New York Film Festival 2015
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Click here for Filmleaf NYFF 2015 comments thread. (Opening night now moved to September 26.)
Links to reviews:
Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One/As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 1, O Inquieto (Miguel Gomes 2015)
Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One/As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 2, O Desolado (Miguel Gomes 2015)
Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One/As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 3, O Encantado" (Miguel Gomes 2015)
Assassin/刺客聶隱娘 (Hou Hsiao-hsien 2015)
Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg 2015)
Brooklyn (John Crowley 2015)
Carol (Todd Haynes 2015)
Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethekul 2015)
Cowboys, Les (Thomas Bidegain 2015)
De Palma (Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow 2015)
Don't Blink - Robert Frank (Laura Israel 2015)
Experimenter, The (Michael Almereyda 2015)
Forbidden Room, The (Guy Madden, Evan Johnson 2015)
Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson 2015)
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch 1943) - Revivals
In the Shadow of Women/L'Ombre des femmes (Philippe Garrel 2015)
Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words/Jag är Ingrid (Stig Björkman 2015) - Documentary section
Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2015)
Lobster, The (Yorgos Lanthimos 2015)
Maggie's Plan (Rebecca Miller 2015)
Measure of a Man, The/La loi du marché(Stéphane Brizé2015)
Mia Madre/My Mother (Nanni Moretti 2015)
Microbe and Gasoline/Microbe et gasoil (Michel Gondry 2015)
Miles Ahead (Don Cheadle 2015)
Mountains May Depart/山河故人, (Jia Zhangke 2015)
My Golden Days/Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse (Arnaud Desplechin 2015)
No Home Movie (Chantal Ackerman 2015)
Right Then, Wrong Now/지금은맞고그때는틀리다 (Hong Sang-soo 2015)
Rocco and His Brothers/Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Luchino Visconti 1960) - Revivals section
Son of Saul/Saul fia (László Nemes 2015)
Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle 2015)
Treasure, The/Comoara (Cornelieu Porumboliu 2015)
Walk, The (Robert Zemeckis 2015)
Where to Invade Next (Michael Moore 2015)
Witness, The (James Soloman 2015)
Opening, centerpiece, and closing night films.
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Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk will make its World Premiere as the Opening Night selection of the upcoming 53rd New York Film Festival (September 25 – October 11), which will kick off at Alice Tully Hall. A true story, the film is based on Philippe Petit’s memoir To Reach the Clouds and stars Golden Globe nominee Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit, the French high-wire artist who achieved the feat of walking between the Twin Towers in 1974.
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Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs is this year's centerpiece selection. Steve Jobs stars Michael Fassbender in the title role, Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak, Jeff Daniels as John Sculley, Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld, and Katherine Waterston as Chrisann Brennan.
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Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead has been selected for the closing night film.In the film, Cheadle, who also co-wrote the script, stars as the legendary Miles Davis opposite Emayatzy Corinealdi and Ewan McGrego.
JOURNEY TO THE SHORE (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2015)
KIYOSHI KUROSAWA: JOURNEY TO THE SHORE (2015)
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TADANOBU ASANO AND ERI FUKATSU IN JOURNEY TO THE SHORE
Death and romance confusingly treated
Journey to the Shore is a new film by the prolific and uneven but sometimes wonderful Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to the supremely great Akira Kurosawa). It is the story of a woman in love with the ghost of her dead husband. Kurosawa excels at creepiness and horror and ghosts should be right up his alley; moreover he dealt richly with contemporary family life in his atypical but excellent 2008 Tokyo Sonata . But this is a confusing mess. It is adapted from a novel, and one may assume that it's such a failure because of a clumsy adaptation that may be trying to deliver too many elements from the book without convincingly integrating them or maintaining a consistent tone. The narrative is choppy and confusing. It is hard to tell who new characters are and why new settings arise.
The premise is that a widow, Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu), is revisited by her dead husband Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano), and he takes her on a series of adventures while they live in some kind of limbo between life and death. Mizuki a Tokyo resident, is a piano teacher deemed mediocre by the mother of one of her child students but perhaps a fine pianist herself. But this is unclear, and like a lot of the film seems irrelevant to the whole. Yusuke drowned at sea three years ago and eventually we learn he had worked as a dentist.
After Yusuke casually reappears to Mizuki, they live together for some time and travel around to different places where he has lived and worked and has connections from his previous three-years as a spirit making his way to the spirit world, or to Mizuki. Yusuke has worked delivering circulars, in a restaurant making gyozas, and out in the country with a rural family. Some of the people, Yusuke tells Mizuki, are "like me," others not, among these families. Two ghosts appear to Mizuki, one of them a young girl who plays the piano, another a boy by a waterfall he says is the way to the other world. She also encounters her father, who died when she was 16 and says he has been watching her. He urges her to leave Yusuke. The finale shows Yusuke about to depart, to celebrate which, he and Mizuki can finally make love.
Each of these segments is like a short story, with the two protagonists in new settings, but they're not presented clearly or engagingly enough and don't add up to a unified whole. Derek Elley of Film Business Asia, an Asian film expert who used to be a principal writer for Variety, thinks that with this film, after his recent flop, Real, Kurosawa "bounces back with one of the strongest films in his up-and-down 30-year-long career." I don't think so. I think Kurosawa's stylish recent TV horror miniseries Penance, a series of separate tales that were nicely unified by a repeated core source-story, was a success, for those who got to see it. But the failed storytelling of Journey to the Shore means he still hasn't made a successful feature since 2008. Journey to the Shore has moments where its attempt to merge everyday and spirit worlds suddenly clicks, and it incidentally provides rarely seen glimpses of contemporary Japanese life. But as a film it never finds its way. All but extreme Kiyoshi Kurosowa fans should avoid.
Journey to the Shore/Kishibe no tabi/岸辺の旅, 127 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015; also Munich, Toronto, Melbourne. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.
CENETERY OF SPLENDOR Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2015)
APITCHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL: CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR (2015)
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The director's first solid feature in four years revisits themes, quietly
Justin Chang's description of Cemetery of Splendor in Variety as "eerily becalmed" might go for most of the former Cannes darling's work, but it seems to have less going on in it than previous outings such as his 2004 Tropical Malady, 2006 Syndromes and a Century (2006 NYFF) and 2010 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010 NYFF), though viewers of these earlier films will get a sense of déjà vu. Events this time center around a rural hospital (converted from an old school) filled with patients, former soldiers, afflicted with their own "tropical malady," a mysterious sleeping sickness; Syndromes was set at several hospitals (a reference to the filmmaker's own "past lives," since his parents were doctors working in hospitals at his home town). Syndromes ended with a large outdoor aerobics class; such a class is featured again here. In all these films, there are visits to spirits and nether worlds; Uncle Boonmee is the most spectacular of those, which helps explain why the director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (nickname "Joe") won the top prize at Cannes that year.
This time, as Mike D'Angelo said in his Cannes report for The Dissolve, there is more for fans who like Joe's penchant for dwelling on the past and less for those, like himself, who like him for his ability to create moments that are "mysterious and enchanting." Here, D'Angelo says, there are a couple of visually magical things -- he notes the colored lights used to attempt to cure the patients of their sleeping sickness and a cloud-filled sky slowly invaded by a giant paramecium -- but for the most part the film focuses on "the glories that once existed in what’s now a drab location," which people sort of sit around and talk about.
The main actors here are Joe regulars. Jenjira Pongpas Widner is Jenjira, a version of herself, a woman with a leg-length differential and crutches who's a volunteer at the sleeping soldier's hospital, located in the country near Joe's hometown, Khon Kaen. She tends to a young soldier called Itt (Banlop Lomnoi, of Tropical Malady), who becomes a sort of pet and protégé when he begins waking up in he afternoon and going out with her. She tells Richard about Itt. Richard (Richard Abramson), who appears in person only once, is an American former military man who has met Jenjira online and has come to Thailand to live with her. Itt seems to be inhabited by the spirits of kings who once roamed the region around the hospital, now drab and being bulldozed, perhaps for a fiber optic network. So Itt, who also speaks to Jenjira through a young mind-reader called Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), can recall past lives, like Uncle Boonmee.
True, Joe has "still got it": he pursues his predilections with the conviction and style of an auteur. Even as his slow-moving style and penchant for the long-held static shot make for frequent longeurs, I feel curiously at home with his relaxed, light-hearted characters and their high-pitched Thai voices, and with his instantly recognizable way of framing exterior shots, his delicate sense of color and light, and his offbeat, slightly crazy passion for the folklore and spiritualism of his country and his willingness to use all his considerable cinematic gifts to depict and embody them. But this film, compared to Joe's other ones, has more telling than showing. As Justin Chang puts it, Cemetery of Splendor lacks "the jungle-feverish exhilaration of the filmmaker’s greatest work."
Cemetery of Splendor, 127 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015 with French theatrical release 2 Sept. An AlloCiné press rating of 4.3, amounting to a rave, notably from Cahiers du Cinéma and Les Inrockuptibles along with Le Nouvel Observateur, Libération, and L'Express, shows that the French critics remain the most faithful of fans, though Le Monde found Cemetery less involving than previous works. Festivals where it's shown or will show (as of Sept. 2015) number a dozen or so, including Toronto and the New York Film Festival, which will be its US premiere. It was screened for this review as part of the latter. It has been picked up for US distribution by Strand Releasing.
Strand's theatrical release date has been announced now: 4 March 2016. OPENING MARCH 4, 2016
NY: IFC CENTER* & FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER.
*In addition to CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR, Apichatpong's previously unreleased 2012 feature MEKONG HOTEL will also open at IFC Center on March 4 for an exclusive theatrical premiere engagement, with a retrospective of the filmmaker's earlier work preceding the openings of the new films.
For more details on MEKONG HOTEL and the retrospective, please visit:
http://www.ifccenter.com/series/myst...weerasethakul/
Limited US theatrical release 14 Mar. 2016. DVD and Blu-ray 28 Jun. 2016.
ARABIAN NIGHTS: VOUME 1, THE RESTLESS ONE (Miguel Gomes 2015)
MIGUEL GOMES: ARABIAN NIGHTS: VOLUME 1, THE RESTLESS ONE (2015)
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Gomes rails against austerity in a wildly ambitious compendium of genres
In his previous (2012 NYFF) appearance, his third feature actually, the remembered colonial adultery tale, Tabu, the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes showed himself to be an uneven but original and imaginative filmmaker. With his massive three-feature, six-hour "Arabian Nights" sequence, introduced in Directors Fortnight at Cannes, he reveals even more energy, ambition, and experimentalism. From the first frames of an over-long prelude, he exhibits a sure touch. But as time went on in Volume 1, which blends lengthy footage about Portugal's economic woes brought about by austerity policies with folkloric and documentary elements loosely tied together (rather arbitrarily) through an externally imposed 1001 Nights narrative structure, the combination seemed increasingly uneasy and unconvincing. What have an exploding beached whale, ruminations about massive shipyard layoffs, a fantasy about officials magically given perpetual erections, men narrating their unemployment experiences, a satirical political fairy tale about a cockerel, and documentary footage of a war on wasps to save bee colonies got to do with each other, or with the Arabian Nights? One is impressed, but one has doubts.It's a lot to swallow, and final assessment must await a viewing of all three parts.
We're told Gomes worked for a year (2013-2014) with journalists recording the devastation caused in Portugal by austerity programs; that this is linked together by a local Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate). But despite a bold (and loud) style, this seems, in its first part, more a matter of ambition than actual accomplishment or coherence. Above all it is coherence that is lacking. Gomes announces (in his free use of big inter-titles) that he is not adapting the Arabian Nights, merely using its structure. But this is simply a way of saying that his use of the classic Arabic folktale framework is superficial, and tacked on in an effort to hold together unrelated material whose combination he himself admits at the outset was foolish.
Variety's Jay Weissberg points out that Gomes has hired Apichatpong Werrasethakul's usual dp Sayombhu Mukdeeprom here, but this hasn't the magical glow of a "Joe" film. Gomes achieves an amusing self-reflectiveness at the outset by showing himself running away from his own film crew, depressed at economic and social events in the country and overwhelmed by the absurdity of his own hubris in planning to depict them in a way that blends the folkloric and the epic. But this only illustrates the film's tendency, and ability, to incorporate all elements that arise, including the director's self-doubts. Whether anyone other than Gomes's most devoted fans will want to stick around remains uncertain, but the flashy series, enlivened (however artificially) by the use of fire, fireworks, and the aforementioned exploding beached whale and by an effective, and loud, use of music ranging from Rimsky Korsakoff to Aarvo Pärt, shot in brightly colored widescreen 16mm., is ideally suited for the more dedicated festival goers, especially those opposed to the right's ill-fated Great Recession austerity measures. The Volumes will be reviewed one by one.
Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless one/As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 1, O Inquieto, 125 mins., debuted in Directors Fortnight at Cannes, May 2015. Many other festivals, including the New York Film Festival, in connection with which it was screened for this review. Released 24 June in Paris, it received excellent reviews (AlloCiné press rating 4.2). The French critics admired Volume 1's blending of poetry and politics.
Arabian nights: Volume 2, the desolate one (2015)
MIGUEL GOMES: ARABIAN NIGHTS: VOLUME 2, THE DESOLATE ONE (2015)
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More meandering narrative from Gomes fails to deliver his message
Guy Lodge in Variety: "Only three tales are told here by the project’s wily mythical narrator Scheherazade, though one in particular sprawls and subdivides itself in such alluringly vine-like fashion that viewers will hardly notice 133 minutes ticking by." That is debatable. However, that long open air "trial" session, held under cover of darkness seemingly with a whole community presided over by a female judge, reminded me of both the actual Arabic 1001Nights, with its succession of sometimes outrageously fanciful and interrelated folkloric tales, and Abderrahmane Sissako's (incomparably superior) open air trial in his Bamako by representatives of the African people of the IMF and the World Bank in a public square where villagers go on pursuing their normal lives. There is an example of a brilliant wedding of politics, philosophy, and everyday life, which may be what Miguel Gomes is striving for. But while he becomes more involved in narrative and less preachy in Volume 2, he also rambles, his film as much of a messy hodge podge as Volume 1.
Gomes has fun with a classic storytelling tone with this summary: "In which Scheherazade tells of how desolation invaded men: 'It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport himself to escape the Guard while dreaming of prostitutes and partridges. A wounded cow will reminisce about a thousand-year-old olive tree while saying what she must say, which will sound none less than sad! The residents of a tower block in the suburbs will save parrots and piss inside lifts while surrounded by dead people and ghosts; including in fact a dog that…'. And seeing the morning break, Scheherazade fell silent." There is a hint of self-satisfaction here,though, at the sheer richness of his own invention.
This is not all of it. The concluding section is a series of stories that take place in a poor housing development, which concludes with an old couple who give their found dog, Dixie (a Maltese poodle whose photogenic friskiness helps enliven things for a while) to an impoverished younger couple, and then commit suicide. Here Gomes comes back more clearly to his initial concern with Portugal's state of economic crisis and the failure of the austerity policy to address it -- though the woes of these people could exist in any economy. This segment made me think of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Decalogue -- another comparison that, like the Sissako one, leaves Gomes in the dust, sputtering for air, signifying little.
[I]Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One/As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 2, O Desolad 131 mins., debuted, like Volumes 1 and 3, at Directors Fortnight at Cannes, and shown at over a dozen other international festivals, including the New York Film Festival 1 October. Screened for the latter for this review. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere.
ARABIAN NIGHTS: VOLUME 3, THE ENCHANGED ONE (Miguel Gomes 2015)
MIGUEL GOMES: ARABIAN NIGHTS: VOLUME 3, THE ENCHANTED ONE (2015)
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AN IMAGE FROM MIGUEL GOMES' ARABIAN NIGHTS, VOLUME 3
Gomes dives deeper into documentary territory with two hours about chaffinch fanciers
After watching Volume 3, we can sum up what each of the three films is like. Volume 1 is at once self-referential (the director running away from his crew); playful about its frame-tale; and observational-documentary. It's overtly -- and somewhat repetitiously and annoyingly -- self-conscious and doctrinaire in its protest against Portugal's destructive period of economic austerity. Volume 2 does something of an about-face and stops preaching to the viewer. Instead it delves into narrative with a vengeance, imitating the original 1001 Nights tales' far-fetched and intertwined incidents, though still blending fantastic and documentary elements, since it relies largely on non-actors. Volume 3, in effect, narrows the focus further, playing around with the Arabian frame-tale idea eccentrically for a bit in a Mediterranean setting at the outset, but then hunkering down into a single narrow focus: a lengthy, rambling documentary on a Portuguese passion we didn't know about and maybe didn't need to: catching, breeding, and training chaffinches and entering them in competitions where they are judged for the richness and complexity of their vocalizing.
There is a vague tie-in to the trilogy's economic theme in that the chaffinch-enthusiasts seem often to come from the working class housing blocks Gomes referred to in Volume 2 -- blocks he explains here were built where formerly there were shanty towns -- though how poor Portugal has long been as a country isn't gone into. It isn't made clear, but some of these men may get so involved in their hobby because they're unemployed. Be that as it may, what we get is just one observed scene after another in a long ramble quite artificially broken up by announcing that Sheherezade has ended one night's storytelling and begun another.
Perhaps to break the monotony, but not successfully, this Volume is exceptionally replete with yellow on-screen texts constantly adding notes and jottings about history, the birds, and this and that. Some may see these excessive texts as amiable eccentricity; others may call it reckless self-indulgence. Either way it is tedious, and Volume 3 emphatically confirms the impression that Miguel Gomes has put one over on the festival juries with this attention-getting, loud, colorful, eccentric, but ultimately unrewarding set of films.
Arabian Nights won the top prize at the June 2015 Sydney Festival, so Guardian's Australian correspondent Luke Backmaster was obliged to write about it, though he is less than enthusiastic. He begins by describing it by its length: "The first and most predictable adjective that comes to mind when describing Miguel Gomes’ surreal, colorful, funny, poignant and at times befuddling Portuguese comedy-drama Arabian Nights is 'long'." He notes that at "some 338 minutes" it's "a thoroughly butt-crunching affair, one part cinematic endurance test and two parts intellectual exercise, more likely to induce back pain or deep vein thrombosis than any other film you’ll see this year or, probably, ever." He's not far wrong (though there are other endurance tests in the festival world). But I would add one other detail. Not only is this marathon a butt-cruncher, it's also frequently ear-splitting. Gomes has the sound ramped up to blockbuster actioner level or beyond. He seems bent on periodically turning festival halls or art house cinemas into discos during those six-plus hours he has taken out of our lives.
Buckmaster appears mistaken in calling the chaffinch segment faux documentary. I don't think the men are playing anybody, just doing their hobby thing. The only question is why this obscure activity should be deemed worthy to take up most of the last third of such an ambitious and flashy trilogy. But the Aussie is right again in his conclusion: Gomes' thingie "is everything a brave cinephile broaching a six-hour hit of Portuguese cinema feared Arabian Nights would be: dull, exhausting and seemingly endless, with symbolic significance only for those willing to make loose and creative connections."
Arabian Nights: Volume 3 - The Enchanted One/As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 3, O Encantad, 125 mins, debuted with Volumes 1 and 2 in Directors Fortnight at Cannes May 2015, thereafter at fifteen other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival. US premiere. A coming Kino Lorber US release set for 18 December 2015.
DE PALMA (Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow 2015)
NOAH BAUMBACH, JAKE PALTROW: DE PALMA (2015)
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BRIAN DE PALMA
A New York Film Festival Special Event film celebrates director Brian De Palma
This affectionate but also relentless film portrait features the American director Brian De Palma talking to young directors Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow about his films, his filmmaking style, and his life. In his Variety review Guy Lodge describes De Palma as "New Hollywood’s foremost Grand Guignol artist." That is how he is seen: gloriously over-the-top. And he did begin with and often go back to lurid horror. Perhaps because of his loud popular style, he was championed by Pauline Kael, which he says meant he was always debated. Given the right material, like the surreal tabloid world of James Ellroy, De Palma could be precise and just. I found his version of The Black Dahlia closer to Ellroy than the celebrated L.A. Confidential. But De Palma's luridness is not to everyone's taste.
De Palma's career is varied, ranging from his blockbuster bid with Carrie, wich won him studio clout, to the violence and depravity of Scarface, to the more sensitive gangster picture Carlito's Way. And ranging, Baumbach noted in a post-screening Q&A, over most of the things that can happen to a director working with and without studio support. His notorious, grand failure is The Bonfire of the Vanities, an adaptation of Tom Wolfe's perhaps un-adaptable novel in which he says he failed because he gave in too much to pressure from studio executives to make alterations.. Another big failure was Mission to Mars. Perhaps because he's Italian-American, he has been a darling of the Venice Film Festival. Even his Redacted (NYFF 2007), a fairly crude indictment of the US Iraq war, won the Silver Lion at Venice.
As De Palma talks, apparently in a single long interview, Baumbach and Paltrow, who claim a decade-long friendship with him, edit in clips to illustrate the movies and their influences. De Palma is very specific and not very theoretical, but makes several key general remarks along the way. The rest we have to deduce by ourselves. First he says he doesn't work from character as they (Baumbach and Paltrow) do, but starts with "structure" and lets the film develop from there. He also says that everybody remarks on the genius of Hitchcock, but he is the only director to follow Hitchcock's methods extensively. De Palma indeed has constantly used Hitchcock films as a source, starting from his early admiration of Psycho and Vertigo. It's well known how otherwise frankly derivative De Palma's work has been. Obviously his Blow Out grows directly out of Antonioni's Blowup, with Coppola's The Conversation as a kind of catalyst. He explains how The Untouchables' finale in the train station is has a direct borrowing from the famous Odessa steps sequence from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Hitchcock's Rear Window and elements of Vertigo were the basis for Body Double, and Vertigo was also the inspiration for his Obsession. Dressed to Kill is a homage to Psycho, including the similar early killing off of lead actress and the concluding exposition delivered by a psychiatrist.
De Palms explains that because of the long silences and long tracking shots in his films he had much need of a score and so had strong relationships composers, notably Bernard Hermann (six films), Pino Donnaggio (seven films), and Ennio Morricone (for The Untouchables, another of his notable later successes, as was the first Mission: Impossible ). De Palma has some interesting stories to tell about these composers and his use of their music. He comments that contemporary films too often allow sound effects and dialogue to spoil the effect of the score.
The one long interview that seems to provide the material for this film includes De Palma's description of his dysfunctional family, his Quaker education, his undergraduate studies at Columbia and graduate work at Sarah Lawrence, and his various marriages and divorces, but personal details are firmly subordinated to the 28-film oeuvre, but he does describe his early and in some cases long-term relationships with major film figures who were contemporaries: Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese, De Niro. Baumbach and Paltrow's illustrative material is invaluable. Clips showing long tracking shots (Pacino, Nick Cage), of chases and shootouts, help give just a glimpse of De Palma's technical gift for storytelling with motion.
The chronological approach means De Palma can describe developments in the film industry, his role in the New Hollywood when briefly directors could be independent and creative in a studio setting, followed by the takeover of the bottom-line obsessed aesthetically challenged producers of the Eighties and onward. As he comes to the end of his of a nearly fifty-year career, De Palma says a director's best work is usually done in his twenties and thirties and forties, and suggests that he may not be up to the physical demands of the job now as he nears seventy: so he takes us from the beginning to the end. He may not be the most profound or uplifting filmmaker, but he must be one of the frankest, humblest, and clearest. This is a highly informative film about De Palma's work; it's actually the kind of film one should have on DVD and watch over and over to focus on and cull out elements.
De Palma, 107 mins., debuted at Venice 9 September 2015; also 30 September at the New York Film Festival, as part of which it was screened for this review. US theatrical release 10 June 201 (limited, Angelika Film Center NYC).
Video of the Baumbach-Paltrow post screening press conference.
Guy Lodge review for Variety.
LES COWBOYS (Thomas Bidegain 2015)
THOMAS BIDEGAIN: LES COWBOYS (2015)
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FRANÇOIS DAMIENS IN LES COWBOYS
Overambitious and under-involving directorial debut for Audiard scriptwriter
Thomas Bidegain, who has written for director Jacques Audiard (his 2009 A Prophet and 2012 Rust and Bone), turns to directing for Les Cowboys with a script by Noé Debré. Unfortunately, it's a disaster, tendentious and overwritten. It begins with an interesting milieu, French people who adore the American West and like to gather in cowboy clothes, ride horses, and sing western songs. The time is 1995. There, a man called Alain (François Damiens) sings a verse of "Tennessee Waltz" to warm applause and shares a waltz with his daughter Kelly, and then, as the evening wears on, gradually realizes Kelly has disappeared. Events follow hard -- too hard and fast -- upon one another as it turns out she has a secret Arab boyfriend who's a jihadist, and she's run off with him.
Alain gets fed up with the police and tries to intimidate the boyfriend's family, then launches his own search for Kelly, even though she has sent a letter saying she has run off voluntarily with her Muslim boyfriend and not to look for her. He traces Kelly to gypsies, then to Belgium, then farther afield, going on a rampage of angry searching, bent on revenge like some John Ford hero, meeting a sudden end after being seen in Syria and apparently having been in Yemen; the plot skips ahead, difficult to follow, as 9/11 and the emergence of Al Qaeda deepen motivations. The usually sympathetic Damiens never seems to find a rhythm of his own either here. In a Variety review Peter Debruge points out a relationship to Ford's The Searchers, and thinks Bidegain is carrying further the explorations of machismo he pursued in his scripts for Audiard. (That may be, but less plausibly; and Rust and Bone already strained the limits; but Audiard seems capable of making anything come to life, and is brilliant with actors, a quality Bidegain may not share.)
As abruptly as the father's search is forcibly ended by his accidental death his son takes over. Georges, or "Kid," his cowboy nickname (Finnegan Oldfield), hitherto passive and silent, but who had stubbornly refused to go with his father on his last search, drop his job as a short order cook and sets out with his own kind of fervor on his own dogged search, losing himself in faraway countries, more flexible and changeable than his father, following hints and traces of his sister. He runs into John C. Reilly in Pakistan, of all places, where Reilly's character, of all things, is a human trafficker. Reilly seems to play it for laughs, which won't wash, and his presence stands out by a mile. The script is heavy on events and local atmosphere, with the ersatz French cowboys ironically the most authentic -- and weak on characterization. Characters have little depth and behave implausibly.
With Kid as the new protagonist in countries where French isn't known, English takes over. Though Kelly's boyfriend/abductor was Maghrebi, Arabic is not heard from, nor, despite references to 9/11, Madrid, and the London bombings, is there any exploration of the origins and nature of jihadist thinking or of how Europeans, particularly women, can be drawn into it. (A late scene does briefly show a mainstream French dislike of hijab-wearing.) In Pakistan, Kid suddenly has a European charitable organization girlfriend (Antonia Campbell-Hughes), randomly thrown in and later as quickly dropped. Movement from one situation to the next tends to be jerky throughout the film, which isn't always easy to follow.
Thanks to some astonishing coincidences, Kid's search turns out more successful than his father's, and he ends up involved in a relationship more surprising than anything hitherto in this too arbitrary-feeling tale. The film's attempt to be topical and important and the absurdity of the overplotting suggest Bidegain, who certainly has much talent as a screenwriter, could still use a strong sure hand like Audiard's -- a collaborator more aware than he seems to be of how things play on screen and what moves audiences. Let's hope he has a stronger collaborator for his next directorial outing. Debruge calls Les Cowboys "an elliptical art film that’s tough to watch, yet continues to haunt in the weeks that follow." True, there are several memorable scenes. But the opacity of the characters and the crudeness of the transitions between plot developments mar these memories, and in some ways Les Cowboys echoes the worst mainstream "topical" conventions.
Les Cowboys, 114 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015 in Directors Fortnight; also in other festivals, including Toronto, Busan, and London. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival. French theatrical release scheduled for 25 November 2015.
INGRID BERGMAN IN HER OWN WORDS (Stig Björkman 2015) Spotlight on Documentary)
STIG BJÖRKMAN: INGRID BERGMAN IN HER OWN WORDS/JAG ÄR INGRID (2015)
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Ingrid Bergman's life reviewed in interviews and pictures
Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words/Jag är Ingrid is a Swedish documentary that was screened in the Cannes Classics section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival -- where it received a special mention for L'Œil d'or award.
This is a warm picture of a great actress who had a complicated life with three husbands, and lived in Sweden, the US, Italy, France, and London. It is not just in Swedish. There are interviews in English, French, and Italian as well. Ingrid's loss of her parents when she was young may have contributed to her intentional rootlessness. And she compensated for this by scrupulously preserving her old photographs, journals, school papers, and other memorabilia, always carrying them from one new life to the next. We hear from the journals. We also get more than our fair share of what the Italians call "filmini" -- home movies, mostly showing Ingrid's young children. If you don't want to see a famous star's home movies, avoid this film.
"In Her Own Words" is not entirely entirely a good description of the documentary. In fact, Ingrid Bergman's children appear and speak very frequently, in various languages. Pia and Isabella speak only English. Roberto (the son, not the husband) speaks frequently in English, and occasionally in Italian. The gist is that while Ingrid's career and her love affairs came first and she was not a mother figure to her children, she played the role of friend to them as they grew up, and however imperfect she was as a parent, she was so charming and such fun to be with that they never felt any resentment.
New to some viewers is the fact that Ingrid had a significant affair with Robert Capa, the great photojournalist. (He died in 1954 in Vietnam, but this isn't mentioned, nor how the affair ended.)
There is some treatment of the scandal aroused, especially in the US, by Ingrid's abandonment of her marriage to Dr. Peter Lindström and taking up with Roberto Rossellini, which led to her being condemned in the US Congress and effectively banned from the US for years. But she was able to make a big comeback with the movie Anastasia in 1956, for which she won her second Academy Award, of three. Ingrid's Hollywood career with David O. Selznick, later with Hitchcock, was an immediate and great success. She was a glowing beauty and a natural on camera: she was a star. Yet her restlessness and desire for change led her to abandon Hollywood. She loved Rossellini ore than his filmmaking method; neorealism and improvisation were not her style, though she made one film with him that is mentioned, Stromboli. Mention is omitted of the four other films Rossellini made with Bergman in them: Europa '51, Viaggio in Italia, Giovanna d'Arco al rogo, and La Paura (Fear). The first Italian film is covered in the film, and also Casablanca; but all Ingrid's Hollywood career isn't covered, nor is there much detail about her life in Hollywood. The home movies only show the Benedict canyon house and the family cavorting around the pool. The limitation of home movies is so much happens away from home, if you're a big star.
The documentary goes into some detail about Ingrid's her 1978 final screen appearance, when she was seriously ill with cancer, in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata.
The kids don't want to speak ill of their mother (who played Joan of Arc so often they had to see her bur a lot), and another limitation of this film is that it offers no criticism of a life and lifestyle that must have produced enemies as well as detractors. All in all this is only a middling documentary with a preponderance of talking heads and archival footage. But its subject is too remarkable and beloved for this not to be a must-see for fans of film history.
Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words/Jag är Ingrid, 114 mins., debuted at Cannes; other film festivals followed. Screened for this review as one of the Documentary section films of the 2015 New York Film Festival. Showed on French TV in Aug. 2015. US theatrical release scheduled for 13 November 2015.
ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (Luchino Visconti 1960) - Revivals
LUCHINO VISCONTI: ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS/ROCCO E I SUOI FRATELLI - Revivals (1960)
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ALAIN DELON IN ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS
Visconti's operatic epic of a southern family disintegrating in Milan arouses mixed feelings today
There are five Parondi brothers, and the film is divided into five chapters moving from eldest Vincenzo (Spiros Focás) through the lazy, badly flawed Simone (Renato Salvatori) to the saintly, self-destructively innocent Rocco (Alain Delon), to the hard working young Ciro (Max Cartier), who goes to work at the Alfa Romeo factory, to the child Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), who gets only a brief coda. After a difficult arrival from Lucania, four of the brothers and their traditional earthy southern Italian "mamma" (the great Katina Paxinou) settle into public housing and the eldest, Vincenzo, who was already in Milan with a job and fiancee, fades from the picture: the main focus for most of the film is on the tragic conflict between Simone and Rocco which turns on their love of the prostitute, Nadia (Annie Giraudot).
Another 4K restoration from Bologna, with a couple of pieces of previously excised footage restored, this most populist, Italian, and emotional of Visconti's films is certainly worthy of a reexamination and a reassessment, which turns out to be problematic. There's no question about the scope of Visconti's vision signaled by the immersive 3-hour run-time. This was the heyday of International productions combining actors from different nations dubbed into the same language, a speciality of the Italians. Spiros Focás and Katina Paxinou were notable Greek actors; Alain Delon and Annie Giraudot, French ones. Some fine Italian thespians include Renato Salvatori and the veteran Paolo Stoppo (who plays a boxing impresario). The blending in works well, with only Giraudot never quite seeming Italian. Delon, whose skill at mime can be seen in Melville's Le Samuraï, was in his prime, and starring in an important Italian movie added to his luster; in this role he runs the whole gamut of emotions.
But the artificiality of dubbing seem more obvious today, and sometimes the lip-synching doesn't convince. Sometimes Visconti's blending of neorealism and baroque melodrama is jarring, and the whole film doesn't entirely gel. Certain scenes seem excruciatingly drawn-out, such as the long fistfight between Simone and Rocco outside the housing project, and the sordid murder by the canal. The conflict between Simone and Rocco hijacks the film. This is meant to be like a Greek tragedy, with a touch of Dostoyevsky, not to mention Vasco Pratolini and several other inspirations and sources; but that's one of the troubles -- too many sources. The narrative hardly adds up to a convincing or informative picture of the life of southern Italians who migrate north. What once was overwhelming and irresistibly moving now seems impressive, but overblown and lacking in unity.
Rocco and His Brothers/Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 180 mins., is now being released by Milestone in the US (and in Blu-ray) in a new 4K restoration on DCP by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with Titanus, TF1 Droits Audiovisuels and Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation with restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation. It is included in the Revivals section of the 2015 New York Film Festival, and its US theatrical release begins 9-29 October at Film Forum, New York.
HEAVEN CAN WAIT (Ernst Lubitsch 1943) - Revivals
ERNST LUBITSCH: HEAVEN CAN WAIT (1943) - Revivals
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DON AMECHE AND GENE TIERNEY ABOUT TO MEET IN HEAVEN CAN WAIT
A roué on the brink of Hades reviews his life in a minor film that shows Lutitsch's light touch and charm
This is not one of Lubitsch's best films, but still shows his charm and light touch in a remastered version that does full justice to its "glorious, candy-box Technicolor. . . beautifully restored by Schawn Belston and his team at 20th Century Fox." It's a wartime triumph of the Hollywood dream machine. It's a historical fantasy about a time when the richest people in New York lived in big greystone mansions on Fifth Avenue. The framework is a consideration of whether the protagonist, the recently deceased Henry Van Cleve (an excellent Don Ameche), warrants admission to Hell by a courtly Satan (Laird Cregar). The interview leads Henry to recall his past life. There are just a few scenes at different stages, when Henry was a cocky teenager, as a young man who steals Gene Tierney from his boring cousin when they are about to get married; winning her back when after a decade she runs to her rich, boring, squabbling parents in Kansas; and Henry's attempts to remain a "player" when a (by Forties standards) superannuated sixty-year-old; and ready for extinction at seventy.
There is sharp verbal promised in the frame tale exchanges like Satan: "I presume your funeral was satisfactory." Henry: "Well, there was a lot of crying, so I believe everybody had a good time." The body of the action co-scripted by Samson Raphaelson is more romantic and kind-hearted. Also with Louis Calhern, Eugene Pallette, Marjorie Main, and Charles Coburn as Henry’s grandfather and fellow black sheep. Gloriously cinematic in an old-fashioned Hollywood studio way, this is a succession of grand interior sets created to expand the original play by Lazlo Bus-Fekete.
Henry tells his life story to Satan at the elegant gate of Hades to see if he qualifies. He turns out to have been a better guy than he realized, despite a bit of womanizing. No connection to the 1978 Warren Beatty/Buck Henry movie; no traipsing back and forth between earth and the beyond in this one. It's more a sequence of scenes that dramatize a romanticized rich class of naive Midwestern beef moguls and Fifth Avenue millionaires for whom work was a choice, not a necessity. I'm not so keen on this kind of fantasy -- there's not enough of an edge in this rote Hollywood version of it -- but I can appreciate the polished studio work and the beautifully artificial Technicolor.
Heaven Can Wait, mins., 112 mins., was originally released in the US 11 August 1943. Restored and rereleased by Twentieth Century Fox in collaboration with the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival where it was presented as part of the Revivals section.
MICROBE AND GASOLINE (Michel Gondry 2015)
MICHEL GONDRY: MICROBE AND GASOLINE (2015)
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THÉOPHILE PAQUET AND ANGE DARGENT IN MICROBE AND GASOLINE
French teen boy road trip à la Gondry
Burned by the disaster of his over-produced Boris Vian adaptation Mood Indigo/L'Écume des jours (R-V 2014), or just wanting a change of pace, the DIY-gadget-mad French filmmaker Michel Gondry turns in his new film, Microbe et Gasoil,to a simple and intimate tale of two outcast, creative lyçée boys in Versailles who go on a highly original summer road trip. They're Danièl (Ange Dargent), whose over-loving eco-nut mom (Audrey Tautou) is a bit depressive, and Théo (Théophile Baquet), with a mean, unlikeable junk/antique dealer dad and an overweight mom whose health is precarious. Danièl is called "Microbe" because he's slight, and his long blond hair gets him mistaken for a girl. Théo is called "Gasoil" because his tinkering leads him to have a smell of gasoline about him. Danièl is an excellent artist who's so good he gets a gallery show (nobody comes, though, except Théo). He has painted many impressions of his brother, who sleeps in the same room and is a would-be punk musician. Théo has an older brother who's in the military.
You can see where things are going when Danièl sees his bike, equipped with a variety of sound effect gadgets. Théo finds an outboard motor and supervises their building of a strange auto run by it. They can't get a license for it, so they build a wood shack on top of it so it can pass as a cabin by the road if authorities come by. They don't tell their parents where they're going, of course.
This setup allows Gondry to lightheartedly indulge his penchant for handmade gadgetry (Les Inrocks calls the film "bricoludique"). But if for a while their makeshift vehicle is at the center of the boy's lives, the main focus is their rapid-fire, slangy conversation and the "ado" things they talk about -- girls, masturbation, courage, and philosophical issues Théo's isolation has caused him to ponder. There is something wackily analytical and French about these sometimes searching and witty chats. There is the girl called Laura (Diane Besnier) who Danièl falls for, who seems unattainable, but in the end turns out to be pining for him.
Along the way they have several adventures. They're kidnapped by a lonely couple "abandoned" by their own kids. Danièl has a tricky encounter with an oriental massage parlor where he tries to get his girly hair cut off. The boys' vehicle is seriously damaged when it's mistaken for part of a gypsy encampment that's raided in the Morvan. They lose all of it when Théo "speed tunes" the engine and it can't be stopped. When they're back in Versailles they're separated: Théo's mom has died and his dad sends him off to boarding school in Vincennes, where his older brother lives.
All this is merely a rough structure to make possible the dialogue between the two boys. The chemistry between the two young actors is palpable. This return to simplicity for Gondry is akin to his earlier straightforward films, the family portrait The Thorn in the Heart and his Bronx bus ride -- another example of his ability to tune in to young people, The We and the I. It may be true that this very French, very low-keyed road trip coming-of-ager will be a hard sell in the Anglophone world, as Peter Debruge says in his sympathetic Variety review. But it deserves a special place in the genre for its charm and specificity. This is a movie full of little offhand details so it would reveal another layer on further viewings. Gondry who rarely (well, never) has found a perfect collaborator for his surreal fantasies like Charlie Kaufman in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, here with his own personal invention quietly achieves one of his best and most intimate works.
Microbe and Gasoline/Microbe et Gasoil, 103 mins., "Quietly released in France after being slighted by the festival circuit" (Debruge) 8 July 2015, it received raves from French critics (AlloCiné press rating 4.0). Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, where the film's US premiere was set for 4 October 2015. US theatrical release begins 1 July 2016. (Northern Califoronia 15 July.)
IN THE SHADOW OF WOMEN/L'OMBE DES FEMMES (Philippe Garrel 2015)
PHILIPPE GARREL: IN THE SHADOW OF WOMEN/L'OMBRE DES FEMMES (2015)
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STANISLAS MERHAR AND LENA PAUGAM IN L'OMBRE DES FEMMES
Garrel offers a new twist on his favorite theme, but with what seems a flat follow-up
A memorable experience of my first New York Film Festival, in 2005, was Philippe Garrel's dreamy black and white almost three-hour epic about the aftermath of 1968, Les amants réguliers, Regular Lovers, starring his glamorous son Louis, Clotilde Hesme, and others. There is magic in this long, meandering film, which is a far more authentic picture of those days than Bertolucci's glamorous candy-box depiction of it in The Dreamers (2003), which first brought Louis (then 19) to wide attention. You either love Louis or hate him, it seems; I've chosen to love him, and I've pursued the dream his father offers in Regular Lovers ever since. In 2008, also at Lincoln Center, as part of Film Comment Selects I saw Garrel's 1991 J'entends plus la guitare (I no longer hear the guitar), which takes us back closer to the autobiographical material that feeds all his work. Louis was just a boy of eight then, though his father filmed him as a boy. The next year FCS showed the 2008 Garrel film, starring Louis, as another suicidal artist (in Regular Lovers he committed suicide as a poet abandoned by his girlfriend). It's called La frontière de l'aube (The Frontier of Dawn), and typically it's in gorgeous rich black and white, but it's unmemorable. I had to see the 2011 Un été brûlant (A Burning Hot Summer) on my own in Paris, in an obscure cinema, for obvious reasons. In color, set partly in Italy, inexplicably costarring Monica Bellucci with Louis, suicidal as usual, this time a bad painter.
Hope was provided by the 2013 La jalousie (Jealousy), starring Louis, included not without reason in that year's New York Film Festival. It's a modest and concisely edited treatment of the named theme. Philippe Garrel returns to it and to the same economical style (and usual lush black and white) in this year's L'ombre des femmes, a third Garrel père main selection of the New York Film Festival, and a worthy one, but also a bit of a disappointment -- or is it just so concise it requires re-watching? The justification of returning to the theme and the method (with son Louis present only as a Nouvelle Vague-style voice-over narrator, which he does in an elegantly detached manner) is that it does offer a sharp new twist in a screenplay written by the great Jean-Claude Carrière, who collaborated notably with Buñuel. Pierre (Stanislas Merhar)and Manon (Clotilde Courau) are a married couple, working together on a documentary about a French resistance fighter (Jean Pommier). Pierre starts an affair with a PhD candidate he meets at a film library, Elizabeth (Lena Paugam) without Manon's knowing it; Elizabeth is curious and spies on the couple to see what her lover's wife looks like -- he has confessed right off that he's married.
Then, by sheer chance, Pierre's masculine superiority is neatly undercut when Elizabeth later spots Manon in a café near the Grands Boulevards métro -- with another man (Mounir Margoum). Eventually what goes around comes around, and the fascination of In the Shadow of Women (odd title, come to think of it) is that while it focuses on Pierre's disdainful, inconsiderate behavior toward both women, the overall effect of the story is to shift from Garrel's usual male-centric point of view. No cell phones or internet or other modern trash here, and no subplots or secondary characters, other than a somewhat annoying - but not funny -- mother (Antoinette Moya), who turns up in cafés and offers advice. And somehow this simplicity makes Garrle's sensiblity seem feminine. When the second revelation comes, there's a bat-squeak of classic French cynicism and farce and female revenge à la {Les Liaisons dengereuses[/i] -- which, however, gets lost in the absurdly feel-good ending. I'm still sorting this out; it may be quite as good as Jealousy; but at the moment it feels like a film that promises more than it delivers. But the same economy has been maintained; in fact this is four minutes shorter than La jalousie. Festival reviews have been good (Metacritic 75%); the French critics loved it (AlloCiné press rating 4.1--a level rarely achieved by a film d'auteur).
In the Shadow of Women/L'Ombre des femmes, 73 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015 with a quick, well-received French theatrical release (27 May 2015; AlloCiné press rating 4.0); eight festivals are listed on IMDb, including New York, where it was screened for this review. US theatrical release 15 Jan. 2016 Lincoln Center and IFC Center NYC.
EXPERIMENTER (Michael Almereyda 2015)
MICHAEL ALMEREYDA: EXPERIMENTER (2015)
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PETER SARSGAARD IN THE EXPERIMENTER
Almereyda's stylized presentation of Milgrim seems inevitable, but not brilliant
Michael Almereyda’s portrait of Stanley Milgram and his "obedience" tests invites immediate comparison with Kyle Patrick Alvarez's similarly themed recent movie Stanford Prison Experiment. Everyone prefers Almereyda's film, it would seem, because it's more stylish. I was disappointed in Experimenter and suggest rethinking this judgment. Both Milgrim and Dr. Philip Zimbardo carried out experiments, or simulations, that were clearly abusive to the volunteers and arguably unethical, and both remained lastingly famous and included in psychology textbooks for their landmark efforts. Both troublingly reflect how group psychology can bring ordinary people to do Eichmann-like or Abu Ghraib-like things.
The difference between the two films comes from the nature of the two experiments. Milgrim's isn't very interesting, and calls for jazzing up. He induced volunteer "teachers" to think they were applying progressively more severe and painful electric shocks to a heard but unseen "student." This behavior is compared to Eichmann in the film -- tried in Israel during Milgrim's time. The "obedience study" was repeated over and over with simple variations. It's shocking in its implications, but there's not much to watch. Though Almereyda might have examined it more minutely, he perhaps wisely chooses not to.
The Stanford study involved two teams of young male volunteers thrown together in a mock-up "prison" location, separately assigned the roles of "prisoners" and "guards." This was meant to go on for several weeks but was ended in a few days because it turned so nasty. The Stanford film simply recreates this event and the experimenters' reaction to it -- because it's an event rich in a variety of incidents that makes good theater. There's more to it as an event than Milgrim's setup. Alvarez assembled some of the more interesting young male movie actors of the moment for his recreation, plus Billy Crudup as the somewhat creepy and dishonest Zimbardo.
Almereyda is dealing with a deceptively simple fake setup. The "victim," the "student," is someone Milgrim has hired (the actor looks like Philip Seymour Hoffman: what if there had been more interesting actors besides Sarsgaard involved?). The real victim is the volunteer "teacher" who is induced to violate his or her own morality in giving, they think, electric shocks to someone they hear protesting and crying out in pain. But this volunteer just sits there. It's not very cinematic. Hence, Almeyreda's movie, which ingeniously treats everything from the outset as make-believe, and gives that quality troublingly pervasive. Backgrounds of interiors and exteriors are just giant black-and-grey photographs. Unlike the overwrought Zimbardo-Crudup, Milgrim-Sarsgaard seems more like an articulate blank, whose detachment is further enacted by having him frequently address the camera. This self-reflective approach still seems original, fifty years after the time when it seemed so in fiction.
Milgrim's career was more tricky, because he was banished from the Ivy League to CUNY, while Zimbardo got to stay at Stanford for life. But the trouble with making Experimenter into a biopic is that Milgrim, like Zimbardo, essentially lived off his one landmark experiment for the rest of his (less long) life. It is not clear to me how we are meant to take his relationship with his doggedly supportive wife (a colorless Winona Ryder). Experimenter skates along, taking Milgrim from one place and career situation to another, embroidering with information about the implications of the "obedience studies." Despite its review of Milgrim's post-obedience career and life, the rest of a movie is essentially just a review of the implications of what happens in the first few minutes. The one ironic moment comes when Milgrim's study is dramatized and distorted for television. What we can say is that the 90-minute Experimenter is more economical than the 122-minute Prison Experiment. Perhaps Milgrim's basic work has more scientific clarity than Zimbardo's setup. Sarsgaard is an interesting actor, who's suitably enigmatic here. His enunciation at times seemed unclear.
Perhaps I'm missing something in failing to see the festival blurb's claim that Experimenter depicts "the bohemian-tinged academic world of the 1960s through the 1980s with an economy that Stanley Kubrick might have envied." Experimenter may be clever, but Stanford Prison Experiment is a more involving watch. Both are disturbing, interesting, and instructive. Neither is a great movie.
Experimenter, 90 mins., debuted at Sundance; over a dozen other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival. US theatrical release 16 October 2015. (Metacritic rating 81%/)