steals from a patient's life to turn it into successful fiction. A simpler, more conventional treatment of this could have been interesting enough. But Triet and cowriter Arthur Harari pile on the complexity and obscure this theme. On top of that there's a surreal back-and-forth-flashback-montage editing technique of very short clips (a bad new fad) that's pretentious and adds confusion.
Sibyl (Efira) was a bestselling author but a painful breakup with her former boyfriend Gabriel (Niels Schneider), with whom she has a child, led her to quit writing and turn to psychotherapy (go figure). She is happy now (it would seem) with a new man, Etienne (Paul Hamy) by whom she has had another child, a little girl. She is going to meetings to conrol her alcoholism and isn't drinking. (Just wait.) Of course she goes on seeing her own shrink too.
She has a younger sister, Laure Calamy (from the Netflix French TV hit Call My Agent), who appears several times, most notably to give the little girl a quick lesson in emotional manipulation: she tells her mother she "lacks the tools to deal with life." An amusing, but gratuitous, moment.
As the film begins - but it is full of flashbacks to the affair with Gabriel, including a gratuitous full-on sex scene (eschewed in Victoria) - Sibyl can no longer resist the temptation to go back to writing and to that end is dismissing her patients. There is a crudely comic scene of a patient royally pissed off at this. Tellingly, he says he has given her his whole life. Soon we will learn that she's quite likely to use it.
At least she does when she takes on a new patient who forces herself upon her for an emergency. She is Margot Vasilis (Adèle Exarchopoulos, in full hysteria mode), an actress on contract for a film to be made on and around the island of Stromboli (evidently a homage to the 1950 Bergman-Rossilini film). She is pregnant by her costar, Igor Moleski (Gaspard Ulliel), but he's involved with the film's German director, Mika Saunders (Sandra Hüller of Toni Edrmann). The emergency is that she can't decide whether to have the baby or not, and she can't bear to tell Igor she's pregnant.
Sibyl is never any discernible help in this matter, and Margot goes back and forth. Meanwhile Sibyl - who has none of the qualities of the wisdom of that name, or even any moral compass - is furiously writing a manuscript based on Margot's sessions, and presumably other stuff cribbed from people's lives. As time goes on, publishers turn out to be very pleased with the results. She's also having play-therapy sessions with a little boy grieving for his dead mother. (These seem gratuitous, and not that interesting, but that goes for much of the material that crowds this over-stuffed film.) Flashbacks frantically depict intense encounters between Sibyl and the handsome Niels Schneider.
Soon - and here is when we enter into farcical territory, though it seemed heavy-handed to me - Sibyl winds up with the film crew on Stromboli, because Margot is even more confused and desperate, but the filmmaking must go on, so she, Sibyl, is called in to hep Margot function. But due to the emotional complications with Igor, Margot, and Mika, Mika also is nearing a meltdown, her directing becoming ever more neurotic and extreme. (I couldn't help wondering if the way Mika's directing is handled might make future actors hesitate to take on Triet as a director.)
In a series of heavy-handed filmmaking sequences, Sibyl emerges for a while as the only competent person around, except perhaps for Igor, who mostly holds his temper. (This is a long-suffering and selfless role for Gaspard Ulliel and one of his most unflattering.)
In a way Victoria was a wild, disorderly mess too, with Efira in a ditsy but sexy role. A hilariously absurd courtroom sequence toward the end, the charm and suavity of the great Melvil Poupaud, and the sweetness of Vincent Lacoste as a babysitter enamored of Efira, make that movie charming and fun. That doesn't happen here.
Eventually the responsibility - or the succession of inappropriate roles, not to mention the inappropriate behavior in assuming them, all the while breaking all the rules of medical ethics - causes Sibyl to meltdown, and her return to alcoholism is spectacular. It's also embarrassing, clumsily staged, and profoundly unfunny. While I sided with French critics on Victoria against the Anglo ones who trashed it, this time I have to agree with the Anglos, and hope that Triet will have more success with her material in her next feature.
Sibyl, 100 mins., debuted in Belgium and France May 24 and the same day at at Cannes, Justine Triet's first film in Competition there. It played in four other festivals including Toronto and New York, screened at the latter for this review, Oct. 5, 2019. AlloCiné press rating 3.7 (butI Victoria was 3.8, La bataille de Solférino 4.0), Metascore (same as for Victoria) 57%.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/J9T.jpg http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/j5t.jpg
JUSTINE TRIET AT NYFF Q&A [CK photos]
-
THE TRAITOR/IL TRADITORE (Marco Bellocchio 2019)
MARCO BELLOCCHIO: THE TRAITOR/IL TRADITORE (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/lobb.jpg
PIERFRANCESCO FAVINO AS TOMMASO BUSCETTA IN THE TRAITOR
For the Italians, a national epic; for us, a sprawling gangster movie with a weird trial sequence
Marco Belloccio's The Traitor seeks to depict the real life of Sicilian gangster Tommaso Buscetta, the so-called "boss of the two worlds." He is important because he was the first major mafia informant in Italy in the 1980's. The movie dramatizes with mind-blowing accuracy Bruscetta's trial as "il primo grade pentito di Mafia," the first high ranking Mafioso "penitent one" or state's witness, or traditore, ("traitor") in the eyes of the Cosa Nostra. This film is very highly regarded in Italy (see Paolo Casella in MyMovies or Federico Girone in ComingSoon, two big Italian movie sites) and was in Competition at Cannes. Anglophone critics have found it impressive in scope, but in some ways underwhelming. To us it seems somewhat bogged down from the start by an over-abundance of detail, such as a long initial sequence of horrific, loud, violent moments showing assassinations, accompanied by a roll call of flowery Italian names.
Because this is different, more "documentary," though not in the least lacking in the elements of gangster grand opera, The Traitor may seem, to Anglos, ultimately lacking in the flair of the director's other works, such as his muted, haunting 2003 Aldo Moro kidnapping drama Good Morning, Night or his energetic and beautiful fascist biopic Vincere (NYFF 2009). And this is not to mention possible overshadowing by the famous early career-making Belloccio films of the Sixties, Fists in the Pocket and China Is Near, the latter celebrated by Pauline Kael as "one of the most astonishing directorial debuts in the history of movies."
The Traitor covers twenty years, skipping most of Bruscetta's early career as a Mafia princeling. It falls into sections, dominated by its make-or-break testimony and trail segment. After the assassinations sequence shows off Cosa Nostra violence, we see Bruscetta move to Brazil, to get away from that and to run crime operations in Rio with his family and Brazilian wife. He leaves behind his two adult sons, one of whom is a heroin addict; it's a decision he regrets after they are both killed by his enemies. But in Brazil he is arrested and tortured. A flashy scene shows him in one helicopter and his wife dangling from another as the cops try to loosen him up by threatening to drop her.
He goes back to Italy and reluctantly, more to save his family than out of any "repentance" (and he rejects all titles for what he's doing), he begins testifying to Judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi). This happens in a series of private sessions and is the film's key relationship. Pierfrancesco Favino, the longtime character actor who plays Bruscetta with enigmatic grandeur, made a point in the NYFF Q&A of repeatedly insisting (in his excellent English) that Falcone is the hero of this story, not Bruscetta; that the men of the Cosa Nostra are evil, stupid fellows. Bruscetta himself hereafter cherishes his relationship with Falcone - whose courage in pursuing this case will lead later to his death in an explosion in a car (duly depicted). In time Bruscetta is given a roommate in his spacious prison accommodations, Totuccio Contorno (an excellent, low-keyed Luigi Lo Cascio), another high-ranking mafioso joining the ranks of pentiti.
Next, after Bruscetta is provided with his choice of tailored suits (with a chance meeting at the tailor's with the soon-to-be-tried "Il Divo" Giulio Andreotti), comes the trial. This is what makes The Traitor special. It seems to a non-Italian operatic, chaotic, absurd: but it not only follows transcripts and extensive films of the events, but was able to be shot in the actual huge courtroom where the trial took place. The "cross-examinations" where mafiosi abuse and accuse each other are wild, crazy macho stuff. Bruscetta, this first time (he will return from witness protection later for a repeat performance), is in a glass cage in the middle, while lesser prisoners are in metal cages along the side.
After this, which results in the sentencing of hundreds of mafiosi, Bruscetta joins his family in the US, in witness protection in various locations from Florida to New England to Colorado. This is interesting too, for its detail, the taste of danger he always felt, though, we learn, he died in his bed as he had wanted, at 71 - but this is also anti-climactic, the stuff of documentary, not of drama.
For Italians we have to remember the story of Tommaso Bruscetta is a great national epic, some kind of partial rite of purification from a long, dark past. For us the movie is more of a mixed bag, with too many digressions to make well-structured drama. The craft and the acting are impeccable, though, and often impressive.
Another important point noted by Bellocchio in his NYFF Q&A (speaking in crystal-clear Italian) but lost to anglophone-only viewers, is that much of the dialogue of the film is in Sicilian dialect that is subtitled in Italian when the film is shown in Italy. He can't understand Sicilian himself. Most Italians can't. This important alienation effect is lost for the US audience, since the Sicilian dialogue simply gets the same English subtitles as the Italian. Bruscetta tries to elevate himself by speaking a mixture of Sicilian and Italian (with some Portuguese, which he speaks always with his wife), but Contorno repeatedly points out that he cannot speak Italian. Awareness of this might help us understand a little better that Cosa Nostra is an alien empire, a strange and powerful cancer on the Italian state.
The Traitor/Il traditore, 145 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes with simultaneous Italian release; nine other festivals listed including Toronto and New York, screened at the latter for this review. Bought by Sony it's scheduled for US release Jan. 31, 2020. Current Metascore based on eight reviews: 57%. Highly regarded in Italy. Released in France Oct. 30, with an AlloCiné press rating of 4.3, equivalent to 86%.
-
BEANPOLE (Kantemir Balagov 2019)
KANTEMIR BALAGOV: BEANPOLE/Дылда (2019
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/pokm.jpg
VIKTORIA MIRONSHNICHENKO IN BEANPOLE
Vibrant grimness
Kantemir Balagov is only 27 years old and this is his second feature; Jessica Kiang calls him in her Variety review a "blazing" talent. This is a long, agonizing study of two battle-scarred young woman working in a hospital in Leningrad, and those around them, just after the end of the War, showing how Russia and its people were ravaged then. The titular figure is Iya (Viktoria Mironshnichenko), whose height, pallor, and strange nervous and muscular condition got her that nickname.
The glowing look and the closeup intensity reminded me at first of Hungarian Laszlo Nemes' amazing debut feature Son of Saul (FCS/NYFF 2015). Balagov fools you, showing you a gallery of hopeless cases but then seeming to focus on cheer and life with Beanpolel's relationship to a cute little boy, then he delivers a rude shock. The plot is a tangled web of associations, manipulations, and disappointments. But if I understood Balagov correctly, the movie grows wholly out of his fascination with a book he discovered about PTSD among Russian woman after WWII, The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich.
From early on, the action is almost too much to bear and too hard to watch. Yet all the characters, played by non-actors, are vivid, and the images glow with yellows and ochres. The cinematography by Ksenia Sereda is great. As ugly and depressing as the events are, they look beautiful, and the director's youthful enthusiasm makes this contradiction seem not cynical but right. This is a film about youth - youth sabotaged. The rickety, minimal trappings - long trolley cars, ornate but ancient automobiles - still seem very alive, if, like the people, likely to collapse and die at any moment. One old but elegant vehicle is driven by Sasha (Igor Shirokov), who comes one night looking for fun, and his hilariously clumsy frolic with Iya's friend Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina) leads to a tenacious connection. He is homely but he turns out to be rich. He can woo Masha with fruit, salt, and other goodies she shares with Beanpole.
I didn't altogether buy into the action, even though I remained open to being astonished. It's all too much, and the main characters are too fluid. When Shasha takes Masha to meet his mother in a grand house, it's a typically jaw-dropping sequence, an opening up of the action that typically soon closes down. Like everything, it all feels improvised, but in some ways all the more real for that. I salute this wunderkind's remarkable talent and invention.
Balagov hit the Russia film scene by surprise only two years ago with his debut feature, Closeness, which also unexpectedly made it into Un Certain Regard at Cannes, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize. At the time even Russians hadn’t heard of the young director, a disciple of the great Alexander Sokurov, whom he gave a nod to in his NYFF introduction of the film as "my teacher." A great deal may be understood by exploring this connection, but obviously Galagov has made what he learned from Sokurov his own as any master pupil does. It seems beyond the point to say this is one to watch. This is a brilliant, unforgettable film.
Beanpole/Дылда (Dylda), 130 mins., debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes May 2019, winning its Best Director award. Seven other festivals followed, including Toronto and New York, screened at the latter for this review. US theatrical release is planned for Jan. 29, 2020. Current Metascore 81%.
[Some of my information is drawn from this site: Russian Beyond.]
-
THE WHISTLERS/GOMERA (Corneliu Porumboiu 2019)
CORNELIU PORUMBOIU: THE WHISTLERS/GOMERA (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/pev.jpg
STILL FROM THE WHISTLERS
The trappings of a crime caper don't make for much entertainment
Corneliu Porumboiu is one of the most admired of the new generation of Romanian directors, whose Police, Adjective I reviewed in the 2009 NYFF, and his The Treasure in the 2015 one. He has his admirers, no doubt. I am not particularly one of them, and even less so after this latest effort.
Porumboiu provides the trappings of a unique crime story here with an unusual Canary Islands setting, but it's all tongue in cheek, and kind of by-the-numbers, so it's not fun and ultimately makes little sense. If conceptual genre flicks are your thing, go for it. Otherwise, stay away from The Whistlers.
"Corneliu Porumboiu's deadpan, daffy noir has a cop caught in a labyrinthine plot involving women, whistling and a mattress full of money" says Jessica Kiang, in her Variety review. Reviewing this film for the Guardian at Cannes, Peter Bradshaw calls it a "elegant and stylishly crafted piece of entertainment," with "a nifty plot" that is "quite involved" but "hangs together well."
There are however essential things missing from the start in this film and they are never supplied: what is this all about, and what are these different players' parts in it? There are mattresses full of cash, yes: where did the cash come from? Cristi (Vlad Ivanov), the stolid, corrupt cop who's the main focus throughout is involved in this business. But what is the business? How did he get involved in it?
Instead of providing details of the crime or personal touches about the characters, Porumooiu gets involved in motifs and peculiar local color. There is a hotel called "Opera" where the proprietor, who's in on the crime, constantly plays opera, on vinyl, loud in the reception area. He has a particular penchant for the Barcarolle from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman. (This gets old after a while.) Most of all, Porumboiu has discovered Gomera, in the Canary Islands, where a code language to communicate with whistles is part of the local culture, and actually taught. Cristi gets lessons and eventually he is able to communicate this way across a considerable distance to the lovely Gilda (Catrinel Marlon). (Why if this is the local culture it's claimed that police would think the whistling was bird calls is unclear. I guess not on Gomera.)
I enjoyed the tightly organized edit of the film, the flashy cars, the pretty if repetitious music, and the beautiful Catrinel Marion. There is a dazzling music-and-lights show at an Asian entertainment park that's used for the final sequence. It's pretty. But it was impossible to enjoy or even understand the rest of the film.
The Whistlers/Gomera, 97 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition and was scheduled for 13 other festivals including New York, where it was screened for this review Oct. 7, 2019. Metascore 74%.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/p6m.jpg
CORNELIU PORUMBOIU AT NYFF Q&A [CK photo]
-
MARTIN EDEN (Pietro Marcello 2019)
PIETRO MARCELLO: MARTIN EDEN (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/yyh.jpg
LUCA MARINELLI (CENTER) IN MARTIN EDEN
Jack London translated into Italian
This is director Pietro Marcello's half-terrific, half-off-putting Italian adaptation, with previous collaborator Maruizio Braucci, of the 1909 American novel by Jack London about a proletarian intellectual who decides to become a writer despite lack of education and is troubled by an upperclass girlfriend, becoming too successful too soon, then despairing. Though there was a 1942 film with Glenn Ford in the lead, the book is well known in Europe but now largely forgotten at home. In America London's dwindling fame rests on his north woods tales and he seems like a YA writer; I had no idea he had this philosophical side.
Pietro Marcello's movie is intermittently engaging, and grabs you from the start, thanks to the charisma and intensity of the rangy Italian star, Luca Marinelli, who proclaims his lines and stares out at us with his big blue eyes. Because Eden is a seaman the protagonist's home base has been shifted to Naples, and despite some lingering American names, Marcello has thoroughly Italianized this material.
Some of Marcello's avant-garde methods can be a bit distracting as we go along. Chief among these is indifference to what era of the twentieth century the action is taking place in, a freedom with period detail he doesn't handle with the same convincing panache as Derek Jarman. An initially intriguing use of edited archival footage also comes to seem distracting and arbitrary, though it's nice that he prefers film and worked with 16mm., and the use of archival footage is something he is particularly wedded too.
It's also true that the character of Martin Eden becomes increasingly shrill and unsympathetic, but that is intended and part of the Jack London novel. This is not meant as a stirring intellectual bildingsroman so much as a disturbing cautionary tale, though that isn't clear until later. It's astonishing when Martin, pushed by his provocative older friend Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi), addresses a socialist rally and attacks their ideology with nihilistic declarations, declaring socialism a "slave mentality." Later at an author lecture he simply sounds crazy. He gets out of control and starts to turn ugly.
As Lee Marshall writes in a Screen Daily review, Marcello is best known for his "unclassifiable arthouse documentaries" that "hover" between "reality" and "a cinematic fugue state." I found this a bit hard to take in the one previous film of his I'd seen, his 2015 Lost and Beautiful/Bella e perduta (ND/NF 2016). He has gone much more mainstream here, and with a bigger budget, though he ultimately makes no concessions to conventionality. Martin Eden is innately a strong, accessible story. We're grabbed by the protagonist's naive passion, his discovery of poetry and books through Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), the upperclass girl he meets through rescuing her little brother from a bully. The sympathy will dwindle rapidly later on.
It turns out that in the terms of Italian education, Martin is so lacking in general information that he needs to go back to primary school, which he's too poor to do, even if he could face the humiliation. Conventional education just isn't what he wants. He simply reads and reads and writes and writes and sends his stories and poems to magazines, which all come back marked "return to sender" - until one doesn't, he's paid an enormous 200,000 lire, and the tide turns toward wealth and fame.
The relationship with Elena is ambiguous. It stands for Eden's ambiguous relationship toward class, conventionality, maybe even toward life. She pledges her undying love, but wants Martin to let her father set him up in some kind of office job. Instead when he needs money he goes to the sea, or takes brutal work on a foundry, and he gets into fights. When he becomes known, and turns into an ideologue, expounding the brutal Darwinian theories of Herbert Spenser, Elena rejects him. Eventually he seems also to reject himself - and when she comes back, he rejects her too.
There is something grand but flawed about Eden as played by Marinelli, grand and flawed also about this film. Pietro Marcello's boldness and freedom engage at first, even with the random found footage and the mixing of 1900's clothes and modern cars. Something grand and revolutionary seems afoot, as with Martin Eden himself: one can see how this filmmaker, with his glut of ideas and penchant for breaking genre barriers, would like this class-hopping anti-hero who breaks all the rules and succeeds - till he crashes. Eden's half-cracked plunge into ideology seems cool for a while. It's something so rare in American movies.
Eden's transformation into a rich, spoiled, self-absorbed superstar author happens too fast, especially given how well the film has depicted some of the proletarian settings, Eden's naivete, his affection for the little family he lives with in the suburbs, his speaking of Neapolitan dialect whenever required. (As with Bellocchio's The Traitor, English subtitles fail to reveal the constant shifts from Italian to dialect to the Anglophone audience.) Suddenly Marinelli has bleached hair combed differently, he lives in a grand house, and he wears fussy collars and neckties. It doesn't really compute. Pietro Marcello's plunge into more conventional storytelling is promising but he might do better to pare down some of his avant-garde methods. This is a memorable if flawed experiment.
Martin Eden, 129 mins., debuted at Venice, where Marinelli won the Best Actor prize. It's in seven other listed festivals, including Toronto, New York, and London, and it was screened for this review as part of the NYFF (Oct. 7, 2019). The film received many wards and nominations at Rome. Metascore 57% (when this review was written, which seemed extreme; it's better than that; now at US release time, Oct. 2020, it's grown to 73%). US release date: Oct. 16, 2020.
A Toronto Q&A with the director HERE.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/m5m.jpg
PIETRO MARCELLO AT NYFF Q&A [CK photo]
-
SATURDAY FICTION 兰心大剧院 (Lou Ye 2019)
LOU YE: SATURDAY FICTION 兰心大剧院 (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/pynn.jpg
GONG LI IN ISATURDAY FICTION
Exploded atmosphere
Lou Ye's elaborate new black-and-white spy film, a showcase for the still glamorous and beautiful Gong LI set in Shanghai in the week before the December 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, is glamorous and atmospheric. One revels in the rainy streets, the big heavy black cars, the men and women dressed to the nines, the public rooms and suites of the elegant "Cathay Hotel" and a puzzling theater stage that seems like a dance hall perpetually in motion.
If I told you that I never quite understood exactly what was going on, that might not differentiate this movie from Casablanca or The Big Sleep. But something is lacking in the characterizations and the dialogue that those classics have. When it is all over and more than two hours have passed, there has been a lot of mystery and finally a lot of noise and blood, but there is not much satisfaction.
The action takes place in the cosmopolitan "French Concession," a place apart in the "solitary island" that the city of Shanghai has been since it was occupied by Japan in 1937 and a privileged neutral zone. Here, Jean Yu (Gong Li, as a famous actress, not a stretch) has come to join Tan Na (Mark Chao), the lead actor and director, in a play, to be staged at Shanghai's Lyceum Theatre, and they are former lovers. This much is clear.
But the scene in which they first meet here blurs the line between reality and theater, and it keeps getting repeated. I never quite understood why. (It almost seems the director of the film has mistakenly left in alternate takes, an effect that's intriguing, but also distracting.) The action begins in murkiness. And while there are continually moments in the light as various characters, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese, come and go, that murkiness continues and floods our perception of the proceedings. We are trapped in ongoing rehearsals, interrupted by double-crosses, surprised by furtive sendings of encrypted messages, and stunned by fatal shootouts. And yet the murkiness triumphs.
Toward the end, the on screen audience assembles for the play, entitled, yes, Saturday Fiction. But Jean Yu cannot perform because she is in too much danger. Her role is taken, temporarily, by Bai (Huang Xiangli), a reporter, spy operative, and acting hopeful who has infiltrated herself early on into Jean Yu's life. Switcheroos and multiple roles are the essence of this piece.
Jean Yu, who's been in Hong Kong a while, is ceremonially greeted as she arrives in the French Concession by the Cathay Hotel's manager Saul Speyer (Tom Wlaschiha of "Game of Thrones"). He turns out to be spying for the Allies, and will report also on all her activities. She has come not only for the play but to locate her ex-husband, and get him out of the hands of the Japanese, who have captured him. She has been a spy operative herself, hence Saul Speyer's special interest. But she's here also for a third reason. She's been summoned by Frédéric Hubert (Pascal Greggory), a French book dealer who reveals his possession of a rare copy of Sorrows of Young Werther signed not only by the author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but by Friedrich Nietzsche. M. Hubert walks with a cane, but it's just an elegant accoutrement. He's quietly natty dresser who's also a spymaster who has looked over Jean Yu over the years while running her espionage missions for some years.
This is a movie that goes a little too slow for quite a while, until it goes too fast. It steeps itself in rich period atmosphere (though with a few touches that are plainly anachronistic), and lingers over Jean Yu's meetings with various men, and has to take time to introduce us to the puzzling play, the Cathay Hotel's labyrinthine passages, and the cast of characters. The latter include Mo Zhiyin (Wang Chuanjun), the Lyceum's untrustworthy and malicious producer, and importantly, Captain Saburo (Joe Odagiri), a Japanese military intelligence officer who has come to Shanghai to distribute to his operatives the updated Japanese operational codes. These M. Hubert is extremely keen on learning. It so happens that Jean Yu may be able to help him pry them out of Saburo, because she closely resembles his dead wife. (Several people get slipped a sleeping potion that helps unlock their secrets.)
Once all this gets set up, the Japanese come in, violence breaks out, and Jean Yu, in the semi-darkness, becomes a nearly indestructible superhero on the Chinese side, capable of wielding a pistol and an automatic weapon with equal pinpoint accuracy. After the long scenes of dreamy dialogue, I confess I found this sudden turn to violence bewildering. After all, it's Gong Li. All that lovely, if somewhat draggy, atmosphere, exploded, thrown away in a prolonged shootout? It seems modern directors love doing period but lack insight into the genres that go with it. Watch, though, to see what happens to The Sorrows of Young Werther, in a memorable sequence when M. Hubert slips away.
Saturday Fiction 兰心大剧院 (Lyceum Theatre), 125 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2019, also in five other festivals including Toronto and New York, screened at the NYFF for this review. Slated for US release by Kino Lorber. Metascore: 51%.
.
-
ATLANTICS/ATLANTIQUE (Mati Diop 2019)
MATI DIOP: ATLANTICS/ATLANTIQUE (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/PWSX.jpg
MAME BINETA SANE, WHO PLAYS ADA IN ATLANTICS
Economic desperation, drowned African refugees, a love story and a ghost story
Atlantics is a refugee drama, transformed into magic and mystery and revenge by possession, that focuses on the women left behind by a group of men suddenly lost at sea when desperation in their work leads them to try to sail to Spain in an open boat. It focuses on a popular suburb of Dakar, poor but vibrant with youth, where workers on a construction site with a futuristic (CGI) tower have striven for months without pay. Among them is Souleiman (Traore), the tall, handsome young lover of Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), who is to marry the well-off Omar (Babacar Sylla) in ten days. A French reviewer called this film "an emotional, visual, and sonorous poem." As the action plays out, the real gives way to dream: the young women take back their power through being possessed by the spirit of their men. The busy trailer for the film uses the tag line DF Wallace's biographer DT Max links to him, "Every love story is a ghost story."
Despite its grand prize, a few French critics found the 36-year-old Diop's film mix of genres lacked mastery; resorted too often to shots of the sea or the full moon. Mike D'Angelo was bothered by the fact that Soleiman possesses the notably fit and young police inspector Issa (Amadou Mbow) instead of Ada and can't agree with Jay Weissberg's interpretation that in his Variety review that this switch is to "avoid any same-sex 'awkwardness' towards the end." Maybe what both writers really object to is resorting to the supernatural to resolve socioeconomic issues in the first place. That is what bothers me - while nonetheless Diap's choice to focus on the bereaved women, partly a practical one, seems justified as a way of examining the tragedy of drowned African refugees.
The main force of the action is that grief is transformed into righteous anger when a group of the women turn milky-eyed at night and go several times to haunt the crooked building project boss, Mr. N’Diaye (Diankou Sembene) and eventually force him to pay them all the lost men's back wages. But there is also the brief return of Soleiman in the body of the fit Issa to make love once with the bereaved Ada. Soleiman's entering the body of Issa is emotional logic, the only kind that prevails here.
This is a film that makes great sense overall but has shortcomings in the details. You can find fault with various plot elements. Another is that though Ada has the conservative friend, Mariama (Mariama Gassama), who berates her for not being nice to her new rich husband she doesn't love, Omar, it would have been better to include severe hijab-wearing friends, and not just fun-loving ones. D'Angelo certainly has a point that Inspector Issa's investigation of the fire of the marriage bed and persecution of Ada is repetitious and inexplicable. The repeated shots of the sea are indeed repetitious, though they do serve as a reminder of its devouring maw and the loss of all the fine young men.
But all this is beside the point in a way because what is enchanting and strong is the way Mati Diap captures the vivacity and physical beauty of the Senegalese people here. This is Africa, and the film shows us what that means. Soleiman is a gorgeous young man, tall, pretty, with the long, loose, forward stride they all have, which conveys a sense of optimism, strength, confidence: you can imagine how they'd think they could sail to Spain in a little open boat. Ada is equally beautiful, slim, supple, forward-striding, charming, coquettish. In their brief afternoon scene when they kiss and long for more, and there is never a goodbye and Soleiman (like all the men) never tells his beloved he is going to sail away, is yet a bright and memorable moment full of sensuality and lost promise.
Likewise all the scenes of the women afterwards glow with color and energy. The action sparkles. The whole film flashes and pops, underlined by Fatima Al Qadiri's music and Claire Mathon's cinematography that is somehow vivid and rough, in-your-face yet pleasing, a palette that's "muted," as Weissberg says, emphasizing the people, and the (bright and often hazy) light. Even the repetitious full moon and sea horizon shots underline the sensual simplicity of the style. The vigor of the young men is so well conveyed in the opening scenes that their temporary survival after death in the night-possessed women feels possible. This is about the beauty of African youth and an energy and strength that can live on after death. Even if Diap's story choices seem alien to you, you can feel that they come from somewhere profound. This is a film bold in its ambition and imagination, so much so it skips over certain details of logic or consistency.
Atlantics/Atlantique, 104 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes May 16, 2019, and subsequently was awarded the Grand Prix. Mati Diop is the first woman of African descent to have a film showing in Competition at the festival or win an award in its 72 years. The film opened theatrically in Dakar in Aug. Eight other festivals are listed including London, the Hamptons, Chicago and New York. It was screened at the NYFF for this review Oct. 9, 2019. AlloCiné press rating 3.4 from 28 review (though many admired it, a good number of French critics also found it seriously flawed), while the Anglophone critics response was apparently much more glowing, given a Metascore of 81% (based on 14 reviews).
-
PARASITE (Bong Joon-ho 2019)
BONG JOON-HO: PARASITE 기생충 (Gisaengchung) (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/ledg.jpg
LEE SON-KYUN AND JO YEO-JEONG IN PARASITE
Crime thriller as social commentary? Maybe not.
I've reviewed Bong's 2006 The Host ("a monster movie with a populist heart and political overtones that's great fun to watch") and his 2009 Mother which I commented had "too many surprises." (I also reviewed his 2013 Snowpiercer.) Nothing is different here except this seems to be being taken more seriously as social commentary, though it's primarily an elaborately plotted and cunningly realized violent triller, as well a monster movie where the monsters are human. It's also marred by being over long and over-plotted, making its high praise seem a bit excessive.
This new film, Bong's first in a while made at home and playing with national social issues, is about a deceitful poor family that infiltrates a rich one. It won the top award at Cannes in May 2019, just a year after the Japanese Koreeda's (more subtle and more humanistic) Palm winner about the related theme of a crooked poor family. Parasite has led to different comparisons, such as Losey's The Servant and Pasolini's Theorem. In accepting the prize, Bong himself gave a nod to Hitchcock and Chabrol. Parasite has met with nearly universal acclaim, though some critics feel it is longer and more complicated than necessary and crude in its social commentary, if its contrasting families really adds up to that. The film is brilliantly done and exquisitely entertaining half the way. Then it runs on too long and acquires an unwieldiness that makes it surprisingly flawed for a film so heaped with praise.
It's strange to compare Parasite with Losey's The Servant, in which Dick Bogarde and James Fox deliver immensely rich performances. Losey's film is a thrillingly slow-burn, subtle depiction of class interpenetration, really a psychological study that works with class, not a pointed statement about class itself. It's impossible to speak of The Servant and Parasite in the same breath.
In Parasite one can't help but enjoy the ultra-rich family's museum-piece modernist house, the score, and the way the actors are handled, but one keeps coming back to the fact that as Steven Dalton simply puts it in his Cannes Hollywood Reporter review, Parasite is "cumbersomely plotted" and "heavy-handed in its social commentary." Yet I had to go to that extremist and contrarian Armond White in National Review for a real voice of dissent. I don't agree with White's politics or his belief that Stephen Chow is a master filmmaker, but I do sympathize with being out-of-tune, like him, with all the praise of Boon's new film.
The contrast between the poor and rich family is blunt indeed, but the posh Park family doesn't seem unsubtly depicted: they're absurdly overprivileged, but don't come off as bad people. Note the con-artist Kim family's acknowledgement of this, and the mother's claim that being rich allows you to be nice, that money is like an iron that smooths out the wrinkles. This doesn't seem to be about that, mainly. It's an ingeniously twisted story of a dangerous game, and a very wicked one. Planting panties in the car to mark the chauffeur as a sexual miscreant and get him fired: not nice. Stimulating the existing housekeeper's allergy and then claiming she has TB so she'll be asked to leave: dirty pool. Not to mention before that, bringing in the sister as somebody else's highly trained art therapist relative, when all the documents are forged and the "expertise" is cribbed off the internet: standard con artistry.
The point is that the whole Kim family makes its way into the Park family's employ and intimate lives, but it is essential that they conceal that they are in any way related to each other. What Bong and his co-writer Jin Won Han are after is the depiction of a dangerous con game, motivated by poverty and greed, that titillates us with the growing risk of exposure. The film's scene-setting of the house and family is exquisite. The extraordinary house is allowed to do most of the talking. The rich family and the housekeeper are sketched in with a few deft stokes. One's only problem is first, the notion that this embodies socioeconomic commentary, and second, the overreach of the way the situation is played out, with one unnecessary coda after another till every possibility is exhausted. This is watchable and entertaining (till it's not), but it's not the stuff of a top award.
Parasite 기생충 (Gisaengchung), 132 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, winning the Palme d'Or best picture award. Twenty-eight other festivals followed as listed on IMDb, including New York, for which it was screened (at IFC Center Oct. 11, 2019) for the present review. Current Metascore 95%. It has opened in various countries including France, where the AlloCiné press rating soared to 4.8.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/ledt.jpg
PARK SO-DAM AND CHOI WOO-SIK IN PARASITE
-
MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (Edward Norton 2019)
EDWARD NORTON: MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/ihjn.jpg
GUGU MBATHA-RAW AND EDWARD NORTON IN MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN
Edward Norton's passion project complicates the Jonathan Lethem novel
The NYFF Closing Night film is the premiere of Edwards Norton's adaptation, a triumph over many creative obstacles through a nine-year development time, of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 eponymous novel. It concerns Lionel Essrog (played by Norton), a man with Tourette's Syndrome who gets entangled in a police investigation using the obsessive and retentive mind that comes with his condition to solve the mystery. Much of the film, especially the first half, is dominated by Lionel's jerky motions and odd repetitive outbursts, for which he continually apologizes. Strange hero, but Lethem's creation. To go with the novel's evocation of Maltese Falcon style noir flavor, Norton has recast it from modern times to the Fifties.
Leading cast members, besides Norton himself, are Willem Dafoe, Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Cherry Jones, Bobby Cannavale and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. In his recasting of the novel, as Peter Debruge explains in his Variety review, Norton makes as much use of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, about the manipulative city planner Robert Moses, a "visionary" insensitive to minorities and the poor, as of Lethem's book. Alec Baldwn's "Moses Randolph" role represents the film's Robert Moses character, who is added into the world of the original novel.
Some of the plot line may become obscure in the alternating sources of the film. But clearly Lionel Essrog, whose nervous sensibility hovers over things in Norton's voiceover, is a handicapped man with an extra ability who's one of four orphans from Saint Vincent's Orphanage in Brooklyn saved by Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), who runs a detective agency. When Minna is offed by the Mob in the opening minutes of the movie, Lionel goes chasing. Then he learns city bosses had a hand, and want to repress his efforts.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw's character, Laura Rose, who becomes a kind of love interest for Lionel Essrog, and likewise willem Dafoe's, Paul Randolph, Moses' brother and opponent, are additional key characters in the film not in the Johathan Lethem book. The cinematography is by the Mike Leigh regular (who produced the exquisite Turner), Dick Pope. He provides a lush, classic look.
Viewers will have to decide if this mixture of novel, non-fiction book and period recasting works for them or not. For many the problem is inherent in the Lethem novel, that it's a detective story where, as the original Times reviewer Albert Mobilio said, "solving the crime is beside the point." Certainly Norton has created a rich mixture, and this is a "labour of love," "as loving as it is laborious, maybe," is how the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw put it, writing (generally quite favorably) from Toronto. In her intro piece for the first part of the New York Film Festival for the Times Manohla Dargis linked it with the difficult Albert Serra'S Liberté with a one-word reaction: "oof," though she complemented these two as "choices rather than just opportunistically checked boxes." Motherless Brooklyn has many reasons for wanting to be in the New York Film Festival, and for the honor of Closing Night Film, notably the personal passion, but also the persistent rootedness in New York itself through these permutations.
Motherless Brooklyn, 144 mins., debuted at Telluride Aug. 30, 2019, showing at eight other festivals including Toronto, Vancouver, Mill Valley, and New York, where it was screened at the NYFF OCT. 11, 2019 as the Closing Night film. It opens theatrically in the US Nov. 1, 2019. Current Metascore 60%.
-
THE IRISHMAN (Martin Scorsese 2019)
[Found also in Filmleaf's Festival Coverage section for the 2019 NYFF]
MARTIN SCORSESE: THE IRISHMAN (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/dnap.jpg
AL PACINO AND ROBERT DE NIRO IN THE IRISHMAN
Old song
From Martin Scorsese, who is in his late seventies, comes a major feature that is an old man's film. It's told by an old man, about old men, with old actors digitized (indifferently) to look like and play their younger selves as well. It's logical that The Irishman, about Teamsters loyalist and mob hit man Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), who became the bodyguard and then (as he tells it) the assassin of Union kingpin Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) should have been chosen as Opening Night Film of the New York Film Festival. Scorsese is very New York, even if the film is set in Detroit. He is also a good friend of Film at Lincoln Center. And a great American director with an impressive body of work behind him.
To be honest, I am not a fan of Scorsese's feature films. I do not like them. They are unpleasant, humorless, laborious and cold. I admire his responsible passion for cinema and incestuous knowledge of it. I do like his documentaries. From Fran Lebowitz's talk about the one he made about her, I understand what a meticulous, obsessive craftsman he is in all his work. He also does have a sense of humor. See how he enjoys Fran's New York wit in Public Speaking. And there is much deadpan humor in The Irishman at the expense of the dimwitted, uncultured gangsters it depicts. Screenwriter Steven Zaillian's script based on Charles Brandt's book about Sheeran concocts numerous droll deadpan exchanges. It's a treat belatedly to see De Niro and Pacino acting together for the first time in extended scenes.
The Irishman is finely crafted and full of ideas and inspires many thoughts. But I found it monotonous and overlong - and frankly overrated. American film critics are loyal. Scorsese is an icon, and they feel obligated, I must assume, to worship it. He has made a big new film in his classic gangster vein, so it must be great. The Metascore, 94%, nonetheless is an astonishment. Review aggregating is not a science, but the makers of these scores seem to have tipped the scales. At least I hope more critics have found fault with The Irishman than that. They assign 80% ratings to some reviews that find serious fault, and supply only one negative one (Austin Chronicle, Richard Whittaker). Of course Armond White trashes the movie magnificently in National Review ("Déjà Vu Gangsterism"), but that's outside the mainstream mediocre media pale.
Other Scorsese stars join De Niro and Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel. This is a movie of old, ugly men. Even in meticulously staged crowd scenes, there is not one young or handsome face. Women are not a factor, not remotely featured as in Jonathan Demme's delightful Married to the Mob. There are two wives often seen, in the middle distance, made up and coiffed to the kitsch nines, in expensive pants suits, taking a cigarette break on car trips - it's a thing. But they don't come forward as characters. Note also that out of loyalty to his regulars, Scorsese uses an Italo-American actor to play an Irish-American. There's a far-fetched explanation of Frank's knowledge of Italian, but his Irishness doesn't emerge - just another indication of how monochromatic this movie is.
It's a movie though, ready to serve a loyal audience with ritual storytelling and violence, providing pleasures in its $140 million worth of production values in period feel, costumes, and snazzy old cars (though I still long for a period movie whose vehicles aren't all intact and shiny). This is not just a remake. Its very relentlessness in showing Frank's steady increments of slow progress up the second-tier Teamsters and mafia outsider functionary ladders is something new. But it reflects Scorsese's old worship of toughs and wise guys and seeming admiration for their violence.
I balk at Scorsese's representing union goons and gangsters as somehow heroic and tragic. Metacritic's only critic of the film, Richard Whittiker of the Austen Chronicle, seems alone in recognizing that this is not inevitable. He points out that while not "lionizing" mobsters, Scorsese still "romanticizes" them as "flawed yet still glamorous, undone by their own hubris." Whittiker - apparently alone in this - compares this indulgent touch with how the mafia is shown in "the Italian poliziotteschi," Italian Years of Lead gang films that showed them as "boors, bullies, and murderers, rather than genteel gentlemen who must occasionally get their hands dirty and do so oh-so-begrudgingly." Whittiker calls Scorsese's appeal to us to feel Sheeran's "angst" when he's being flown in to kill "his supposed friend" (Hoffa) "a demand too far."
All this reminded me of a richer 2019 New York Film Festival mafia experience, Marco Bellocchio's The Traitor/Il traditore, the epic, multi-continent story of Tommaso Buscetta, the first big Italian mafia figure who chose to turn state's witness. This is a gangster tale that has perspective, both morally and historically. And I was impressed that Pierfrancesco Favino, the star of the film, who gives a career-best performance as Buscetta, strongly urged us both before and after the NYFF public screening to bear in mind that these mafiosi are small, evil, stupid men. Coppola doesn't see that, but he made a glorious American gangster epic with range and perspective. In another format, so did David Chase om the 2000-2007 HBO epic, "The Sopranos." Scprsese has not done so. Monotonously, and at overblown length, he has once again depicted Italo-Americans as gangsters, and (this time) unions as gangs of thugs.
The Irishman, 209 mins,. debuted at New York as Opening Night Film; 15 other international festivals, US theatrical release Nov. 1, wide release in many countries online by Netflix Nov. 27. Metascore 94%.
-
BACURAU (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Juliano Dornelles 2019)
KLEBER MENDOÇA FILHO, JULIANO DORNELLES: BACURAU (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images//filhoBCX2.png
SONIA BRAGA (CENTER) IN BACURAU
Not just another Cannes mistake?
This is a bold film for an arthouse filmmaker to produce, and it has moments of rawness and unpredictability that are admirable. But it seems at first hand to be possibly a misstep both for the previously much subtler chronicler of social and political unease as seen in the 2011 Neighboring Sopunds and 2016 Aquarius, Kleber Mendonça Filho, and for Cannes, which may have awarded novelty rather than mastery in giving it half of the 2019 Jury Prize. It's a movie that excites and then delivers a series of scenes of growing disappointment and repugnance. But I'm not saying it won't surprise and awe you.
Let's begin with where we are, which is the Brazilian boonies. Bacurau was filmed in the village of Barra in the municipality of Parelhas and in the rural area of the municipality of Acari, at the Sertão do Seridó region, in Rio Grande do Norte. Mendonça Filho shares credit this time with his regular production designer Juliano Dornelles. (They both came originally from this general region, is one reason.) The Wikipedia article introduces it as a "Brazilian weird western film" and its rural shootout, its rush of horses, its showdowns, and its truckload of coffins may indeed befit that peculiar genre.
How are we to take the action? In his Hollywood Reporter review, Stephen Dalton surprises me by asserting that this third narrative feature "strikes a lighter tone" than the first two and combines "sunny small-town comedy with a fable-like plot" along with "a sprinkle of magic realism." This seems an absurdly watered down description, but the film is many things to many people because it embodies many things. In an interview with Emily Buder, Mendoça Filho himself describes it as a mix of "spaghetti Western, '70's sci-fi, social realist drama, and political satire."
The film feels real enough to be horrifying, but it enters risky sci-fi horror territory with its futuristic human hunting game topic, which has been mostly an area for schlock. (See a list of ten, with the 1932 Most Dangerous Game given as the trailblazer.) However, we have to acknowledge that Mendonca Filho is smart enough to know all this and may want to use the schlock format for his own sophisticated purpose. But despite Mike D'Angelo's conclusion on Letterboxd that the film may "require a second viewing following extensive reading" due to its rootedness in Brazilian politics, the focus on American imperialists and brutal outside exploiters from the extreme right isn't all that hard to grasp.
Bacurau starts off as if it means to be an entertainment, with conventional opening credits and a pleasant pop song celebrating Brazil, but that is surely ironic. A big water truck rides in rough, arriving with three bullet holes spewing agua that its driver hasn't noticed. (The road was bumpy.) There is a stupid, corrupt politician, mayor Tony Jr. (Thardelly Lima), who is complicit in robbing local areas of their water supply and who gets a final comeuppance. The focus is on Bacurau, a little semi-abandoned town in the north whose 94-year-old matriarch Carmelita dies and gets a funeral observation in which the whole town participates, though apart the ceremony's strange magic realist aspects Sonia Braga, as a local doctor called Domingas, stages a loud scene because she insists that the deceased woman was evil. Then, with some, including Carmelita's granddaughter Teresa (Barbara Colen), returned to town from elsewhere, along with the handsome Pacote (Tomaso Aquinas) and a useful psychotic local killer and protector of water rights called Lunga (Silvero Pereira), hostile outsiders arrive, though as yet unseen. Their forerunners are a colorfully costumed Brazilian couple in clownish spandex suits on dustrider motorcycles who come through the town. When they're gone, it's discovered seven people have been shot.
They were an advance crew for a gang of mostly American white people headed by Michael (Udo Kier), whose awkward, combative, and finally murderous conference we visit. This is a bad scene in more ways than one: it's not only sinister and racist, but clumsy, destroying the air of menace and unpredictability maintained in the depiction of Bacurau scenes. But we learn the cell phone coverage of the town has been blocked, it is somehow not included on maps, and communications between northern and southern Brazil are temporarily suspended, so the setting is perfect for this ugly group to do what they've come for, kill locals for sport using collectible automatic weapons. Overhead there is a flying-saucer-shaped drone rumbling in English. How it functions isn't quite clear, but symbolically it refers to American manipulation from higher up. The way the rural area is being choked off requires no mention of Brazil's new right wing strong man Jair Bolsonaro and the Amazonian rain forest.
"They're not going to kill a kid," I said as a group of local children gather, the most normal, best dressed Bacurauans on screen so far, and play a game of dare as night falls to tease us, one by one creeping as far as they can into the dark. But sure enough, a kid gets shot. At least even the bad guys agree this was foul play. And the bad guys get theirs, just as in a good Western. But after a while, the action seems almost too symbolically satisfying - though this is achieved with good staging and classic visual flair through zooms, split diopter effects, Cinemascope, and other old fashioned techniques.
I'm not the only one finding Bacurau intriguing yet fearing that it winds up being confused and all over the place. It would work much better if it were dramatically tighter. Peter DeBruge in Variety notes that the filmakers "haven’t figured out how to create that hair-bristling anticipation of imminent violence that comes so naturally to someone like Quentin Tarantino." Mere vague unexpectedness isn't scary, and all the danger and killing aren't wielded as effectively as they should be to hold our attention and manipulate our emotions.
Bacurau, 131 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, where it tied for the Jury Prize with the French film, Ladj Ly's Les misérables. Many other awards and at least 31 other festivals including the NYFF. Metascore 74%. AlloCiné press rating 3.8, with a rare rave from Cahiers du Cinéma. US theatrical distribution by Kino Lorber began Mar. 13, 2020, but due to general theater closings caused by the coronavirus pandemic the company launched a "virtual theatrical exhibition initiative," Kino Marquee, with this film from Mar. 19.
-
ZOMBI CHILD (Bertrand Bonello 2019)
BERTRAND BONELLO: ZOMBI CHILD (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/zc4.jpg
LOUISE LABEQUE AND WISLANDA LOUIMAT (FAR RIGHT) IN ZOMBI CHILD
Voodoo comes to Paris
If you said Betrand Bonello's films are beautiful, sexy, and provocative you would not be wrong. This new, officially fifth feature (I've still not seen his first one, the 2008 On War), has those elements. Its imagery, full of deep contrasts, can only be described as lush. Its intertwined narrative is puzzling as well.
We're taken right away to Haiti and plunged into the world of voodoo and zombies. Ground powder from the cut-up body of a blowfish is dropped, unbeknownst to him, into a man's shoes. Walking in them, he soon falters and falls. Later, he's aroused from death to the half-alive state of a zombie - and pushed into a numb, helpless labor in the hell of a a sugar cane field with other victims of the same cruel enchantment. In time however something arouses him to enough life to escape.
Some of the Haitian sequences center around a moonlit cemetery whose large tombs seem airy and haunted and astonishingly grand for what we know as the poorest country in the hemisphere.
From the thumping, vibrant ceremonies of Haitian voodoo (Bonello's command of music is always fresh and astonishing as his images are lush and beautiful) we're rushed to the grandest private boarding school you've ever seen, housed in vast stone government buildings. This noble domaine was established by Napoleon Bonaparte on the edge of Paris, in Saint Denis, for the education of children of recipients of the Legion of Honor. It really exists, and attendance there is still on an honorary basis.
Zombi Child oscillates between girls in this very posh Parisian school and people in Haiti. But these are not wholly separate places. A story about a Haitian grandfather (the zombie victim, granted a second life) and his descendants links the two strains. It turns out one of those descendants, Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat), is a new student at the school. A white schoolgirl, Fanny (the dreamy Louise Labeque), who's Mélissa's friend and sponsors her for membership in a sorority, while increasingly possessed by a perhaps imaginary love, also bridges the gap. For the sorority admission Mélissa confesses the family secret of a zombi and voodoo knowledge in her background.
Thierry Méranger of Cahiers du Cinéma calls this screenplay "eminently Bonellian in its double orientation," its "interplay of echoes" between "radically different" worlds designed to "stimulate the spectator's reflection." Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times bluntly declares that it's meant to "interrogate the bitter legacy of French colonialism."
But how so? And if so, this could be a tricky proposition. On NPR Andrew Lapin was partly admiring of how "cerebral and slippery" the film is, but suggests that since voodoo and zombies are all most white people "already know" about Haitian culture, a director coming from Haiti's former colonizing nation (France) must do "a lot of legwork to use these elements successfully in a "fable" where "the real horror is colonialism." The posh school comes from Napoleon, who coopted the French revolution, and class scenes include a history professor lecturing on this and how "liberalism obscures liberty."
I'm more inclined to agree with Glenn Kenny's more delicately worded praise in his short New York Times review of the film where he asserts that the movie’s inconclusiveness is the source of its appeal. Zombi Child, he says, is fueled by insinuation and fascination. The fascination, the potent power, of the occult, that's what Haiti has that the first wold lacks.
One moment made me authentically jump, but Bonello isn't offering a conventional horror movie. He's more interested in making his hints of voodoo's power and attraction, even for the white lovelorn schoolgirl, seem as convincing as his voodoo ceremonies, both abroad and back in Haiti, feel thoroughly attractive, or scary, and real. These are some of the best voodoo scenes in a movie. This still may seem like a concoction to you. Its enchantments were more those of the luxuriant imagery, the flowing camerawork, the delicious use of moon- and candle-light, the beautiful people, of whatever color. This is world-class filmmaking even if it's not Bonello's best work.
Bonello stages things, gets his actors to live them completely, then steps back and lets it happen. Glenn Kenny says his "hallmark" is his "dreamy detachment." My first look at that was the 2011 House of Tolerence (L'Apollonide - mémoires de la maison close), which I saw in Paris, a languorous immersion in a turn-of-the-century Parisian brothel, intoxicating, sexy, slightly repugnant. Next came his most ambitious project, Saint Laurent(2014), focused on a very druggy period in the designer's career and a final moment of decline. He has said this became a kind of matching panel for Apollonide. (You'll find that in an excellent long Q&A after the NYFF screening.) Saint Laurent's "forbidden" (unsanctioned) picture of the fashion house is as intoxicating, vibrant, and cloying as the maison close, with its opium, champagne, disfigurement and syphilis. No one can say Gaspard Ulliel wasn't totally immersed in his performance. Nocturama (2016) takes a group of wild young people who stage a terrorist act in Paris, who seem to run aground in a posh department store at the end, Bonello again getting intense action going and then seeming to leave it to its own devices, foundering. Those who saw the result as "shallow cynicism" (like A.O. Scott) missed how exciting and powerful it was. (Mike D'Angelo didn't.)
Zombi Child is exciting at times too. But despite its gorgeous imagery and sound, its back and forth dialectic seems more artificial and calculating than Bonello's previous films.
Zombi Child, mins., debuted at Cannes Directors Fortnight May 2019, included in 13 other international festivals, including Toronto and New York. It released theatrically in France Jun. 12, 2020 (AlloCiné press rating 3.7m 75%) and in the US Jan. 24, 2020 (Metascore 75%). Now available in "virtual theater" through Film Movement (Mar. 23-May 1, 2020), which benefits the theater of your choice. https://www.filmmovement.com/zombi-child
-
WASP NETWORK (Olivier Assayas 2019)
OLIVIER ASSAYAS: WASP NETWORK (2019)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/wn.jpg
GAEL GARCÍA BERNAL AND PENELOPE CRUZ IN WASP NETWORK
Spies nearby
The is a movie about the Cuban spies sent to Miami to combat anti-Castro Cuban-American groups, and their capture. They are part of what the Cubans called La Red Avispa (The Wasp Network). The screenplay is based on the book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War by Fernando Morais, and it's mainly from the Wasp, Cuban point of view, not the FBI point of view. Unlike the disastrous Seberg, no time is spent looking over the shoulders of G-men, nor will this story give any pleasure to right wing Miami Cubans. But it won't delight leftists much either, or champions of the Cuban Five. The issues of why one might leave Cuba and why one might choose not to are treated only superficially. There's no analysis of US behavior toward Cuba since the revolution.
On the plus side, the film is made in an impeccable, clear style (with one big qualification: see below) and there's an excellent cast with as leads Edgar Ramirez (of the director's riveting miniseries Carlos), Penelope Cruz (Almodóvar's muse), Walter Moura (Escobar in the Netflix series "Narcos"), Ana de Armas (an up-and-comer who's actually Cuban but lives in Hollywood now), and Gael García Bernal (he of course is Mexican, Moura is Brazilian originally, and Ramirez is Venezuelan). They're all terrific, and other cast members shine. Even a baby is so amazing I thought she must be the actress' real baby.
Nothing really makes sense for the first hour. We don't get the whole picture, and we never do, really. We focus on René Gonzalez (Édgar Ramirez), a Puerto Rican-born pilot living in Castro’s Cuba and fed up with it, or the brutal embargo against Castro by the US and resulting shortage of essential goods and services, who suddenly steals a little plane and flies it to Miami, leaving behind his wife Olga and young daughter. Olga is deeply shocked and disappointed to learn her husband is a traitor. He has left without a word to her. Born in Chicago, he was already a US citizen and adapts easily, celebrated as an anti-Castro figure.
We also follow another guy, Juan Pablo Roque (Wagner Moura) who escapes Havana by donning snorkel gear and swimming to Guantanamo, not only a physical challenge but riskier because prison guards almost shoot him dead when he comes out of the water. Roque and Gonzalez are a big contrast. René is modest, content with small earnings, and starts flying for a group that rescues Cuban defectors arriving by water. Juan Pablo immediately woos and marries the beautiful Ana Marguerita Martinez (Ana de Armas) and, as revealed by an $8,000 Rolex, is earning big bucks but won't tell Ana how. This was the first time I'd seen Wagner Moura, an impressively sly actor who as Glenn Kenny says, "can shift from boyish to sinister in the space of a single frame" - and that's not the half of it.
This is interesting enough to keep us occupied but it's not till an hour into the movie, with a flashback to four years earlier focused on Cuban Gerardo Hernandez (Garcia Bernal) that we start to understand something of what is going on. We learn about the CANF and Luis Posada Carriles (Tony Plana), and a young man's single-handed effort to plant enough bombs to undermine the entire Cuban tourist business. This late-arriving exposition for me had a deflating and confounding effect. There were still many good scenes to follow. Unfortunately despite them, and the good acting, there is so much exposition it's hard to get close to any of the individual characters or relationships.
At the moment I'm an enthusiastic follower of the FX series "The Americans." It teaches us that in matters of espionage, it's good to have a firm notion of where the main characters - in that case "Phillip" and "Elizabeth" - place their real, virtually unshakable loyalties, before moving on. Another example of which I'm a longtime fan is the spy novels of John le Carré. You may not be sure who's loyal, but you always know who's working for British Intelligence, even in the latest novel the remarkable le Carré, who at 88, has just produced (Agent Running in the Field - for which he's performed the audio version, and no one does that better). To be too long unclear about these basics in spydom is fatal.
It's said that Assayas had a lot of trouble making Wasp Network, which has scenes shot in Cuba in it. At least the effort doesn't show. We get a glimpse of Clinton (this happened when he was President) and Fidel, who, in a hushed voice, emphatically, asserts his confidence that the Red Avispa was doing the right thing and that the Americans should see that. Whose side do you take?
Wasp Network, 123 mins., debuted at Venice and showed at about ten other international festivals including Toronto, New York, London and Rio. It was released on Netflix Jun. 19, 2019, and that applies to many countries (13 listed on IMDb). Metascore 54%.
-
LITTLE EMPTY BOXES ( Max Lugavere, Chris Newhard 2024)
MAX LUGAVERE, CHRIS NEWHARD: LITTLE EMPTY BOXES (2024)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20bxx.jpg
MAX AND KATHY LUGAVERE IN LITTLE EMPTY BOXES
A son helps his mother with a fatal disease and shares with us what he learns about it
In Little Empty Boxes, filmmaker Max Lugavere, working with his codirector and cameraman, chronicles his effort to help his mother Kathy with her mysterious dementia. He searches for answers behind her illness, finding lifestyle and diet choices from decades earlier are significant factors. Playing the main roles in this documentary are director Lugavere starring as himself ("for the first time"), and his mother, ("as 'Mommy'"). To offset this jokey sound to the opening credits they end by noting that the film was made in cooperation with the Alzheimer's Association of America. And we are going to learn about that in both a personal and scientific way. The value of this documentary is that it has both elements.
Old family footage complete the picture in a film about Max, an adult son investigating the onset of dementia and Parkinson's in his beloved mother Kathy, and his effort to understand her condition and, if possible, do something to slow down its outset or alleviate its symptoms. Diet turns out to be a major factor. We, Americans, or Westerners at large, now seem to be eating our way more and more frequently into early mental decline. Environment and stress are other causes. None of these factors has been improving, and the unfavorable numbers have been increasing rapidly - a familiar story, isn't it? And aren't we making ourselves worse by worrying about such things? - A vicious cycle.
Max Lugavere is a robust and fitness-conscious young man with a deep voice who enjoys cavorting in front of the camera in millennial casual attire, including form-fitting and bicep-revealing T shirts. He actually shot a very promising film of his mother, which we glimpse here, when he was just a boy, a film whose cheer and charm perhaps inevitably outweigh those of the more thought-provoking later footage. He shows us in the first moments, as he gets up and cleans his teeth, his adult reading: works by Carl Sagon, Michio Kaku, and Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers top the bedside book pile. And on top of those, Ayn Rand's dystopian fictional critique of socialism, Anthem.
Taking a little time first off to display its maker's quirks and always from a first person POV throughout, tHis is a documentary in which the director makes himself both the narrator and, in a way, the main character; but this is nonetheless always primarily a loving and personal film about Alzheimer's disease and related illnesses in which it's his mother who is the center of attention. Lugavere is a filmmaker and TV cohost in L.A., but as eldest of three sons, has, at the outset, when he learns of his mother's worsening mental condition, remained perhaps closest to her even while living across the country from her and his two brothers, who along with their father and her ex-husband, all live in New York.
We follow Max in a visit to Kathy that finds her rapidly worsening, at 62, as her caretaker/housekeeper Debra recounts, behaving strangely, unable to finish sentences, dangerous to leave alone in her art-filled Manhattan apartment, whose spectacular city view perhaps reflects that her ex-husband, Bruce, was a garmento, a princeling of the garment district. Max has decided to give up L.A. for now, and resign from his job as a TV host. We see him meet with his cohost to inform her of this decision (though we wonder if this is a performance, since they are both performers), and next he is in a plane to New York.
We meet Max's two brothers and one brother's husband, only briefly, for a spectacular apartment Fourth of July fireworks-watching party. Max, who explains he has always liked helping out with family health issues, takes Kathy for a grueling series of brain scans, including one that requires her to have her head locked in place in for 45 minutes that she very strenuously objects to, up to the last three minutes of the 45. She is already frightened. These tests add to the discomfort. But Max explains they are essential for her to have the best diagnosis and the best treatment.
Kathy sometimes seems overwhelmed and downcast, but she can be very feisty too/ His presence seems to help her in itself. She and Max have great chemistry: she most thrives with her sons and lives for them, and says so. Despite her fear and initial depression, she is a lively person who can still be seen smiling and laughing, to the end of the film. (The film does not invade the privacy of her grim final months and days and merely reports on them in final on screen texts.) Finally when the tests done at Max's instigation are all done, a neurologist, reviewing all of them, explains to her and to him what they mean: that she has a form of Lewy Body disease(or LBD).
These are illnesses caused by deposits of an abnormal protein in the brain and may combine Parkinson's and other forms of dementia. LBD starts with thinking and behavior changes that are followed by problems with movement. This is a sad illness that is perhaps less common, but happens to have been what occurs to Georg Kienzler, the father of Léa Seydoux played by Pascal Greggory in Mia Hansen-Løve's memorable 2022 film One Fine Morning/Un beau matin. Georg's helplessness and the disappearance of his personality and brilliant intelligence, precisely recreated by Greggory, were both touching and hard to watch. Lewy Body disease, Max mentions, leads to worse outcomes than Alzheimer's and Parkinson's - as if they weren't enough! "To me that's scary," he says. Scary indeed. Few experiences can be harder than to have to live through a parent's gradual disappearance while the body is still there before you, week after week, month after month. In the film, Georg is moved to a facility where he can be cared for, a difficult decision. Kathy is lucky that, as far as we can see, most of her last days are spent at home, with Max and sometimes his brothers Ben and Andrew, around to keep her company along with a private caretaker.
The film is finally a portrait of mother and son, with an intense digression about her diagnosis and its causes and treatment. Much is personal here, and Kathy and Max have a warm relationship in every scene. But there is a solid amount of expertise presented through live interviews with scientists and doctors. Much emphasis is on diet, which, with stress, is a major factor in developing dementia. This is a disease that develops over decades.
The long lead-up to an ultimately fatal onset means there is plenty of time to prevent, delay, or reduce dementia. But the problem is that by the time it is usually diagnosed, it has been developing for a long time and there are irreversible changes in the brtain. Still Max, who we've already seen doing yoga and working out seriously with weights on his own, is seen with Kathy while she is working out with a personal trainer, going on walks including her old neighborhood in Washington Heights, Brooklyn, and eating with her foods recommended by neuro-nutritionists: fresh vegetables doused in extra virgin olive oil and generously flavored with Korean kimchi.
Kathy does seem to improve later in the film after this healthy regime has begun - she is probably much helped by Max's warmth and presence. She still appears well able to walk, even though she has become incontinent, and she appears to be more cheerful now and a good sport about the healthy meals, though she says about kimchi, "Gee, what do they put in this stuff?" Online texts spare us but report on the last days when Kathy's cognitive function went into serious decline, she finally developed cancer so her blood became toxic, and she died three months later.
This is an informative and warmly human film about coping and understnding: it tells a lot many don't know about dementia and its lifestyle causes, but it also documents filial affection: a loyal son who drops everything to be with his mother during her last days.
The tech aspects and music here are unexceptional but fine. Some archival family footage, while not unusual, is used particularly tellingly at special moments. There is expert information about Alzheimer's and diet. It's made unusually clear here how long the country was dominated by false dietary information: the belief that fats and cholesterol are harmful, which are now known to be an essential part of diet, and the turn to "low fat" diets and diets free of meat, poultry, diary, and cheese were deficient in essentials.
The film's most memorable parts simply show the warm interactions of a young man and his mother. You may, like me, want to go out and buy some radishes and some kimchi after watching. Lugavere's research led him to co-author with Paul Grewal M.D.Genius Fooods, a book about diet and mental function published in 2018 that was a Times. bestseller.
Little Empty Boxes ,, 100 mins., released by Abramorama in New York Apr. 19, Los Angeles Apr. 26, 2024.
-
THE LISTENER (Steve Buscemi 2023)
STEVE BUSCEMI: THE LISTENER (2023)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20tess2.jpg
TESSA THOMPSON IN THE LISTENER
All the lonely people
So there's this beautiful woman of color, and all she has to do of an evening is take "helpline" calls in her little cordless headphone from lonely or sad or desperate or distracted people at her apartment, and all we have to do in this movie is listen to the conversations and see how soothingly and supportively she talks to the callers, seeming really interested, but not too much, not fake.
Except, of course, we don't have to listen to these conversations; it's just that this movie is asking us to. And let's say up front right off that some wont want to. Why would one stick to the end through all the ninety-plus minutes? Well, "Beth" (Tessa Thompson) is beautiful, as we said. And perhaps we are just curious about people, and each caller has a specific story. When the little "ding-ding" of another call comes, it announces a new little surprise, a new human experience. The screenplay by writer Alessandro Camon - never does the writing matter than in a movie like this - does a good job of providing us with constant variety without seeming to strain for novelty or try shock or titillate us.
Now, usually call service/operator films have dramatic outcomes. A good recent example is Gustav Möller's 2017 Danish police emergency call drama The Guilty,, a "crackerjack feature debut," where the rookie cop station operator has to save someone in dire danger, finding the endangered caller's risky location and getting her rescued without ever leaving the police station. The Listener is free of The Guilty's restrictions. "Beth" gets to wear a blouse with cleavage, to let her beautiful hair down, and to walk around her cozily lighted apartment, and we get to watch her, while her movements gradually show how emotionally taxing these calls are for her. Her voice loses its perkiness and her greetings their cheeriness as the evening wears on.
This isn't that high-tension kind of call drama; it's actually rather languid. It meanders, and we meander with it. This is a movie to curl up to. Kristen Lopez is not wrong in her Tribeca review for The Wrap when she says The Listener "plays a lot like a podcast or even a radio drama."
"Beth" is restrained. That isn't her real name. It's the policy of the call-in service (in L.A.?) to use a pseudonym. Most callers just talk of this or that. Some have had traumas happen to them. Some are just lonely and bored. One is a hostile "incel" type misogynist. There are two kinds of criminals and a badly damaged vet. Some are facing dilemmas they can't or won't deal with. One of the latter is Chris (Bobby Soto), a cop, who witnessed a police killing where the killer was cleared of responsibility, but he knows it was unjustified. It's a double bind: if he talks, his colleagues will consider him a traitor, and if he doesn't he carries guilt by association. The ante is upped for "Beth" because the "N" word was used in the incident.
But here, as in nearly every case, the conversation just ends. It's late, after all.
One call is from a woman who is schizophrenic and refuses to take meds, or for that matter, talk to doctors. Sharon (Alia Shawkat) is crazy, but her obsessive paranoid way of connecting one thing to another makes "Beth" suggest she could make poetry out of it; and Sharon calls back at the end of the night with a poem she has written, which she reads and "Beth" finds awesome.
The last new call in the evening has a special resonance and sets itself off because the caller is unusually energetic and smart and has an English accent. Her name is Laura and the actress voicing her is none other than Rebecca Hall. This major call is from a fired sociology professor, just simultaneiously divorced, with no money and no friends, who is sure the world will end in flames and floods and whether in a hundred years or a thousand, she does not care. This woman is a piece of work - one can't help wondering why "Beth" doesn't hang up on a caller sometimes, including this one - either because the caller is too crazy, or too annoying, or unwilling to be helped, but then it's her job as the listener, to keep talking, even when the caller wants to hang up but she, "Beth," wants to provide more sympathy or encouragement. These conversations are like tennis rallies: we watch to see how long the ball keeps getting batted back across the net.
Laura is a caller who establishes a bond early on, because she knows about "Beth's" job here and asks her a lot of questions - reflecting her training as a sociologist, she says. For instance, Laura knows it's a "peer" function "Beth" plays here, sort of like a member of A.A. So that means "Beth" has a "deal", and Laura is the first caller to ask her what her "deal" is, her "secret." It's rather predictable, alas, but this nonetheless must be considered a climactic moment, because what we've been waiting for is the big reveal of who "Beth" is, our protagonist. It's still exciting because this is one of the first times there has been real give-and-take.
Laura gets talked out of suicide for tonight, the only moment when this plot point emerges. Not only that, though, but perhaps more importantly, "Beth" suggests to Laura that she might turn out to be good at this job herself. (And she is, after all, out of work, so maybe the suggestion isn't such a lame kind of bonding gesture as it might seem.)
And now we begin to get it: as A.A. members are drunks who talk other drunks into sobriety, late night helpline phone answering operators are made up of (formerly, or recovering) suicidal people who talk other suicidal people out of killing themselves, one night at a time. While this movie doesn't provide any of the sensational panicky, hyper-emotional moments of the phone genre, it delivers something more useful: an understanding of how these call services function and who works on them.
Tessa Thompson is attractive, appealing, and subtle in her performance. I found her manner a bit on the withholding and controlled side., but maybe that is how you have to be,l both to serve the caller and to save yourself, in such a job. "Beth" makes clear, by the way, that she doesn't do this job constantly and this is the last month of her current stint at it. What we also see of course is that just as this isn't a movie for everyone, this isn't a job for everyone either. But the veteran actor Steve Buscemi, who has been in so many classic films and great TV series, from "Mr. Pink" in Reservoir Dogs through "The Sopranos" and so much more, draws classy, well modulated performances from all his unseen actors, as well as from the one we see. But while one appreciates the restraint as part of the helpline job, the result is not as memorable as it ought to be, and the callers, though troubled, aren't in extremis enough
Alessandro Camon was an Oscar nominee for The Messenger, whose cast included Buscemi. That film's director, Oren Moverman, is one of The Listener's producers. It's been mentioned that this film, with its mostly voice-only cast, seems an obvious Covid shutdown project.
The Listener, 96 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 9, 2022, (Giornate degli Autori), also showing at Vienna, Thessaloniki, Stockholm and Tribeca. US release by Vertical Mar. 29, 2024. Metacritic rating: 63%.
-
THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR Wes Anderson 2023
WES ANDERSON: THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR (AND THREE MORE) (2023)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20ffx.jpg
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH, LEFT; BEN KINGSLEY, CENTER[, IN THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR
Wes Anderson develops a new approach to short story adaptation for Roald Dahl
Surely one of Wes Anderson's most engaging and warmly human efforts was his first venture into stop-motion animation, Fantastic Mr. Fox, a Roald Dahl adaptation. This time he has turned to Roald Dahl again, using live actors on screen - but in a new way. Rather than making them vanish into reimaginings of the texts, he has the actors - and what actors they are! - variously recite them, or much of them, while partially acting them out. He does four stories this way. Watching this is like being someone with an incredible visual imagination, and being read to - a most ingenious combination of experiences combining storytelling, filmmaking, and reimagining that manages to be highly stylized without getting in the way of Dahl's drollery. Dahl and Anderson seem to be looking over each other's shoulders, cooperatively.
This is a collection, but it went out as a short by the name of the forty-minute opening film, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugart, and that way it won the Oscar in the 96th annual Academy Awards for Best Live Action Short Film. This was deserved, especially when you consider that these are really four short films. "Henry Sugar" debuted at the Venice Film Festival. The Roald Dahl Story Company had been bought by Netflix for close to $700 million. Anderson's four short films came onto Netflix one after another, on four days in September, 2023. As a single film, they recently became available as a single film, on March 15, 2024.
Anderson's penchant for artificiality and a high level of control triumphs here because he draws us into the art of storytelling, and also into the narrative ingenuity of Dahl's tales. This movie is so engaging it made me what to watch it again, right away, and rewatch his other marvel of 2023, Asteroid City, which left me curiously cold the first time. Now I'm wondering if I haven't found a way into it. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugarreminds you that in watching Wes Anderson, there is so much to see. It's all about ingenious devices and intricate visual and editing detail, and the narrative works as a correlative to that.
Anderson might have thought about Japanese Kabuki when he invented this sequence. Though the chatty, fast-talking storytelling of Dahl's tales is nothing like Kabuki, the highly theatrical, somewhat stiff style has something in common with it. Uniformed "stagehands" come on scene and off, handing actors props or collecting them. The scenery is a thing of artificial, though sometimes Trompe-l'œil, "flats," which can be slid on or off, sideways, or drawn up or dropped onto the scene. In a beautiful scene that evokes some of the most accomplished children's books of my luxuriously read-to childhood, a forest is made up of many layers of flat-painted foliage, which slide smoothly on and off. Everything is seen as a rectangle, as if we are looking into a box-stage.
As for the actors, they are used like a troupe of players who come back playing multiple roles, conscious performers withal. Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel (so glad to see him included in this august company), Ben Kingsley and Richard Ayodde are encouraged to recite their texts rather rapidly and without too much expression, often standing facing forward, lined up flatly (but not always) along the horizontal. They say their lines of dialogue and then "said so-and-so" and also recite the lines of narration as each tale unfolds.
The artificiality of this approach is offset by what playful eye-candy it all is; how witty and involving the stories are. Anderson, who obviously delights as an artist in intricate, even maniacal detail and visual complexity, must be conscious of being a miniaturist this time: the stories might be cloying or precious, were they extended to feature length, but this way each one is a little gem.
The stories? You should just watch them. The first and and longest, titular one purports to be "true" and is very like a factoid from an old Ripley's Believe It or Not. That dogeared volume (I'm remembering my childhood again) contained the story of an Indian fakir who taught himself to hold his arm aloft, and kept it that way so long a bird, imagining him to be a tree, built a nest in his palm. Here, a spoiled rich man and gambling enthusiast (Cumberbatch) learns of a yogi who takes many years to learn how to see without using his eyes and tours the world performing feats. Henry Sugar works at it so he can read the denominations of playing crds when they are facing down and thus, contrives to make large sums at casinos. The money bores him, so he uses it to establish charities and winds up leaving at his death, of a pulmonary embolism which he has foreseen, a collection of the finest orphanages in the world.
The story feels like an obvious "spiritual growth parable" (as Glenn Kenny calls it), but it's all in the telling. And anyway, you may be more delighted by the three others. "The Swan" is about a loutish boy who steals a rifle and uses it to wantonly kill birds, ending with a large swan, while terrorizing another boy. More droll are "Ratcatcher," full of the pride of a working class English specialist, and the suspenseful "Poisoh" (my favorite, as storytelling). The latter depicts the terror of finding oneself in bed with an Indian krait, one of the most venomous of the world's snakes. Roald Dahl is a unique storyteller, who appears through the film (as Ralph Fiennes), in his working hut, in his writing chair, with his writing board, paper, and sharpened pencils. His presence is appropriate, since Anderson's and his cast's methods prove so highly suited to the storytelling of this writer.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (and three more), 87 mins. The first story, 40 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2023; it opened Sept. 27,, 2023 on the internet in 30 countries. Now available in the US complete together on Netflix. Metacritic rating: 85%.
-
I DIDN'T SEE YOU THERE ( Reid Davenport 2022))
REID DAVENPORT: I DIDN'T SEE YOU THERE (2022)
Man with a camera
Director Reid Davenport shows us from first hand what it is like to take the BART system in the Bay Area as a person with cerebral palsy in a wheel chair. He narrates the film and shot it himself. He says he made several films before but didn't shoot them himself. They showed what he looks like to the world. That is the subject here too, but this time his purpose is to focus on what the world looks like to him. He captures the rhythms and clatter and beauty around him as he moves about.
Reid says the new camera allows him "to be more spontaneous and look for shapes and patterns and not worry about meanings and words."
Well, it doesn't quite turn out that way. This sill becomes a somewhat sketchy picture of Reid'slife. He lives in Oakland, Califoria, where he can be an artist, which he sas he has settled on after striking out at a series of other occupations We don't learn altogether what akk that means, but Oakland apparently is a place where it's relatively easy to get around. It has a friendly system of public transportation, particularly BART (one trip on a bus means an encounter with a driver who's very bossy), and there is a system of contiguous, even sidewalks.
Reid comes from Bethel, Connecticut, we learn, and goes back there several times, visiting with his loving mother, who wants nothing more than for hm to move back to the East Coast, and other family members. He says he sees Bethel as a "Purgatory" because it wants to be a suburb but isn't, quite. It seems like a bright, green, sunny place, and above all a place where loved ones are, which Oakland is not.
One thing we know: New York City isn't handicapped-friendly. Try taking the subway with a wheelchair, or going down a Manhattan sidewalk.
While he is making the film, which he continually narrates, like a diary, near Reid'sk Oakland apartment a big red circus tent has gone up. It seems to haunt him. He never quite finds out what it is, but it awakens in him thoughts of the Freak Show in the time of the original Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus run by the impresario PT Barnum. It turns out Bethel, Connecticut was the home of PT Barnum. When he's back on a visit there, Reid films the Barnum house. It now has a new statue of the man that has gone up. The Freak Show exemplifies all that was wrong with the way people approached difference and disability in the past, a legacy that lingers, Reid implies.
It doesn't feel like Reid is treated like a freak in the moments he films here, exactly. What we learn, partly though conversation with his mother, is that he seems to her oversensitive sometimes - though eventually she usually comes to understand. Mostly perhaps the annoyance is that people keep offering to help Reid when he doesn't need any help, and thereby setting him apart. Toward the end, he approaches his apartment building and someone has laid out an electrical wire that's in his way. He is adamant about it, furious that such a thing happens where he lives. Perhaps this just concentrates the frustration of being who he is, the daily difficulty of everything, even of handling a pair of glasses. He has the same eye doctor as his little niece in Bethel. But putting on the glasses - that's different for him than for her, no doubt..
Watching this film was colored by an experience I had some years ago on a long train ride to a remote part of western Massachusetts. The only other person in the train car with me was a man with cerebral palsy, and we wound up having a conversation. I would frankly not have thought it was possible. At first I could not even understand him. (I am sure he was harder to understand than Reid Davenport.) He was a remarkable individual who was traveling to a place where he was going to teach disabled people and people with cerebral palsy. He also taught a program of dance for disabled people, he told me, a method he himself had developed. He had his own rig with him, which he was using, that enabled him to manipulate a laptop computer and to type. Part of it was made of wood. He had quite a bit of baggage with him. He asked me to get some of it down for him: that was how the conversation started. But being curious, I just kept asking questions. I got his name and email address, but the connection never developed further. Still, it opened up a new awareness for me of how some people triumph over unimaginable difficulties.
A neighbor has a friendly conversation with Reid and tells him he is heroic. This was how I felt about the man on the train. He had undertaken to deal with unimaginable difficulties and was triumphing.
The main thing is that Reid Davenport has made a film. Films about people with CP help open up their world to us. Just a trailer for one about a young artist who has severe CP (Reid Davenport speaks much more easily) called King Gimp brought me to tears.
We are all struggling to function in the world, I think. Just not this much.
I Didn't See You There, 76 mins., debuted at Sundance, where it won a directing award; it has been in major documentary festivals and other international festivals. It was releaased on VOD Feb. 20, 2024. Metacritic rating: 74%
-
THE PROMISED LAND (Nikolaj Arcel 2023)
NIKOLAJ ARCEL: THE PROMISED LAND (2023)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20kgs.jpg
MADS MIKKELSEN IN THE PROMISED LAND
The trials of Ludwig Kahlen
Those looking for an epic, uplifting story like the Swedish master Jan Troell's film of settlement in America The New Land, will be sorely disappointed by this grim Danish saga, set in the inhospitibale and empty Jutland heath in the mid-eighteenth century. But an IMDb citizen reviewer describes this film as "a period piece set in Europe with the look and feel of epic westerns," and that is something of what is to be found here. The great Danish star Mads Mikkelsen, whose grizzled, stony face no camera lens ever tires of, carries us through this fllm's depiction of the hero, Ludwig Kahlen's, long struggle with a drunken aristocratic villain known as Schinkel. He insists its "De Schinkel," but his aristocratic neighbors know otherwise, and his real origins are about as lowly as those of Kahlen, who eventually gets a "von" added to his name legitimately by the Danish King. He's stuck it out. He has raised potatoes, a crop that will grow most anywhere, on the Jutland plain, and survived untold hardships - but they will be told, in the over two hours run-time of this film.
Kahlen has gotten permission to take over some of the king's land on the Jutland plain - whose cold, flat expanse is the first thing we see in this handsomely lensed film. Permission from the Crown - except that, we learn eventually, the King is a drunk, whom he never sees and does not even know he's there, though he is pleased to have the seemoingly uninhabitable and unarable land inhabited and farmed in his royal name. In exchange Kahlen has requested, once he succeeds, to be given a royal title and an estate. Meanwhle, he calls the house he builds on the land "KIng's House." He comes with this request retired from the Danish army, in which he has earned the title of Captain painstakingly over many years. It's pointed out to him, as he knows - and accepts - that a noble recruit would have made the rank in just a few mohths. But he is a bastard - the real name of this film, Bastarden - the fruit of a nobleman's rough drunken sexual use of one of his serving maids.
The evil Schinkel, aka De Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), is guilty of the same drunken misbehavior, and one of his victims, Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin), becomes one of Kahlen's longtime ally on the farm. But his heart belongs to a high born women he meets at Schinke's, Edel Helene (Kristine Kujath Thorp), who has taken a shine to him from the start, and he to her. Another resident on the farm is a gypsy girl - they are called Taters here - named Anmai Mus (Hagberg Melina). She, Kahlen, and Ann Barbara become a kind of family, but it cannot last in this world of tribulations. Schinkel wants to get rid of Kahlen because his own land is near this godforsaken one, though we never learn if he has a farm or anything: he exists in the screenplay only to be a villain, and a sadist: we are forced to watch him have a captured runaway indentured servant slowly killed when Kahlen is also present, in the middle of the county ball. Nice social life they have.
The trouble for Kahlen is not just getting anything to grow in this harsh climate and land, but getting anyone to come and help him. He lures some Taters, the gypsy people, to work on the farm, but that is illegal, and he's forced to send them away. Finally about three dozen Germans are sent there, but their spokesman objects to the presence of the gypsy girl, Anmai Mus, whose dark skin he thinks will bring a curse on their enterprise, Kahlen can't send her away, but promises she won't be seen. That only works for a while. When Kahlen is successful, and has eighty bags of potatoes to show the Crown, that only upsets the other landowners, who join with Schinkel to attack him and his farm. Everything brings more trouble.
This is not really so much a story of farming so much as of dealing with hostile neighbors, and one positively evil one. But Kahlen as embodied in Mikkelsen is of course an impressive, regal figure, however beaten down, and a women near Schinkel whom he expects to marry him, Edel Helene (Kristine Kujath Thorp), who has taken a shine to him from the start, and he to her. But this is not a romance, not a tale of victory, but of endurance, nothing more. And those who like to see a villain get his will be satisfied. However while this is a handsome, well acted, and even austerely beautiful film, I found it a bit of a trial to watch. This is a world that brings to mind Samuel Johnnson's Rasselas, which says "Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed." If there is no fun, and there isn't, there needs to be uplift, and there is little of that; so despite its good qualities, I can't give this film the highest marks.
Nikolaj Arcel has been winning awards for twenty years, and an earlier success, the 2012 The Royal Affair, also starred Mikkelsen.
The Promised Land/Bastarden, 127 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2023, showing also at Telluride, Toronto, Calgary, and a half dozen US festivals; it shows at Göteborg Jan. 29, 2024. Metacritic rating: 76%.
-
MY BEST MOVIES OF 2022 draft lists
MY 2022 BEST MOVIES LISTS AS OF 11/27
Best Movies of 2022:
TÁR (Todd Field)
THE FABELMANS( Steven Spielberg)
ARMAGEDDON TIME (James Gray)
AFTERSUN (Charlotte*Wells)
EMILY THE CRIMINAL (John Patton Ford)
THE NORTHMAN (Robert Eggers)
Also liked:
ELVIS (Baz Luhrmann)
TILL (Chinonye Chukwu)
Best Foreign:
HIT THE ROAD (Panah Panahi)
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Joachim Trier)
A HERO (Asghar Farhadi)
LOST ILLUSIONS Xavier Giannoli) 6/22 US limited release
PARIS 13th DISTRICT (Jacques Audiard)
ONE FINE MORNING/UN BEAU JOUR (Mia Hansen-Love) 12/09 US limited release
THE HAPPENING/L'EVENEMENT (Audrey Diwan 2022) US early 2023?
THE BOX/LA CAJA (Lorenzo Vigas)
TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (Ruben Östlund)
Also liked:
COSTA BRAVA, LEBANON (5/15/22 Quad Cinema)
CASABLANCA BEATS (9/16/22 IFC center)
Best Documentaries:
DESCENDANT (Margaret Brown)
MY IMAGINARY COUNTRY (Patricio Guzmán)
THE TERRITORY (Alex Pritz)
RETROGRADE (Matthew Heineman)
ALL THAT BREATHES (Shaunak Sen)
Also liked:
ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED (Laura Poitras)
MR. BACHMAN AND HIS CLASS (Maria Speth)
Notable re-release:
SEPA: EL NUESTRO SEÑOR DE LOS MILAGROS
Need to See:
NO BEARS (Jafar Panahi) - NYFF
Best performances:
AUSTIN BUTLER, ELVIS
AUDREY PLAZA, EMILY THE CRIMINAL
MICHELLE WILLILAMS, THE FABELMANS
GABRIEL LABELLE, THE FABELMANS
Best Unreleased in the US:
THE SALES GIRL (Janchivdorj Sengedor - NYAFF)
BRUNO REIDAL: CONFESSIONS OF A MURDERER (Vincent Le Port)- RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA (FLC)
Wish I'd LIked:
THE BANSHEES OF INISHIRIN (Martin McDonagh)
DECISION TO LEAVE (Park Chan-wook)
FIRE OF LOVE (Sara Dosa)
-
MOON GARDEN (Ryan Stevens Harris 2022)
RYAN STEVENS HARRIS: MOON GARDEN (2022)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/mgnn2.jpg
HAVEN LEE HARRIS IN MOON GARDEN
Emma's adventures in nightmare-land
Five-year-old Emma, a cloyingly cute Shirley Temple type (Haven Lee Harris, the director's daughter), lives with her unhappy mom Sara (Augie Duke) and angry dad Alex (Brionne Davis), whose marriage is now understandably on the rocks and who seem to fight lately much of the time. One night, while her parents are having a loud argument, Emma in her upset trips and rolls down the basement stairs, lands at the bottom in a coma - and is swept off into a noisy, frightening, phantasmagoric, but sometimes beautiful landscape of dreams. And we follow her along this path for the rest of the movie, whether we want to or not.
What unfolds of this vision in the bulk of Moon Garden involves a dazzling use of various informal but ingenious bricolage effects and animation techniques (including stop-motion) to depict a child's-eye-view story of purgatory, or something awfully close to it: life dominated by the constant fighting of the child's parents, which the mother tries to escape, but seems unable to]. The multi-media visuals create a series of bizarre, dreamy, melodramatic sequences in glowing colors and constant motion and sound. The eye may delight (or not), but all this effort to unleash surreal images might have been better spent on depicting the actual lives of the parents and the little girl in a subtle and complex way instead of the trite, sentimental frame tale the movie unthinkingly provides us with.
However, realism is not what the filmmakers were in search of, or the kind of storytelling that would somehow show us what apparently is going on: little Emma's struggle to regain consciousness. As the early dialogue announces, daddy is a writer, or at least wants to be, who wishes he could dream in bright colors the way little Emma tells him she does. He is frankly jealous, believing his daughter's vision to represent the font of creativity. "Wish I could dream like that," he says to Emma.. "It'd make writing my book a heck of a lot easier." Moon Garden is a celebration of the vividness of the childish imagination. Hence this is one of those films where the filmmakers are self consciously celebrating themselves - because these beautiful images are, after all, their own creation. But as the comatose imagined vision develops, it can hardly be seen as the product of a such an imagination - or at least one hopes not.
At first (in the dream, apparently), we see the little girl, and hear and glimpse the couple, now embracing, now panicking, and the emergency vehicle coming to take the girl to the hospital. But this morphs more and more into gooey scenes of insectoid monsters and dark, Dantesque, infernal visions at once gorgeous and terrifying. There are sequences of water that alternate between sunny swimming lessons of the girl and her parents at a happier time, and little Emma floating about alone in a muddy, leaf-filled morass surrounded by fencings of pipes. Masked and hairless creatures come and go, while the film ingeniously keeps alive the idea of the child's comatose state and the adults trying to signal to her.
A hyperactive sound design and Michael Deragon's vivid score maintain violent energy, with many crashes and explosions and eccentric fantasy scenes maintaining excitement and melding all together. There are numerous interesting little sequences. An ashen-skinned black gentleman in a mask, for instance, gives Emma a transistor radio that seems a talisman for her: its staticky transmissions represent Emma's shaky effort to connect with her mother's voice. A huge, papier-mâché rhinoceros floats high above. Emma is ordered to clean a horribly dirty and dilapidated bathroom, and she undertakes this overwhelming and disgusting chore cheerfully. What might that mean?
Well-realized though the scenes may be, it becomes harder and harder to see the unfolding images as related to any unified storyline. Sound and image dominate as things of themselves. There is no narrative of the sort created by Louis Carroll, no matter how much Emma's adventure may initially remind us of Alice's. Nor, for that matter, does this fragmented world compare with the equally bizarre and fantastical but more coherent one of Guillermo del Toro. Moon Garden could be seen as frequent editor Ryan Stevens Harris' calling card to do mise-en-scène for somebody else's movie. Harris' well-realized but meandering sequences seem to hover between sophisticated horror film with nightmarish storyline and the pure warped, nightmarish virtually abstract surreality of Phil Tippet's Mad God seen last year on Shudder.
As a Letterbox'd commenter says, Moon Garden is derivative to the point of exhaustion, and being shot on expired 35mm stock can't be the main selling point of a film. There need to be more interesting characters and a solider story, and less treacly emotional content. But as with Mad God, the filmmaker seems to be so wholly absorbed into the intricate physicality of his sequences - this is what makes them fascinating - that he really can't be bothered with the larger picture of a narrative arc. People who like this kind of film are like children: a film for them is like a series of delightful baubles, bright shiny things that dazzle, and for them that's enough. (I found the YouTube reviewers "Spoiler Alert" helpful.)
Moon Garden, 93 mins., debuted at the Dances with Wolves and Micheaux festivals in Los Angeles and the Motor City Nightmares fest in Detroit in June and July 2022. Its US theatrical release distributed by Oscillooscope begins with IFC Center in NYC May 19, 2023.
-
CINEMA SABAYA (Orit Fouks Rotem 2021)
NY ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL - RECOMMENDED FILMS
Here are some films recommended by Richard Gray of Reel Bits.com. He sayhs "there's alwas so much to watch." You said it, Richard.
"The New York Asian Film Festival remains one of the highlights of the festival calendar. Now in its 22nd edition, the collaboration between the New York Asian Film Foundation and Film at Lincoln Center returns from 14-30 July this year.
"Opening with Lee Won-suk’s KILLING ROMANCE, the program contains a whopping 78 films from Hong Kong, Japan, China, South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Singapore, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These include Kazuyoshi Kumakiri #MANHOLE, featured on the festival poster, and the international premiere of Lee Byeong-heon’s DREAM as the centerpiece."
Mountain Woman (Takeshi Fukunaga, Japan 2023)
This director's Ainu Mosir came along as part of a slow wave of recognition of Japan’s Ainu peoples, delivers more visual poetry about outsiders with a unique blend of quiet contemplation and breathtakingly inevitable outcomes. If his previous work looked at cultural identity through the coming of age story structure, then here he applies his naturalistic lens to a period setting. Read our full review.
Art College 1994 (Liu Jian, China 2023)
Set in China in the 1990s, this animated film takes a look at youth featuring a group of art students. What is art? Ponder that during the incredibly measured pace of this highly detailed Chinese animated film from Liu Jian. Disarmingly wry and insightfully funny. At others, it feels almost documentary in nature. Read our full review.
December (Anshul Chauhan, India 2023)
We’ve been following Anshul Chauhan for a few years now, especially the excellent Kontora (2019) from a few years ago, along with his more recent short film Leo’s Return (2021), which was another superb character study. So, a new feature film from the director is something to get excited about. This one follows the psychological trauma of a person fighting for a reduction of her prison sentence seven years after murdering a classmate.
Egoist (Daishi Matsunaga, Japan)
One of the LGBTQIA+ films tagged in this year’s program and director Daishi Matsunaga’s film is playing in New York following it’s German premiere at Nippon Connection in June. Based on the autobiographical novel by Makoto Takayama, it follows two young men who start a passionate affair following a workout session — although that relationship is soon put to the test.
Okiku and the World (Junji Sakamoto, Japan)
Following its world premiere at IFFR earlier this year, Junji Sakamoto’s crisp black and white film about two people working as “manure men” in this Edo Period jidaigeki. Already getting terrific reviews, film critic Mark Schilling calls this “a model of how to inventively and feelingly revive a core genre riddled with formulas and conventions.”
Phantom (South Korea)
Lee Hae-young, who was the director behind the superior 2018 thriller Believer, returns with a spy drama is set in 1933 Korea, during Japanese colonial rule, and features a cast of Korean stars — Sol Kyung-Gu, Lee Ha-Nee, Park So-Dam, Kim Dong-Hee, and Seo Hyun-Woo to name a few — speaking almost entirely in Japanese.
In Broad Daylight (Hong Kong)
Coming from Hong Kong, director Lawrence Kan bases his latest thriller on true events. Starring Jennifer Yu as a reporter, this very topical film follows a news agency who investigates abuse at a nursing home.
A-Town Boyz (US)
One of the films that looks at this Asian diaspora around the world, this US documentary focuses on three young men who are involved in Atlanta’s vibrant hip-hop scene: Harrison “Vickz” Kim, Eugene Chung, and Jamy “Bizzy” Long. Director Eunice Lau’s film enjoys its world premiere at NYAFF this year.
Gaga (Taiwan)
One of the rare looks at Indigenous Taiwanese communities in this Golden Horse winning film from director Laha Mebow and a cast of non-professional actors. The title, which refers to the spiritual traditions of the Indigenous Tayal people, gives audiences a look at the tensions that exist between First Nations traditions and modern practices to this day in Taiwan.
Redemption with Life
As part of the Filmmaker in Focus on director Zhang Wei section, NYAFF presents the world premiere of his latest outing. NYAFF describes the film, which follows a motorcycle club, as “a dark meditation on capitalistic corruption in which classic codes of honor and loyalty are put to the ultimate test.”
NYAFF Narrative Shorts Animation Showcase - Animation 2023
Yes, it’s a little bit of a cheat putting in a showcase of 10 films as the eleventh entry on this list, but where else will you find such a terrific set of animated shorts from across Asia? From the world premiere of Kong Son-hee’s BORDRLINE (South Korea) to Masashi Kawamura brand new film HIDARI (Japan), these span the realms of experimental fringes to the potential next big thing. Don’t miss them.
-
New York Asian Film Festival 2023 list of films
Art College 1994
Liu Jian 2023 China 118 minutes Mandarin with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Loosely based on filmmaker Liu Jian’s own experiences at the Chinese Southern Academy of Arts, this consistently compelling masterwork proves that art school students are just about the same everywhere.
Showtimes
July 16
7:30 PM
The Cord of Life
The Cord of Life
Qiao Sixue 2022 China 96 minutes Mongolian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A folktronica musician and his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother set off on a quixotic quest across the magnificent vistas of the steppes, stopping along the way to embrace the wondrous culture of their roots.
Showtimes
July 25
3:30 PM
Empty Nest
Empty Nest
Zhang Wei 2020 China 81 minutes
North American Premiere · Q&A with Zhang Wei
A charismatic salesman rekindles an elderly woman’s belief in love and happiness in this poignant tale of love and the search for meaning in the twilight years of life.
Showtimes
July 23
3:30 PM
Factory Boss
Factory Boss
Zhang Wei 2014 China 100 minutes Mandarin with English subtitles
Sharp and thought-provoking, Factory Boss offers a rare glimpse into the lives of those caught in the crossfire of progress and profit.
Showtimes
July 22
12:00 PM
Flaming Cloud
Flaming Cloud
Liu Siyi 2023 China 107 minutes Mandarin with English subtitles
World Premiere · Q&A with Liu Siyi
Director Liu Siyi’s stunning feature debut, a live-action spin on the classic fairy tale paradigm, is an exquisite homage to the Disney movies and Chinese folklore that her generation grew up on.
Showtimes
July 29
4:00 PM
Redemption with Life
Redemption with Life
Zhang Wei 2023 China 100 minutes Mandarin with English subtitles
World Premiere
In the latest feature from NYAFF’s Filmmaker in Focus, Zhang Wei, a majestic motorcycle club snakes its way along a glorious Tibetan highway before a nested series of flashbacks reveals the plight that brought them on their profound journey.
Showtimes
July 28
3:30 PM
The Rib (Director’s Cut)
The Rib (Director’s Cut)
Zhang Wei 2018 China 143 minutes Mandarin with English subtitles
Q&A with Zhang Wei
This breakthrough film, about a 32-year-old man trying to undergo reassignment surgery, illustrates the intense stigma and obstacles that the LGBT community must face in China, offering an inside look at both the marginalized and those who condemn them.
Showtimes
July 22
7:00 PM
A Woman
A Woman
Wang Chao 2022 China 118 minutes Mandarin with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A factory worker in Mao’s China tows the party line on the surface, but in her personal life she extolls the virtues of resilience and resistance against institutionalized sexism and oppression. Wang Chao’s adaptation of Zhang Xiuzhen’s novel is told in sweeping episodes that eloquently describe the hidden hardships of the era.
Showtimes
July 23
1:00 PM
Hong Kong
A Light Never Goes Out
A Light Never Goes Out
Anastasia Tsang 2022 Hong Kong 103 minutes Cantonese with English subtitles
US Premiere · Q&A with Anastasia Tsang
A recent widow teams up with the young apprentice of her husband, one of Hong Kong’s premier neon sign artisans, to complete his magnum opus in this nostalgic paean to Hong Kong’s irrepressibly bright and vibrant spirit.
Showtimes
July 25
6:00 PM
Back Home
Back Home
Nate Ki 2023 Hong Kong 120 minutes Cantonese with English subtitles
World Premiere · Q&A with Nate Ki and Anson Kong
In this hallucinogenic horror opus, a young man who can see ghosts returns to his childhood home and is trapped in a waking nightmare.
Showtimes
July 25
9:00 PM
Everyphone Everywhere
Everyphone Everywhere
Amos Why 2023 Hong Kong 91 minutes Cantonese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Director Amos Why (Far, Far Away, NYAFF 2022) brings his wry playfulness with narrative structure and media formalism to this pointed satire of postmodern communication and its resultant technological fallout.
Showtimes
July 20
3:30 PM
In Broad Daylight
In Broad Daylight
Lawrence Kan 2023 Hong Kong 106 minutes Cantonese with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Lawrence Kan
Based on real events, this hard-hitting exposé of systematic failure and institutionalized corruption is a clarion call for compassion and respect without prejudice.
Showtimes
July 20
5:45 PM
Mad Fate
Mad Fate
Soi Cheang 2023 Hong Kong 108 minutes Cantonese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Set in a surreal city of hookers, mystics, and psychopaths, Mad Fate is a crazed, morally complex addition to classic Cantonese mean-streets noir.
Showtimes
July 22
2:15 PM
Nomad (Director’s Cut)
Nomad (Director’s Cut)
Patrick Tam 1982 Hong Kong 94 minutes Cantonese with English subtitles
East Coast Premiere · New 4K Restoration
Four attractive souls, equal parts rich and working class, form a tragic romantic bond of ennui, anomie, absurdity, love, and violence in (Wong Kar Wai mentor) Patrick Tam’s genre-defying Hong Kong New Wave watershed.
Showtimes
July 21
3:45 PM
The Sunny Side of the Street
The Sunny Side of the Street
Lau Kok-rui 2022 Hong Kong, Malaysia 111 minutes Cantonese, Urdu with English subtitles
New York Premiere
After a fit of road rage gone south, Yat, a cantankerous cabbie with a checkered past, finds himself embroiled in the fate of a young Pakistani asylum-seeker. These two lost souls find they have more in common than they thought as they form a strong bond on a path of redemption paved with corruption and despair.
Showtimes
July 17
3:30 PM
Vital Signs
Vital Signs
Cheuk Wan-chi 2023 Hong Kong 100 minutes Cantonese with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Cheuk Wan-chi & Louis Koo
This buddy mentor-mentee story is imbued with pathos set against the backdrop of harrowing thrill-a-minute emergency rescue operations. Louis Koo shines as the stoic yet soft-hearted ambulanceman supreme, who must face his own painful past while literally breaking his back to provide a good future for his charmingly precocious young daughter.
Showtimes
July 19
8:30 PM
The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell
The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell
Herman Yau 2023 Hong Kong 100 minutes Cantonese with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Intro by Louis Koo
Genre maestro Herman Yau follows his highly successful showstopper The White Storm 2: Drug Lords (NYAFF 2019) with this even more hyperbolic and gritty entry in the gonzo super-cops vs. crazy crooks series.
Showtimes
July 20
8:30 PM
Japan
Presented with the support of the Japan Foundation
#Manhole
#Manhole
Kazuyoshi Kumakiri 2023 Japan 99 minutes Japanese with English subtitles
East Coast Premiere
A young executive is stuck in a desolate manhole amidst a driving downpour armed only with a trusty cell phone in this fantastical edge-of-your-seat thriller.
Showtimes
July 16
10:00 PM
December
December
Anshul Chauhan 2022 Japan 99 minutes Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Anshul Chauhan & Shogen
This riveting courtroom drama, written and directed by non-Japanese, wrestles with the controversial imprisonment of juvenile offenders and the gray areas of Japan’s criminal justice system, where the conviction rate is 99%.
Showtimes
July 24
6:00 PM
Egoist
Egoist
Daishi Matsunaga 2023 Japan 120 minutes Japanese with English subtitles
New York Premiere · Q&A with Daishi Matsunaga and Ryohei Suzuki
A poignant story of love, loss, self-sacrifice, and discovery, Daishi Matsunaga’s heralded new film is inspired by the seminal semi-autobiographical novel by Makoto Takayama.
Showtimes
July 15
8:30 PM
Home Sweet Home
Home Sweet Home
Takumi Saitoh 2023 Japan 113 minutes Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Takumi Saitoh
A young family moves into a new house but the claustrophobic basement that controls the always-perfect temperature will soon ominously reflect all of their collective nightmares….
Showtimes
July 27
9:00 PM
A Hundred Flowers
A Hundred Flowers
Genki Kawamura 2022 Japan 104 minutes Japanese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Genki Kawamura, a best-selling author (If Cats Disappeared From the World) and star producer (on anime mega-hits like Belle, Weathering With You, and Your Name) makes a poetic and visually stunning feature debut, adapted from his own novel.
Showtimes
July 16
12:15 PM
In Her Room
In Her Room
Chihiro Ito 2022 Japan 136 minutes Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Chihiro Ito & Satoru Iguchi
There are mysteries nested inside mysteries in this otherworldly erotic film, the directorial debut of veteran screenwriter Chihiro Ito (Crying Out Love in the Center of the World, Spring Snow), adapted from her own novel.
Showtimes
July 28
6:00 PM
Mayhem Girls
Mayhem Girls
Shinichi Fujita 2022 Japan 98 minutes Japanese with English subtitles
International Premiere
A small gaggle of previously unassociated high school girls, centered around the humbly charismatic Mizuho, form a tight-knit clique when their typically adolescent hormonal changes are suddenly manifested by… supernatural powers!
Showtimes
July 26
4:00 PM
Motherhood
Motherhood
Ryuichi Hiroki 2022 Japan 116 minutes Japanese with English subtitles
US Premiere
The details behind two generations of fraught mother-daughter relationships unfold following a news item about a 17-year-old girl’s attempted suicide. This intense psychodrama of emotional blackmail and betrayal has stirring twists and turns aplenty.
Showtimes
July 18
3:15 PM
Mountain Woman
Mountain Woman
Takeshi Fukunaga 2022 Japan/USA 100 minutes Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Takeshi Fukunaga
A rural woman whose village is in its second year of a devastating famine quest for survival gradually transforms into a journey to self-actualization in this haunting 18th-century-set tale of resilience in the face of harsh discrimination.
Showtimes
July 24
9:00 PM
Okiku and the World
Okiku and the World
Junji Sakamoto 2023 Japan 90 minutes Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Junji Sakamoto
This audacious, aesthetically brilliant new Edo-era period drama about two “manure men” who collect waste from outhouses achieves a perfect blend of potty humor, cutting social commentary, and budding romance.
Showtimes
July 16
2:30 PM
Kazakhstan
Mountain Onion
Mountain Onion
Eldar Shibanov 2022 Kazakhstan 90 minutes Russian, Kazakh, Mandarin with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Eldar Shibanov
Director Eldar Shibanov looks to the eyes of children for a wryly imaginative satire of adult foibles, filling his deceptively quotidian Kazakh boondocks with lively oddballs as colorful as their quirky costumes and other random devices.
Showtimes
July 29
1:30 PM
Malaysia
Abang Adik
Abang Adik
Jin Ong 2023 Malaysia 115 minutes Malay, Mandarin, Cantonese, Sign Language with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Jin Ong
The bond of two undocumented orphans is tested when one’s pent-up aggression leads to an unspeakable act. This remarkable award-winning debut offers a rare glimpse into Malaysian street life.
Showtimes
July 29
6:45 PM
Philippines
I Love You, Beksman
I Love You, Beksman
Percival Intalan 2022 Philippines 107 minutes Filipino with English subtitles
North American Premiere
When fashionably androgynous salon worker Dalia falls for a gorgeous beauty pageant contestant the truth finally comes out: He’s a straight guy with a queer eye! This brilliant riff on Romeo and Juliet wears campy corniness on its self-aware pop-art sleeve.
Showtimes
July 22
4:30 PM
12 Weeks
12 Weeks
Anna Isabelle Matutina 2023 Phillipines 105 minutes Filipino, English with English subtitles
International Premiere · Q&A with Anna Isabelle Matutina
The refreshingly multidimensional characters and complex interpersonal relationships in director Anna Isabelle Matutina’s bold debut cover all the points and counterpoints of the sensitive issue of abortion.
Showtimes
July 26
6:15 PM
Where Is the Lie?
Where Is the Lie?
Quark Henares 2023 Philippines 85 minutes Filipino, English with English subtitles
New York Premiere · Q&A with Quark Henares, EJ Jallorina & Royce Cabrera
This vibrantly Gen Z-skewing film with a humorous and hard-hitting script based on a real-life incident in the Philippines focuses on the charming, lovelorn target of a vile cyberbully (a star-making performance by luminous trans woman EJ Jallorina).
Showtimes
July 22
10:15 PM
Singapore
Geylang
Geylang
Boi Kwong 2022 Singapore 87 minutes Mandarin, Hokkien, English with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Boi Kwong & Jason Ho
A beautiful young prostitute’s sudden disappearance leads her foul-mouthed pimp, ragamuffin boyfriend, and a local lawyer on a gore-filled wild goose chase in this wild pop-art genre joyride.
Showtimes
July 21
6:00 PM
South Korea
Co-presented with Korean Cultural Center New York
Bear Man
Bear Man
Park Sung-kwang 2023 South Korea 97 minutes Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Park Sung-woong is dazzling in two roles — as an embarrassingly goofy bear cub/man-child and a steely, well-dressed hit man — in this boisterous comedy.
Showtimes
July 19
3:30 PM
Dream
Dream
Lee Byeong-heon 2023 South Korea 125 minutes Korean with English subtitles
Centerpiece Film · International Premiere · Q&A with Lee Byeong-heon
A virtuoso soccer player (Park Seo-jun) and cynical producer (K-pop megastar IU) form a national football team made up of homeless individuals in acclaimed director Lee Byeong-heon’s highly anticipated blockbuster.
Showtimes
July 17
6:00 PM
Greenhouse
Greenhouse
Lee Sol-hui 2022 South Korea 100 minutes Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere
This striking feature debut is a gripping slow-burn drama-cum-thriller about a caretaker for a disabled elderly couple coping with her own psychological troubles.
Showtimes
July 27
6:30 PM
Hail to Hell
Hail to Hell
Lim Oh-jeong 2022 South Korea 109 minutes Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere
In this tar-black comedy, Na-mi and Sun-woo’s suicide pact is abruptly foiled when they find out that the bully who led them to this sorry fate is living happily ever after, far from their sleepy town.
Showtimes
July 29
9:30 PM
The Host
The Host
Bong Joon Ho 2006 South Korea 119 minutes Korean and English with English subtitles
This screening takes place on July 21 at 9pm in Damrosch Park
A young girl's family does everything in its power to rescue her from the clutches of a giant amphibious mutant—rendered as alternately chaotic, lethal, and clumsy—that has emerged from the Han River in Bong’s masterful monster movie. This film screens as part of Lincoln Center's Korean Arts Week.
Showtimes
July 21
9:00 PM
Killing Romance
Killing Romance
Lee Won-suk 2023 South Korea 106 minutes Korean with English subtitles
Opening Night Film · North American Premiere · Q&A on July 14 with Lee Won-suk & Lee Sun-kyun · Q&A on July 30 with Lee Won-suk, Gong Myoung, Lee Hanee & Lee Sun-kyun
A comic fantasia about a former superstar actress trapped in a toxic marriage with an egomaniacal tycoon, Killing Romance rounds up unforgettable performances that power up an electroshock of a tale, dancing between a love story, a musical, a murder plot, and a million things in between.
Showtimes
July 14
7:00 PM
July 30
1:30 PM
Phantom
Phantom
Lee Hae-young 2023 South Korea 133 minutes Korean and Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Lee Hanee
One of South Korea’s biggest hits of 2023, this brilliantly lensed, action-packed spy drama is set in 1933 Korea, during Japanese colonial rule, and features a cast of Korean stars speaking almost entirely in Japanese.
Showtimes
July 30
4:15 PM
Rebound
Rebound
Chang Hang-jun 2023 South Korea 120 minutes Korean with English subtitles
New York Premiere · Intro & Q&A with director Chang Hang-jun, Kim Taek, Jeong Jin-woon & Billy Acumen
Transcending the sports genre and eschewing the pitfalls of easy sentiment and melodrama, Chang Hang-jun’s Rebound elevates its premise with a singularly rousing screenplay, co-written by Kwon Sung-hui (The Spy Gone North, As One) and Kim Eun-hee (Netflix’s Kingdom).
Showtimes
July 15
5:30 PM
A Tour Guide
A Tour Guide
Kwak Eun-mi 2023 South Korea 94 minutes Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Kwak Eun-mi
Han-young, a North Korean defector, gets a license to guide Chinese tourists thanks to the language skills she acquired as a refugee in China. She works diligently but faces many challenges, from coworker rivalry to assimilation, all while desperately searching for her missing brother.
Showtimes
July 19
6:00 PM
Taiwan
Co-presented with the support of Taipei Cultural Center in New York
The Abandoned
The Abandoned
Tseng Ying-ting 2022 Taiwan 128 minutes Mandarin, Taiwanese, Thai with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Tseng Ying-ting
A down-on-her-luck police detective uncovers the work of a vicious serial killer targeting illegal migrant workers in this transcendently insightful examination of the human psyche.
Showtimes
July 26
9:00 PM
Bad Education
Bad Education
Kai Ko 2023 Taiwan 77 minutes Mandarin with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Taking over from his mentor Giddens Ko, Kai Ko delivers a kinetic (and often laugh-out-loud-against-our-better-judgment) delineation of good and evil with turbulent high stakes.
Showtimes
July 15
12:30 PM
Eye of the Storm
Eye of the Storm
Lin Chun-Yang 2023 Taiwan 118 minutes Mandarin with English subtitles
International Premiere
Eye of the Storm is a gripping and poignant hospital thriller that explores the power of empathy and human resilience in the face of despair.
Showtimes
July 27
3:30 PM
Gaga
Gaga
Laha Mebow 2022 Taiwan 111 minutes Atayal, Mandarin, Taiwanese, English with English subtitles
East Coast Premiere · Q&A with Laha Mebow
Imbued with divinely tragicomic undertones, Gaga’s deceptively simple story allows the audience to bask in the glory of the Atayal tribe's unique culture and effervescent personalities.
Showtimes
July 18
8:30 PM
Marry My Dead Body
Marry My Dead Body
Cheng Wei-hao 2022 Taiwan 130 minutes Mandarin with English subtitles
East Coast Premiere
A bit of folk magic lands a wannabe supercop betrothed to the ghost of a gay man who forces him to make a much needed attitude adjustment while also helping him solve a major drug case. This is full-throttle fun and high-voltage action all the way—and a much-needed sendup of homophobia.
Showtimes
July 17
9:00 PM
Miss Shampoo
Miss Shampoo
Giddens Ko 2023 Taiwan 116 minutes Mandarin with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Star auteur Giddens Ko adapts one of his own wild short stories into a raunchy gangster-romcom mash-up about a fledgling hair dresser who inadvertently saves the life of a gang boss, who falls for her.
Showtimes
July 23
6:00 PM
Thailand
Faces of Anne
Faces of Anne
Rasiguet Sookkarn, Kongdej Jaturanrasmee 2022 Thailand 116 minutes Thai with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Rasiguet Sookkarn
Anne wakes up on a strange island oppressed by scary caretakers and given a mission of survival against blood-crazed pagan demons in this surreal odyssey about all that it means to be a woman in the modern world.
Showtimes
July 28
9:15 PM
Kitty the Killer
Kitty the Killer
Lee Thongkham 2023 Thailand 120 minutes Thai with English subtitles
International Premiere · Q&A with Lee Thongkham & Vithaya Pansringarm
Built on comic book logic with its tongue firmly in cheek, this anarchic action-comedy is a rousing pastiche of Asian genre film tropes and references exuberantly topped off with a riotous Thai sense of humor for a rollicking good time.
Showtimes
July 21
8:30 PM
You & Me & Me
You & Me & Me
Wanweaw Hongvivatana, Weawwan Hongvivatana 2023 Thailand 121 minutes Thai with English subtitles
North American Premiere · Q&A with Weawwan Hongvivatana, Wanweaw Hongvivatana & Thitiya Jirapornsilp
This charmingly insightful directorial debut by real-life twins Weawwan and Wanweaw Hongvivatana puts a buoyantly ironic spin on summer romance.
Showtimes
July 15
2:30 PM
Vietnam
Glorious Ashes
Glorious Ashes
Bui Thac Chuyên 2022 Vietnam, France, Singapore 117 minutes Vietnamese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Profound and lyrical, the first film in over a decade from cinematic poet Bui Thac Chuyen (Adrift) spins a mesmerizing tale of life, love, loneliness, and pyromania in yesteryear’s Mekong Delta.
Showtimes
July 16
5:00 PM
Diasporic Cinema
A-Town Boyz
A-Town Boyz
Eunice Lau 2023 USA 72 minutes English
World Premiere · Q&A with Eunice Lau
This edgy documentary focusing on three young men in Atlanta’s vibrant hip-hop scene is an illuminating time capsule of the immigrant struggle juxtaposed with cultural trends and socio-economic needs.
Showtimes
July 23
8:30 PM
The Effects of Lying
The Effects of Lying
Isher Sahota 2023 U.K. 85 minutes English
North American Premiere · Q&A with Aizzah Fatima, Isher Sahota & Jon Tarcy
With a smashing cast, the majority of whom just happen to be British Asian, The Effects of Lying cleverly milks the universal truisms of family dysfunction for both philosophical reflection and savage laughs galore.
Showtimes
July 18
6:00 PM
Shorts Programs
Narrative Shorts Showcase – Animation
Narrative Shorts Showcase – Animation
Various Directors 2022-2023 Various 119 minutes
A showcase of animated shorts from South Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan, and the United States.
Showtimes
July 21
1:15 PM
Narrative Shorts Showcase – Live Action
Narrative Shorts Showcase – Live Action
Various Directors 2022-2023 155 minutes
A showcase of live-action shorts from China, South Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Japan, and the United States.
Showtimes
July 14
3:30 PM
Closing Night Film - To Be Announced!
Closing Night Film
Closing Night Film
2023
World Premiere
NYAFF Closing Night will conclude this year’s festival with a fabulous awards ceremony and the world premiere of a new all-star family-friendly animation blockbuster, to be revealed in a future announcement.
Showtimes
July 30
7:45 PM
Talks
All talks are free to NYAFF ticket and pass holders.
-
TERRENCE MARTIN, DOMINIQUE BRAUN: GET AWAY IF YOU CAN (2022)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/geaw.jpg
TRAILER
Crazy couple on an island, with flashbacks
Terrence Martin previously directed the not much noticed 2009The Donner Party, with Crispin Glover. A Cinemagazine review in Danish compliments Glover's straightforward lead performance and says, "The cast acts solidly, the sets look good and the soundtrack is also good. Still, 'Famished' is not recommended. The rigid narrative structure, the slow pace and the muddled editing throw a spanner in the works." (Wife Dominique Braun has no previous credits.) The Danish review says the film begins in medias res with no explanation. This one does the same, plunging us onto a small sailing yacht with an awkward couple (Martin and Braun) going somewhere, we don't know where. Domi (Braun) wants to take a day off on nearby islands. T.J. (Martin) refuses, wanting to complete the journey and saying these are known as "the Islands of Despair." While he is drunk (he is a drinker, also a surfer), she takes a rubber raft and camps on the island. As the awkward couple marinates in this untenable situation, a lot of flashbacks come along to explain how they got here.
The latter feature Marina (Martina Gusman), a Spanish-speaking woman friend of Domi's back home in South America, saying she admires her love story but Domi, who dabbles in art but is no good and seems to know it, complains that they are not having sex. These alternate with scenes featuring Ed Harris as T.J''s ultra-macho, retro father, disapproving of his planned boat trip, but also insisting he be very careful and establish he is the captain. T.J. evidently has failed at that since Domi has gone on her own in a quite crazy and dangerous way in landing alone on a deserted island. More flashbacks explain the father never liked his son's relationship with this woman and even planned with his other son (Riley Smith) to disrupt it. Domi tells Marina all her husband does is "work all day with his father." The father plans for the son to inherit his business, or did: he now declares him to be an f--ing loser.
Further flashbacks reveal Domi fleeing dinner after an ugly moment alone with the father and due to the repeatedly alluded to lack of sex and disliking the "gringo" lifestyle, packing up and returning to South America. How they got back together later we don't find out, but it's hinted T.J.'s brother has made him a lot of money and, disloyal to their father, offered him a way to win Domi back. Scenes of Marina and Domi (returned to S.A.) show Domi isn't happy back home either, and decides on her own to return to her husband.
Meanwhile back on the island - a present time nearly overwhelmed by all these flashbacks - things are progressively crazier. Domi seems to want to settle in by herself, and refuses a catch of fish T.J. offers. T.J. alternately surfs, fishes, and sits among the sea lions and rocks in a wet suit practicing loudly with a Spanish language textbook.
The surf, the rocks, the islands are dramatic and ruggedly beautiful. The couple washed up on it are a mess and it's impossible to care about them. There is an ominous percussive score that promises something menacing. It goes with the film's anguished, fumbling invention.
Get Away If You Can, 78 mins., not previously seen, will show in Los Angeles at Laemmle Monica and other select theaters and on digital for rent or purchase from Fri., Aug. 19, 2022.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/geaw2.jpg
TERRENCE MARTIN, DOMINIQUE BRAUN IN GET AWAY IF YOU CAN
-
THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER (Joanna Hogg 2022)
JOANNA HOGG: THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER (2022)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/daw.jpg
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 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: 79%.