New York Film Festival 2010

[Chris Knipp]

XAVIER BEAUVOIS: OF GODS AND MEN (2010)



A triumph of acting and atmosphere

Xavier Beauvois' last film was a little cop story, a "policier," but it hit hard. This one, based on true events in Algiers in the 1990's, hits harder, though its impact is a mixture of intellectual and emotional. It poses a life and death ethical issue. When radical Islamists (الجماعة الإسلامية المسلّحة , the Armed Islamic Group, GIA) terrorize the Algerian countryside, eight French Cistercian monks have to decide whether to accept military protection and let the government evacuate them, or stay and continue to serve the terrorized locals they've always provided with necessary clothes, food, and medical treatment.

Criticisms of the film up front are: that it's an action movie about deciding not to do anything; that where it's going is never much in doubt; that at two hours, those two points considered, it's too long; and that it covers its protagonists with sainthood a little too easily. Some critics complain that the second prize (Grand Prix) at Cannes rewarded the monks rather than the film. But these are weak objections. Accepting almost certain death is hardly not doing anything. It's not so often these days that one gets to see such personal and deeply felt moral decisions being made. Decision-making is the highest form of action; all the rest is running around in circles or following instinct. When one observes how agonizing the decision is for several of the monks, the conclusion hardly seems foregone.

The film's two-hour running time is necessary to establish how complex and difficult the decision is; moreover, the events telescoped in the film actually took place over a period of four years. The GIA had actually ordered all foreigners to leave two and a half years before they come for the monks of Tibhirine. And the film is not inferior to the monks. Typically for him, Beauvois tells a story that is both complex and essentially simple, unified by a single issue. Eventually the monks' decision comes to seem inevitable but it's not easily arrived at for some any of them.

Some of the monks have big families and ordinary occupations they might return to. Others have no one and can imagine no other life, but are afraid and don't want to die. They all are here because it is where they were meant to be. They became Cistercians to live, not to die, however: how and who and what will they be serving by dying? And how then can they make a decision that is likely to mean their death? Of Gods and Men is a meditation, a harmonious blend of practical activity, singing prayer, and turbulent encounters with the locals and the Islamists. And all the while the monks are periodically meeting among themselves under their leader Brother Christian (Lambert Wilson) to decide what to do. (Christian insists from the start that they must remain, but it's not till much later that they all come around to this point ov view.) Beauvois' accomplishment is that he handles the sublimely monastic, humbly everyday, and terrifyingly violent moments with an equally authentic feel.

Brother Luc (the venerable and monumental Michael Lonsdale) treas villagers with salves and kisses. He is old and asthmatic, but he is seeing 150 patients a day now, because they are suffering from stress. Shielded as they are, the monks know the whole country is in turmoil. Anyway, early on the GIA leader Ali Fayattia (Farid Larbi) confronts Christian, demanding medical treatment for one of their wounded. Christian manages to put him off, quoting the Qur'an. Fayattia comes across as religious; he repeats back in Arabic the Qur'anic lines Christian has quoted in French, and he's respectful of the fact that, unbeknownst to him, it is Christmas.

In the past, and still in Hollywood, a story of this kind would never be depicted so authentically. Though Beauvois by intention isn't following events literally, the people, the language, and the locales look, sond, and feel right. The monk's knowledge of and respect for local custom and a fair smattering of Arabic are established. So is their naiveté. When their Peugeot station wagon breaks down on the road, a group of local women restart if for them; they haven't a clue. There are dozens of details establishing the monks' rootedness in the place and their interaction with the people.

But this doesn't answer the question: why are French Christian monks in this strictly Muslim country? Notably, Croatian workers get their throats cut. The monks have a more important status. Doing peaceful work in a place of conflict always seems crazy or impossible, whether the doers are religious or secular. This is a question the film doesn't answer. But by the end one comes to respect the monks on their own terms. A decision can't always be judged by its consequences. This is a remarkable film because is confronts issues and beliefs in real-world terms within the otherworldly milieu of monastic life. Music consists mostly of the a capella singing of verses by the eight monks in a little chapel; toward the end, when their decision has finally been made, there is a kind of celebration where Luc opens bottles of wine and turns on a radio playing Swan Lake, which takes on a remarkable sacramental air Tchaikovsky may never have imagined. This is one of a number of bold and original decisions by Beauvois who manages almost magically to do something new within the format of classical filmmaking. He has justifiable confidence in his actors, both very individual and very much an ensemble, whose every gesture seems special and human. Yes, this is serious stuff, and the eight monks are painted in saintly colors. Is their something wrong with dignifying human courage? Caroline Champetier's photography, beautiful throughout for its clarity of light, evokes the Last Supper, and the director, in a French pun at a Q&A, connected metteur en scène, film director, with La Cène, The Last Supper.

The monks refine their decision to the point of purity. But the situation wasn't simple. The villagers seem to love the monks, but authorities see them as as colonial remnants, protecting them only out of duty. A military officer has an unfriendly look. Recent findings show when taken hostage the monks may have died by military error rather then the hand of the as yet unidentified hostage takers.

Des hommes et des dieux, 122 minutes, in French and Algerian Arabic, was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2010. It premiered at Cannes, where it received the Grand Prix, and opened September 8, 2010 in Paris, where it has received high praise from critics of all stripes.

[Chris Knipp]

DAVID FINCHER: THE SOCIAL NETWORK


EISENBERG AND TIMBERLAKE IN THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Algorithms and power

The Social Network, David Fincher's brilliant and timely new movie based on Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, begins with a huge irony: The young founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, isn't social. And he isn't nice either. Not so indirectly, the film suggests that perhaps the brave new world of programming and Internet personal revelations is a corruption and downgrading of human interaction (as well as a systematic invasion of privacy). If computer nerds rule, our moral compass may be out of whack. The opening scene, packed with Aaron (West Wing) Sorkin's nasty-smart rapid-fire dialogue, shows both Mark Zuckerberg's steel trap intelligence and his total lack of human warmth. He's so coldly condescending toward his Boston U. girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara, who's to be the US Dragon Tattoo girl) that she decides right then to break up with him. She demolishes him with the closing lines: "Listen. You’re going to be successful and rich, but you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole."

Facebook grows out of this insult. Stung, Mark rushes back to Kirkland house, his Harvard dorm, drunk, and begins blogging his resentments toward Erica and simultaneously writing Facemash, a website onto which he hacks Harvard girls' ID photos and puts them in pairs so students can pick which one they prefer. (Mark abandons an earlier idea of comparing girls with farm animals.) He has gotten the site completed by using an algorithm provided by his well-off friend Eduardo Savarin (Andrew Garfield), who will emerge as the most likable character in the film. In hours Facemash goes locally viral. It's October 28, 2003. This breach of Harvard security gets Mark six months' academic probation. It also makes him famous at Harvard. The patrician, rowing champion, final club member Winklevoss twins Cameron and Tyler (both played with panache by Armie Hammer) decide Mark is the man to construct the Harvard social network they have dreamed up. Mark is flattered at being invited to talk to what he later calls "the Winklevi" at Porcellian, Harvard's most elite club (though he was only allowed in the bike room). He's also impressed that the tall, godlike twins "work out." In the verbal sparring with Erica he has talked about the desirability of entering an exclusive Harvard club. (Note: the real Mark Zuckerberg has denied that he ever wanted to join such a club, and the film omits mention that he not only graduated from an exclusive Eastern prep school, Phillips Exeter, but was captain of the fencing team there.)

The twins ask Mark to build their site and he agrees. But Mark thinks bigger -- and tells no one. He strings the twins and their pal Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) along for weeks with stalling emails. (We start getting this through inter-cut scenes of legal meetings when the principals in the events are deposed.) But he has realized the idea is too good not to steal. Facemash is replaced by what is at first called "The" Facebook. Eduardo remains Mark's business partner, but Mark does not share everything with him.

All this happens very fast, almost too fast to think -- this is the smart, competitive world of East Coast colleges where the pace is brutal and the stakes are high. There are juicy images of Ivy League party times. "The" Facebook spreads to other colleges. Eduardo's story is a foil for Mark's. He's Facebook's chief financial officer, but he's a nice guy, a guy who reaches out. He gets into some trouble, while punching for another final club, Phoenix, exposed in the Harvard Crimson for feeding a chicken chicken meat in a restaurant as part of club initiation. Later Mark's accused of tipping off the Crimson to discredit Eduardo. The friends eventually aren't.

There are many actors, including producer Douglas Urbanski as Harvard president Larry Summers, who haughtily rebuffs the Winkelvoss's request to intercede on their behalf for what they see as Mark's stealing their idea. Mark says the twins don't deserve recognition as co-creators of the site and are just upset because once in their life things haven't gone their way. The other major figure in the movie is Sean Parker (a lively Justin Timberlake), Napster's bad boy creator. As Sorkin's screenplay depicts it, Parker is a main cause of Eduardo's greatly reduced role and eventual expulsion and humiliation. But Parker is an ally and protector of Mark's interests. He knows Mark is onto something huge, and gets him bigger funding and dreams of moving Facebook not only beyond colleges and out into the rest of the USA, but to other continents. All this while Mark is still working with a mere $19,000 investment. It's Parker who, at a sushi lunch, with two sexy girls who've latched onto Eduardo and Mark, stuns them with the word "billionaire" -- and also says Mark has got to move to California, to Silicon Valley, home of the young Web rich. The big split comes when Eduardo spends a summer in New York ostensibly as a financial intern, and Mark moves out to Palo Alto.

The final focus of the movie, which makes much of the conflicts between Zuckerberg and the twins and Savarin through the deposition scenes where they confront each other at various stages, is on Mark's loneliness. He has millions of "friends," but nobody likes him. He's gained the whole world and lost his own soul -- if he ever had one. Yet he's not unsympathetic. And partly his loneliness is the loneliness of genius. He has not only gained the whole world -- which he doesn't care about: both the movie Mark and the real one are indifferent to money -- but he has changed it.

The settlements are various. No one present at the creation of Facebook has wound up a pauper. Though Mark's lack of connectedness is a theme, he's neither Machiavellian nor cruel, just cut off from people. On a Facebook page (!) about Eduardo Savarin, we learn that, "He owns a 5% share of Facebook, worth US$1.1 billion as of May 13, 2010." The twins, their father, and their partner Divvya Narendra, one source says, received a settlement that including Facebook shares is now worth around $121 million. The twins also came in sixth in the last Olympic rowing competition, and are still in training.

The movie has a subtly distinctive look that can best be called muted. Without forcing anything, Fincher and his crew bring dialogue to life without any artificial jazzing up. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's music blends nicely with ambient sound, which is often important. Great skill is exercised in conveying young people talking in loud party or club settings while still keeping tricky dialogue audible. Needless to say, Eisenberg anchors the piece amazingly. He showed in Holy Rollers that he could give life to a nerdy, peculiar guy; that ability explodes here, with an impersonation that is creepy, funny, stunning, and sometimes appealing. Garfield is equally good as a kind of foil, an innocent, but warm and when needed, combative. Timberlake creates a character that is not only wild and dangerous but smart and relatively worldly wise.

Fincher's movie relies heavily on Aaron Sorkin's writing, which makes characters and events come to life. A criticism is that the witty dialogue is so infectious all the characters begin to talk the same "Sorkin-speak." But Sorkin has a great knack for depicting power struggles among rapidly changing and spreading events. This is above all a series of riveting scenes with great, memorable dialogue. Erica's initial put-down is just one of a host of zingers. This is a classic story of greed, jealousy, and rapacious free enterprise. It may metastasize faster in the world of x's and o's, but it's old-fashioned Americana. Besides this we get character studies of boys growing into men that is a whole set of coming-of-age tales, but above all an ensemble piece. This is not a "biopic." Actually, we don't know who Mark Zuckerberg is, or who any of the main players are. That means some controversy, but that only tightens the movie's vice-grip on the zeitgeist. The Social Network is not only one of the best American films of the year but one of the most significant.

Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was the Opening Night film September 24, 2010. The Social Network opens wide in US and Canadian theaters October 1, 2010. Facebok is everywhere, and this film will open in at least 29 other countries over time. It's probably going to make Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, and Justin Timberlake (already famous anyway) as well known as Mark Zuckerberg, or more so.

YouTube videos (5) of NYFF Q&A begin here.
See also David Denby's eulogy in The New Yorker calling it "a brilliantly entertaining and emotionally wrenching movie," "a work of art" and "an extraordinary collaboration."

See further Filmleaf discussion of this movie here.

[Chris Knipp]

JEAN-LUC GODARD: FILM SOCIALISME (2010)



Difficult watching

Godard is nearly eighty now, but Clint Eastwood is six months older; and of course festival-goers know Manuel de Olivera has just completed a film at nearly the age of 102, which the Variety review calls "an especially accomplished example of the helmer's favorite theme of impossible love expressed in precise, comic terms." Yet there is a weariness in Godard's work we don't feel in the work of the other two directors, perhaps because Godard is an avant-gardist, and nothing ages like the radical, and pessimism tires out the pessimist. Another reason is that Godard doesn't work by conventional full-bore filmmaker's means; his work still has a DIY quality; he does a lot of it himself. This time he is working entirely in video. Unlike David Lynch, whose Inland Empire is all shot with the same non-professional camera, Godard, and three other cameramen, used a range of cameras from professional HD that produced pristine images of a luxury cruise ship in bright gleaming color to a cell phone that yielded harsh blurs when flashed on the big screen. This according to Amy Taubin, whose article about Film Socialisme for Film Comment was written in connection with the New York Film Festival presentation.

It is easy enough to point out, as Taubin does, that the film is divided into three parts like a sonata with a fast movement, a longer, slower one, and a faster final one shorter than the first. The first, as Taubin puts it, "takes place on a huge ocean liner cruising the Mediterranean, with brief side trips in various ports of call." "Takes place" is one way of describing it; I'd have said simply "was shot." Due to the extreme fragmentation and shortness of the edits, there isn't much sense of anything "taking place." Nor are the non-ship moments identifiably "ports of call," though that makes sense of it. The second section focuses on, let's say, a house and nearby gas station in the south of France. The last "movement" goes back over the Mediterranean capitals of western civilization alluded to in the first, but this time making much use of archival footage of atrocities -- something Godard has done before, I believe in his 2004 Notre musique.

The first part is full of gnomic utterances, and everything is in fragments, in a variety of languages, mostly French with German next, also including some Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and a dash of Latin and Greek. References are made to various writers and thinkers, and there's a guy on board the ship who gives a lecture on geometry to an empty hall. Sometimes the dialogue fits the image, often not. Along with this are "subtitles" in English, mostly just for the French, in what Godard whimsically calls "Navaho." They are just a few words out of the sentence spoken in the film. Most of the French is comprehensible, not that together it makes much sense, but reading the "Navaho" subtitles could only distract you. Words are often run together, as in “nocures noblood” and “Digdeep Communist archives." If Godard is trying to illustrate the failure to communicate, he succeeds in not communicating.

The second part is a bit more coherent, but also visually less interesting. It focuses on a family called Martin, made up of the parents, a boy of ten, and a teenage girl. They have a donkey and llama tethered at the gas station. The wife decides to run for local office and a medic crew shows up. Tauabin theorizes that this section is about Godard as a little boy,and says that's confirmed by the boy's doing a copy of a Renoir painting. Here the images are less "flashy," without all the shifting of formats and with longer more stationary shots.

As almost anybody who writes about this film cannot fail to say, we watch it first of all because it's by Godard, who is one of the French masters of that fertile period of the late 1950's and 1960's, and whose Breathless one can still watch with pleasure, and, if one knows if from its first appearance, with nostalgia. (One can watch plenty of his other films too, up to 1970, when he parted company with the larger art house audience.) In his discussion of Film Socialisme on his blog "Deep Focus," Todd McCarthy comments that in contrast to other film artists, particularly French ones (he mentions Truffaut) who stayed close to the warm openness of Renoir, Godard is, or has turned, mean-spirited, linking himself with those whose anti-Americanism in his view is part of their anti-humanism -- the "same misguided camp as those errant geniuses of an earlier era, Pound and Céline." This, McCarthy thinks, is borne out by Godard's recent failure to appear at Cannes to discuss his latest work. As an innovator who contributed to new film language in his time of creative flowering, Godard also can be compared, McCarthy suggests, to James Joyce, whose Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses and short stories are triumphs, but whose Finnegans Wake descends into what can be seen as a stubborn, hermetic, ivory tower elitism -- "l'art pour l'art," art for the chosen few. There are always "die-hard Godardians," McCarthy goes on, happy to be included in that chosen few, but McCarthy says that at Cannes none of them could be of much help with Film Socialisme. Amy Toubin's article is a description, not an explanation or a justification. At the New York Film Festival the resident Godardian was New Yorker film writer Richard Brody, who has written a 720-page tome on the director, Everything Is Cinema.

Any careful observer can describe the contents. Devotes can say what cinephiles like to say when they can make no sense of a film, that they "need to see it again." And a Godard film like this one can add luster to a film festival, the way a literature buff might add tone to his shelves by displaying a copy of Finnegans Wake. Parts of Finnegans Wake are lovely to listen to, notably the long "Anna Livia Plurabelle" monologue, which I used to listen to a record of Joyce reading when I was young. And Finnegans Wake, though nearly impenetrable, is coherent and has "skeleton keys" that explain it For a film buff, it's worth while to watch at least some of Film Socialisme; Amy Taubin's applying the adjective "ravishing" to the film makes some sense, if referring to the look of some of the HD segments, and their occasional effective contrast with the rough video. But for most of us, time is spent better watching films that make more coherent use of their documentary footage, their image and sound than this bulletin from Godard's dotage.

Seen and reviewed at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2010. Planned in France as VOD. Recommended for Godardians. I am sorry now that I did not refer to French criticism of the film, which was generally favorable, rather than relying on a few English discussions. But what I wrote above is true to my viewing experience, and I am not of the opinion that a film that is repulsive or opaque will open up its secrets if I "need to see it again." Again I am in agreement with Todd McCarthy on this point.

[Chris Knipp]

CRISTI PUIU: AURORA (2010)


Cristi Puiu in Aurora

Murder and other daily activities

New Romanian Cinema leader Cristi Puiu stars in and directs this three-hour film, his second, about a man whose four murders seem only blips in a host of minutely observed quotidian events -- observed, but not explained. Puiu is more interested in the what than the why. Or the who: the film doesn't reveal who some of the people are, and motives are still unrevealed even at the end. All that's clear is that Viorel, the protagonist, is full of muted anger. Compared to Puiu's absorbing and critically admired debut, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, about an aging man who dies because he's shifted from hospital to hospital on a holiday weekend, there is no sense of moral outrage or dark humor in Aurora. What prevails is a sense of the meaninglessness of it all. The combination of meaninglessness and complication is a difficult one. None of the stark poetic simplicity here of Camus' Stranger. Puiu's vision of man is of the numbing ordinariness of evil, violence as a quiet, inexplicable reflex. One leaves the film convinced of the originality of its vision, but dreading the thought of seeing more. One feels chilled, baffled.

There's almost a real-time feel as the film follows Viorel from one dawn into a second day. He wakes up with a woman who has a little girl. She is Gina (Clara Voda), apparently his girlfriend. Even at coffee he is stony-faced and withdrawn. He goes to the metallurgy plant where he may have been fired or demoted, and collects two firing pins made for him by an employee to fit a shotgun. That he must test the pins with calipers and insists on paying shows his reflexive distrust and desire to separate himself from others. Puiu the actor is impressively composed, contained, and mundane. He's nobody you'd particularly notice, except that he's not quite there.

Viorel's life is mired in detail, and we get to watch dozens of tasks slowly performed, before and after the murders (there are four, two and two). He leaves things with his mother Puşa (Valeria Seciu), who gives him some of his shirts she's ironed; much argument about the size of the bag. He confronts his stepfather Stoian (Valentin Popescu) for entering his jumbled room (he still has one in the flat, apparently) and tells him he has never liked him: "It's just chemistry. I can't help it." (That may explain the whole lead-up to the murders.) He watches people from his car. His flat is being redone, and he supervises men who remove boxes and other things for the walls to be scraped and painted. (His resentment even toward these men is clear.) He puts together the shotgun, and tests it, firing into a duvet. And so on.

The first murders are observed in a long shot in a hotel parking garage so the victims, a man and a woman, can't be clearly seen. The second two, which happen hours later, take place in a suburban house later identified as that of his "ex-mother-in-law," Rodica (Catrinel Dumitrescu). After a long conversation, he follows her up the stairs with a knife. The stabbing isn't shown. We see Rodica's legs on the floor later from another room. Puiu the director is master of the excruciating delay. Nothing happens with much dispatch. Viorel gets coffee and has conversation with his mother-in-law before he stabs and later shoots her. He hesitates long just deciding what to say when she asks him if he wants one lump or two.

After the murders is when the viewer's ordinary cinema expectations are shocked. Viorel does not run. He simply goes about his business. He has other chores to complete. In the end, he takes his older daughter, a first-grader, out of class and, because his mother is out, leaves her at the next-door neighbors'. Here as always the viewer is plunged into a world of irrelevant, but richly observed, detail: an eager-to-please wife; a husband arguing with his nephew who wants to sell him a fitted kitchen; a preening adult son. And then he goes and turns himself in at the police station. The bored cops interview him as if he were reporting a noisy neighbor.

At one point Viorel terrorizes three women at a chic men's clothing shop. The well-dressed manager never loses her cool. He's looking for a woman they say no longer works there. It's never clear who she is. Puiu's performance is memorable. In retrospect one is struck by the repressed rage and irony of his character. He has created a killer who is close to lots of people, tipped just a little over the edge. The glare in his eye as he looks at his mother-in-law cutting up potatoes gradually tips us off that he is going to use the knife on her.

This is the second in Puiu's planned series of "Six Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest." The beginning in "aurora," dawn, he has said signals an answer to F.W. Murnaus's warmer vision in his famous film Sunrise. Images by Viorel Sergovici are in harsh color when there is bright light, often under-lit and tinged with blue. A lack of background music, apart from occasional dimly heard songs, adds to the impression of realism. A Louis Moreau Gottschalk piano piece during the opening and closing credits adds an ironically pleasant note. But none of this is truly at all pleasant, unless for the pleasure to some of satisfying festival fashions: a glacial pace, a preponderance of stationary long or middle distance shots, an intermingling of documentary and fictional techniques, and a screenplay that leaves much to puzzle over, and in this case, belies all conventional genre expectations in which, as Puiu has commented, murder is more commonly "glamorized."

Cristi Puiu's 181 film, in Romanian, was shown in the Un Certain Regard series at Cannes and was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center in September 2010.

[Chris Knipp]

MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA: THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA (2010)



Love and death and the transmigration of souls

Oliveira's reputation may be more widespread than knowledge of his eclectic output. Now 102, he began sporadically after being an athlete, film actor and farmer, and has only been making features almost every year more recently. Last year he completed Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl, and this year he again tells the tale, The Strange Case of Angelica (O Estranho Caso de Angélica) this time more magical, of a young man who falls hopelessly in love with a beautiful young woman. Again Oliveira straddles epochs. Blond Haired Girl was a 19th-century short story transposed to the 20th century. Angelica is an original idea of Oliveira's from the Fifties transposed -- partially -- to now. The interiors, which this time are more austere, have nothing modern about them, and the young Sephardic Jewish photographer, Isaac, uses a Fifties Leica camera. Ricardo Trêpa, who takes the role of Isaac, also played Macário, the disillusioned protagonist of Blond, only now he is pale and beardless.

Macário and his girl loved each other, only he was repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to marry her, finally discovering that she was not worth marrying in the first place. Isaac falls in love with a dead girl, and his love-longing follows the classic pattern of the Arabic and medieval platonic mythology of insane sublimated passion. His behavior becomes increasingly disturbed and strange, and he finally collapses under a grove of olive trees. (If this links him with Oliveira, as the director admits, he also denies any Jewish family ties.) Ultimtely Isaac winds up flying through the sky linked with his beloved, Angélica (Pilar López de Ayala).

She has died shortly after being married, and her wealthy family calls upon Isaac to take the picture of her in death, more famous photographers being absent at the time. As he is taking the photographs with his Leica, he looks through the rangefinder to focus and sees Angélica's face come to life, and she smiles, he is electrified, and he is henceforth obsessed.

Isaac lives in a rooming house by the side of the Douro river, subject of the director's first short, Labor on the Douro River (1931), and he crosses the river to photograph men digging in a vineyard because working by traditional methods interests him. There are other threads. The rich family is somewhat dominated by a "pretentious" servant (Isabel Ruth). At key moments, including the night of Isaac's photographing the dead Angélica, it is raining heavily. Two well-dressed old men and a mostly silent woman sit at the table at the boarding house at breakfasts, where the landlady worries about Isaac's working too hard, and then his acting more and more strangely. But there is a visitor, a designer from Brazil, and they discuss such contemporary issues as global climate change, economic collapse, and antimatter. The landlady's caged sparrow dies from eating egg, and this disaster causes Isaac to run out of the house. The conversation is stilted and repetitious. Isaac rarely speaks. He has strange dreams and howls at night. When he flies off with the spirit of Angélica in amorous metempsychosis, the image is reminiscent of many Chagall paintings. Music throughout is successive excerpts from Chopin, mostly a sonata, in a restrained performance by Maria João Pires. The film is pleasant to watch, but a little slow, and a little repetitious. Even at only 95 minutes it feels somewhat long. But it captures a mood, and the restrained F/X works for the soaring souls with sublime simplicity. But I should add that this F/X, as various writers have noted, is of a sort that might have seemed crude in the earliest days of film.

The lines between necrophilia and spiritual love or between insanity and sublime passion are thin in The Strange Case of Angélica, which, as many have noted, could as well or better be called The Strange Case of Isaac. The mise-en-scène is simpler and creates an air of fable or dream rather different from the worldly storytelling of Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl. This is utterly different from Oliveira's absorbing, but somehow unsuccessful sequel to Buñuel, Belle toujours; but to speak of only a trio of films by a director who's made some 60-odd, short and long, over an 80-year period, is to say little. Not many of us have a grip on the oeuvre of this long-lived cinéaste but for one who has you may consult an article by Jonathan Rosenbaum, "The Classical Modernist," available online from the Film Comment of July/August 2008.

Shown in the Un Certain Regard segment at Cannes, and seen and reviewed by this writer as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2010. It opens in theaters in New York and Los Angeles in November. The distributor is Cinema Guild.

[Chris Knipp]

ABDELLATIF KECHICHE: BLACK VENUS (2010)


Yahima Torres in Black Venus

True dilatory history of an epically abused woman

Tunisian-born, French-resident filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche has focused on French-born Arabs in his acclaimed earlier films (two of them swept the French Oscars and he has won top prizes at Venice and elsewhere). This time he has turned to an historical study of brutality and intolerance. It's the story of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called "Hottentot Venus," a women born in South Africa and brought to Europe in the early 19th century to be paraded as a carnival wild woman because of her measurements. She was pursued by racist French scientists, who could not get her to show them her genitalia but made casts of them and her body and kept her skeleton on display on the pretext that "Hottentots" were proven through her to be closer to monkeys than Europeans and therefore of an inferior race. These relics were displayed at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris until the Seventes, and finally, in response to protests, returned to Saartjie's native South Africa in 2002 and buried close to where she was born.

A brave performance by Cuban-raised Yahima Torres anchors the film, which shows exhaustively how Saartjie was humiliated in performances first in London, where she and her minders are taken to court for slavery or abuse, but her testimony leads to dismissal. The trial is shown in detail -- too much detail, like everything else. Then she is taken to Paris for similar performances. Kechiche reports having extensively studied the records, but much is not clearly known; in some cases where it is known, such as her age, he has made changes. In his imagining, Saartjie is abandoned by her erstwhile protector, Caezar (André Jacobs) for lack of cooperation, and turned over to an animal trainer associate, Réaux (Olivier Gourmet), who uses her for "sex slave" shows to aristocratic French libertines along with a rough carnival woman and whore, Jeanne (Elina Löwensohn). It is at one of these, which rival Pasolini's Salo for shock value, that she is spotted by anatomist Georges Cuvier (Francois Marthouret), who decides her negro head shame and facial features and her steatopygic thighs (much exploited in the shows) make her good material for his racist studies. When the French sex show opportunities dries up, partly due to the old suspicion that Saartjie or "Sara" is being abused, Réaux turns her into a simple prostitute. Eventually, Saartjie, who has continually taken refuge in drink, is turned out of the brothel on suspicion of venereal disease, and dies, probably of that and pneumonia, whereupon the scientists get her body to dissect and make a cast of -- also shown in detail.

This is essentially a period, costume biopic, and while Kechiche's work is still strong in the many ensemble scenes -- the French scientists in the prologue; the English and French carnival crowds; the particularly disturbing French libertine sequences -- and in directing the hitherto inexperienced Torres in a performance full of strength and forbearance, there is, overall, little to set this apart from other films about exploited performers, circuses, and sleazy manipulators except for the excessive length of Kechiche's repetitious sequences, which are all allowed to run to two or three times the necessary length to get their point across, and then get it across again. Kechiche seems out of his element here, and despite the intensity and richness of scenes there is a generic quality his films never had before.

It also seems that Kechiche crosses the line in too bluntly showing the "Hottentot Venus'" cruel objectification, or, if you grant that may have been necessary, he blunts the point by illustrating this objectification too repetitively. Is the film painful to watch because it needs to be, or because the filmmaker didn't know how to present his information with economy and true force?

Abdellatif Kechiche has won extraordinary acclaim in France and internationally since 2000, the year of his first film, Blame It on Voltaire (La faute à Voltaire, 2000). His second film, Games of Love and Chance (L'Esquive, 2005) won Césars for best film, best director, and best scenario. His third, The Secret of the Grain (Le grain et le mulet, 2007), again won Césars for best film, best director, and best scenario. And there have been other awards at Venice and elsewhere. Black Venus/Venus noire was received with less enthusiasm at Venice this year. It was recognized as a brave and important project that went astray. Despite much disturbing and raw material, the film is likely to be widely seen, and its complicated message about racism, human degradation, and exploitation of women can't fail to make an impact. But coming from Kechiche it is a disappointment and seems a wrong turn. I hated this film.

Introduced at Venice September 2010. Seen and reviewed at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was scheduled for one showing October 7. Released by MK2, Venus noire is scheduled for release in France October 27.

[Chris Knipp]

PABLO LARRAÍN: POST MORTEM (2010)


Alfredo Castro and Antonia Zegers in Post Mortem

An eerie horror show that evokes real political events by indirection

Alfredo Castro plays the kind of sleazy creep you'd like to scrape off your shoe. The Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who is interested in how politics seeps through to the unpolitical, has twice now made him his protagonist. In the 2008 Tony Manero Castro was a petty thief, accidental murderer, and would-be Travolta imitator during the Seventies military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In Post Mortem, which takes place earlier, he's morphed into a morgue worker (based on a real person) named Mario Camejo, who types up autopsy reports and was present when Allende's body is brought in. The film begins with a prologue of military vehicles roaring over the rubble of wrecked streets. Larraín's cool, arresting images evoke a vaguely surreal world of dead-end spaces-- you half expect some insect creatures out of William S. Burroughs to pop out around a corner.

The world is not very different, as Larraín depicts it though Alfredo Castro, before and after Allende. Larraín was born three years after the coup, and he's only imagining the atmosphere of the time, but he revels in a uniquely clammy kind of moral rigor mortis. It may be that Mario Camejo is just coming to life at the end of the film, when he slowly constructs a barricade trapping his would-be girlfriend and neighbor with the younger man she's been hiding with. He holds with the opinion favored by the military (and the official view now), that Allende, who was shot point-blank, committed suicide: in other words, he favors the military. When Nancy prefers Victor (Marcelo Alonso), a young long-haired leftist, Mario in effect buries the couple alive, blocking them in their hiding place with the little dog he has rescued earlier.

The special pleasure of the film is the macabre alienness of its principals. Two meals Mario shares with Nancy earlier, in the period of his doomed courtship, are feasts of dry non-communication. Watch how they decide what to pick from the menu of a big Chinese restaurant, and how they share an egg fried in a little pan at Mario's grim lodgings. "Nice place you're got here," says Nancy. "I like the furniture." They sit at his table dishing up the egg, and she slowly begins to cry. Then he cries too.

Larraín's protagonist this time leads a less eventful life than the violent, striving anti-hero of Tony Manero but he conveys a full sense of the world turned upside down just outside the frame. Mario is taking a shower and barely hears when much of his street is torn apart and Nancy's house is demolished. We hear it, though Larraín need only show Mario showering, and the effect is much more disturbing that way (rich sound design is as essential as cinematography in creating the film's world). Nancy's father hosted union meetings. So her parents are never found after the coup.

This event is depicted by rubble, burned automobiles in front of the Bim Bam Bum Club from which Nancy was expelled and the piles of bodies that come to the morgue. Mario's coworker Sandra (Amparo Noguera), who does the cutting, and their coroner Dr. Castillo (Jaime Vadell), who does the autopsy reports, are instructed to speed things up and simplify. Sandra later goes haywire and the captain in charge fires into the corpses to show her rescuing people is forbidden. She and Mario had tried to save several people who arrived not yet dead.

Much of the style of both these films is due to the contribution of the cinematographer, Sergio Armstrong, who used grainy 16mm film to create a washed-out, seedy Seventies atmosphere. With his long straight gray hair, small thin frame, sepulchral pallor, and dedicated neutrality, Alfredo Castro is a memorable figure. When he's joined on screen by a vast accumulation of corpses Post Mortem comes very close to becoming a a horror film. While this, Larraín's third feature, seems less compelling than the deliciously repellent Tony Manero, he has again shown his considerable knack for crabwise depiction of Seventies Chile, and a sense of how civil disorder invades behavior and consciousness. Not exactly fun stuff; big box office is not to be expected.

Ultimately it's a narrow, limited way of seeing the world -- what about the good people? Families? -- but it's an extremely evocative one. You can't get it off your shoes, and will find it still sticking to them weeks or months later. For me, however, the creepiness of Tony Manero was greater, partly because Larraín's visual style and his use of Alfredo Castro were fresh then, partly because the focus on the coup lessens the impact of the personal realm. Larraín has a unique vision, though his sense of a low-keyed ghoulishness resembles Matteo Garrone's portrait of a man with a similar occupation in The Embalmer. Both films are dripping with vague eeriness.

Larraín was inspired by a news story mentioning an actual Mario Camejo as present for the autopsy on Salvador Allende. What might he have been like? the director wondered. And he imagined this film. Post Mortem debuted at Venice on September 5, 2010. “If you read the autopsy of Allende, which is public, it’s on the Web, you will find a very powerful text. It is the autopsy of Chile,” Larraín said in a Venice interview. Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2010.