New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2011

[Chris Knipp]

Isild Le Besco: Bas-Fonds (2010) -- FILM COMMENT SELECTS


NOÉMIE LE CARRER, VALÉRIE NATAF AND GINGER ROMÀN IN BAS-FONDSa

Bad girls

Actress Isild LeBesco's fourth directorial effort, Bas-Fonds ("The Lower Depths," or, better "The Dregs"), is a series of appallingly violent, apparently improvised scenes mostly set in a trashed suburban flat inhabited by three young women who are living a sub-human existence dominated by occasional lesbian sex, physical and verbal abuse, and alcohol. After a while a squat, heavy-looking black dog is brought in. Magalie (Valérie Nataf), Stéph-Marie (Noémie Le Carrer), and Barbara (Ginger Romàn) live a squalid and insensate, violent and inward-turning life on the barest fringes of human civilization. Trash litters the floors of their barren apartment. In their day-to-day life that consists of little more than eating, sleeping, drunkenness, violent squabbling and getting off, with a little watching of soaps and what sound like porno films on a big box TV, they are lost to all but each other.

Magalie, the lumpish leader, rules with a mixture of male power and animal charisma. Stéph-Marie, her little sister, is a self-effacing simpleton. Barbara, bleach-blond, unaware that she's prettier than the other two, is employed as a night cleaner at an office building. She also acquires a "lover," whom she met at a cafe and has regular sex with. Already estranged from her biological family, she has unwittingly joined the pack out of an attraction to Magalie, met at a dance club, who has sex with her and beats her. One day at the instigation of Magalie and out of sheer boredom they hold up and trash a small bakery at closing time, killing the young baker (Benjamin Le Souef) with a shot from a rifle and terrorizing his wife (Ingrid Leduc). They return to their meaningless life but nothing is the same. Magalie beats Barbara so brutally that one day she goes to the police and this nightmare ends with imprisonment and a trial.

Le Besco's "Dregs" is a film for devotees of X-rated raunch or cinephiles who scoff at entertainment-seeking and seek to be shaken and disturbed by what they watch. This is the film school of deliberate and none-too-subtle provocation, that, however it may annoy, has commitment behind it, if not great skill. Its cruelty and meanness make Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers , which after all has its humorous side, seem like Singing in the Rain by comparison; Philippe Nahon in I Stand Alone is a polished sophisticate compared to Magalie, and it's impossible to speak of von Trier's Antichrist in the same breath because that film's even more cinematically sophisticated than von Trier intended it to be, and if it goes too far, it also offers much visual beauty. Bas-Fonds isn't technically crude in the camera department, but its acting and directing are, and Leslie Ferperin of Variety has commented with reason that while the second half is "not without grace notes," the " first part is so tacky, histrionic and wannabe-outrageous it feels like an early John Waters movie in French, but without the laughs."

In between violent closeups of these poor creatures, who communicate only in shouted obscene taunts, there are passages of voice-over with poetic musings, finally, with a recitation of the 23rd Psalm. At the end Barbara has been released and has a job, but she seems disconnected from life, and longs for the bestial suburban cave she used to live in with the two sisters and muses that she would go back to it, sooner or later, if she could.

The periodical moments of soft, poetic voiceover (Le Besco's own quite beautiful voice) with dappled water and sky shots are meant to and to some extent do establish a humanistic context. These too, they are saying, are God's creatures, poor little lambs who have gone astray. But patched-in comments are too easy and gratuitous. What Bas-Fonds succeeds in doing is both in keeping us at one remove from its characters, and throwing their invective and lurid squalor so much in our faces we can't analyze and think. When we look closer we see that there's more gesture than context and more noise than narrative. We get stunning shtick: scantily clad (but occasionally laundered) young woman going wild on each other and dispensing with the amenities. But dialogue consists mainly of brief shouts, obscene epithets, accusations. "More hootch!" You forgot such and such! (Visits to the supermarché are included). "The bottom on the can is cold!" (Their meals consist of canned food heated in a pan of boiling water and eaten from the can.) A script consisting of barbaric yawp can't develop relationships or history or context. It's only by a flashback that the way Barbara and Magalie met is established. By suggesting that Magalie does a lot of sleeping LeBesco avoids having to give her much else to do. The Guignol of the bakery and its aftermath provide the film's narrative arc. Le Besco seems to do a lot of showing, but in fact her showing doesn't tell, and she has to spell things out with voice-overs to get any ideas across.

Le Besco aligns herself with a French cinema of desperation to which Bresson, Pialat, Godard, Noé and Dumont also belong. Her context seems more petulant and childish than those others but she may make up for that with a passionate intensity that makes her films, as one French commentator remarked, "more lived than seen."

Bas-fonds was released in France by Ciné Classic and opened in Paris December 29, 2010. It was seen (and painfully lived) and reviewed as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's series Film Comment Selects. The series, now in its eleventh year, includes 26 films this year and they are shown between Feb. 18 and March 4 at the Walter Reade Theater at 65th Street near Broadway.

FCS screenings of Bas-Fonds:
Fri Feb 18, 2011: 9:00 pm
Sat Feb 19, 2011: 4:00 pm |

[Chris Knipp]

For the Fillmleaf Forum discussion thread linked with this series, please go HERE.

INDEX OF LINKS TO REVIEWS IN THIS SECTION:

At Ellen's Age (Pia Marais 2010)
Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari 2010)
Belle Épine (Rebecca Zlotowski 2010)
Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975, The (Göran Hugo Olsson: 2011)
Cairo 678 (Mohamed Diab 2010)
Curling (Denis Côté 2010)
Destiny of Lower Animals, The (Deron Albright 2010)
Gromozeka (Vladimir Kott 2011)
Happy, Happy (Anne Sewitsky 2010)
Hit So Hard (P. David Ebersole 2011)
Hospitalité (Koji Fukada 2010)
Incendies (Denis Villeneuve 2010)
Majority (Seren Yüche 2010)
Man Without a Cell Phone (Sameh Zoabi 2010)
Margin Call (J.C. Chandor 2010)
Memory Lane (Mikaël Hers 2010)
Microphone (Ahmad Abdalla 2010)
Octubre (Daniel, Diego Vega 2010)
Outbound (Bogdan George Apetri 2010)
Pariah (Dee Rees 2010)
Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine 2010)
Winter Vacation (Hongqi Li 2010)

The press screenings schedule for the 2011 New Directors/New Films is as follows. I will be watching as many of these as I can and reviewing all that I see.

Monday, March 7
10:00am MARGIN CALL (109 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
12:15pm ONE and WINTER VACATION (10 min + 91 min) – MoMA, Titus 1

Tuesday, March 8
10:00am MEMORY LANE (98 min) – MoMA, Titus 2
12:00pm OUTBOUND (87 min) – MoMA, Titus 2

Wednesday, March 9
10:00am INCENDIES (130 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
12:30pm MAJORITY (111 min) – MoMA, Titus 1

Thursday, March 10
10:00am HAPPY HAPPY (85 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
11:45am AT ELLEN’S AGE (95 min) – MoMA, Titus 1

Friday, March 11
10:00am 6,7,8 (100 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
12:00pm THE BLACK POWER MIX TAPE 1967-1975 (100 min) – MoMA, Titus 1

Monday, March 14
10:00am CURLING (96 min) WRT
12:00pm PARIAH (86 min) - WRT
2:00pm CIRCUMSTANCE (107 min) – WRT

Tuesday, March 15
10:00am BUKOWSKI and COPACABANA (10min + 107 min) - WRT
12:15pm HIT SO HARD (101 min) - WRT
2:15pm BELLE EPINE (80 min) - WRT

Wednesday, March 16
10:00am MICROPHONE (120 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
1:00pm SOME DAYS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS (93 min) - WRT
3:00pm TYRANNOSAUR (91 min) - WRT

Thursday, March 17
10:00am NIGHT HUNTER and SUMMER OF GOLIATH (16min + 76 min) - WRT
12:30pm MAN WITHOUT A CELL PHONE (83 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
2:10pm MIYUKI and HOSPITALITÈ (9min + 96 min) – MoMA, Titus 1

Friday, March 18
10:00am GROMOZEKA (104 min) – MoMA-Titus 1
12:00pm MILA CAOS and EL VELADOR (18min + 72 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
2:00pm OCTUBRE (93 min) – MoMA-Titus 1

Monday, March 21
10:00am THE DESTINY OF LESSER ANIMALS (87 min) – MoMA, Titus 2
12:00pm MATCH and ATTENBERG (11min + 95 min) – MoMA, Titus 2
2:00pm FWD: UPDATE ON MY LIFE and SHUT UP LITTLE MAN! (28min + 85min) – MoMA,Titus 2

[Chris Knipp]

J.C. Chandor: Margin Call (2011)


KEVIN SPACEY IN MARGIN CALL

A cooler drama of financial meltdown

Margin Call is a dark, elegant-looking, well-acted and very focused film that takes a more realistic look at Wall Street's 2008 crash. Sometimes you may wish for more fantasy, for the glitz and drama of Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko. Or for the drive and desperation of Ben Affleck and Giovanni Ribisi in Boiler Room. J. C. Chandor's feature film debut, which he also wrote, has a real sense of atmosphere, but not quite such a good sense of how to tell a story. You would think a moment so climactic and urgent would fuel a movie of great suspense. Instead there are longeurs, and a sense of slow wind-down, a giving up. The Variety review calls it "methodical, coolly absorbing." But the cool gets in the way of the absorbing sometimes.

But there is commentary. This is clearly a world of men only pretending to know something (and this is realistic, we have to believe) when they barely have a clue. The highest officer on the sales floor can't read charts on screens, and the CEO asks the explainer of what's gone wrong to "Speak to me as you would a small child, or a golden retriever." Too believable. Margin Call has been described as a thriller but also a comedy. Things would be desperate if they weren't so pathetic, tragic if they weren't so tinged with stupidity and greed. You'd weep for these people if so many of them were not reptiles. These are smart people but they're not fully using their brains or their moral sense because their eyes are on the money.

Details have been freely altered but the unnamed setting is a firm like Lehman Brothers. It's a kind of vast gilded glass-bound cage with beautiful faraway views of Manhattan. A couple of employees go on a fast early morning drive to Brooklyn Heights, but otherwise for 36 hours hardly anybody leaves the building.

The action is simple. Heads roll aplenty, but that happens all the time. This time it's different because it emerges that for the past two weeks (and really a long time before that) the firm's holdings have become so shaky that it's going to go under. ( It's credit default swaps and the real estate crisis that are bringing down the store values, but such details are not delineated.) The decision is made to dump all the firm's mortgage securities in a single day for whatever they can get on a dollar per sale as the day wears on. It's the end of the firm and the first big step in the end-of-2008 financial meltdown.

Chandor gets things going through a risk manager Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) who's part of a sudden purge. As he's escorted out of the building he presses a flash drive upon one of his underlings. It's something he was in the middle of, he says, that looks very important. "Be careful." The underling, Sullivan (Zachary Quinto, the new Spock in Star Trek and a producer of this film), who along with a star trader, Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) and his pal Seth (Penn Badgley), is among those not let go that day, stays in the office till late at night completing Eric Dale's research. He calls back Seth and Sullivan and Will, and they call in Will's boss Jared Cohen (Simon Baker), and when the information has been dumbed down enough for all to understand they call upon the CEO himself, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons). They must bring back Eric Dale, but in the interests of "security" his mobile was cut off, and he has not come home. Also present now: the head risk manager, responsible for Eric Dale's demise, Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore).

Once Tuld gets his golden-retriever-level summary from Sullivan, he knows this is The End. It falls to the trading-floor manager, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey) to pep-talk the sales floor into selling out the company, knowing most of them are also going to lose their jobs when it's done, but with a million-plus bonus for axing themselves, the company, Wall Street, and the world economy.

Special kudos go to Kevin Spacey for delivering a performance that is restrained and real this time. He even looks right, and he is the most genuinely complex and conflicted character. Irons too is riveting, managing to be both chatty and Olympian, quick-witted and clueless. Tucci is workmanlike as usual. Bettany is convincing and a little raw in the Ben Affleck role, the aggressive, risk-taking, Nicorette-chomping salesman who's blown a two-million-plus year's earnings mostly on luxuries, a $150,000 sports car (which sounds better than it looks; it's the one that gets driven to Brooklyn Heights to corral Eric Dale), and over $75,000 on call girls and cocaine. The other actors, though carefully chosen, are not as interesting, and this is not an ensemble piece. It doesn't depict a world where people cooperate. There is too much dithering in the script and there are not enough memorable lines, except for almost everything Jeremy Irons says. There's the one about the golden retriever, and the signal line of the piece: "It's not called panic if you're first out the door."

There's a business about Sam Rogers' dying dog that isn't used forcefully enough to justify its being dragged in. There are also one or two gaps in continuity: but this film was reportedly shot in three or four days. Excellent use is made of steel and glass, of night shots of Manhattan, men (few women) in good suits, and a shot of Tuld (Irons) eating alone by a sweep of windows (On the World?) in the company dining room, a moment that nails the man's sublime indifference. Chandor's own father worked in the industry for forty years, and one thing he brings to this film, well received at Sundance and a creditable, even flashy, first effort, is fairness. We pay attention to these men even if we don't like them. There is sympathy if not psychological depth. These are not caricatures. Chandor deserves credit for bringing in such a good-looking, complicated picture for just a little over three million and delivering a swirl of financial events in only 109 minutes. The Red camera cinematography of Frank G. DeMarco does much to contribute to the film's cool elegance.

Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA and the series' opening night film. Picked up at Sundance by Lionsgate, it opens in US theaters in the autumn -- October 2011. It was also at Sundance and Berlin.

ND/NF OPENING NIGHT SELECTION.
Wednesday, March 23rd 2011 | 7 & 7:30 PM | MoMA
Thursday, March 24th 2011 | 8:30 PM | FSL

[Chris Knipp]

Hongqi Li: Winter Vacation (2010)



Much ado; but then, not so much

Hongqi Li, who has been a hit at the Locarno festival, reminds me of the ultra-dry Swedish director Roy Andersson, but without the production values, the variety of settings and characters, or the momentum. As with Andersson's You the Living, which was in the Rome festival in 2007, the scenes are a series of vignettes with no strong connecting storyline. (Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki are also kindred spirits.) Winter Vacation focuses on a group of teenage boys in a generic nowhere land of modern China -- it's Inner Mongolia, but the director deliberately chose shots that could be almost anywhere -- who are frozen in boredom and inertia so stylized it is, occasionally, quite funny. But this is Beckett (one can't help thinking of him too) without the wit or eloquence. Hontqi Li's people stand and stare at each other for a long time before they speak. Very often they just stare into space rather than at each other. There are always, always very long pauses between lines of dialogue.

These kids have no radio, video games, no iPhones or MP3, no TV -- except one that keeps showing Hongqi Li's previous feature (this is his fourth), Routine Holiday (2008). A fun thing to do is to stand over one of their pals (he's their sort of ring leader) and watch him sleep. And he does a lot of that. To make it really exciting someone holds a small pinwheel in front of the boy's mouth so as he sleeps his exhalations make the wheel spin round.

A girl brings one of the boys a cap she has knitted for him. Four or five of his friends are standing around and he's on his bed. He turns the cap over in his hands, manipulates it, pulls it, flips it again. Then he passes it on to another boy, who does the same, and so on, around the room, and then back to the boy the cap was made for. "I'm too young to need a cap like this," he says.

A town market in a desolate square. A long range of tables are sparsely arranged with vegetables of various kinds. A woman comes up and goes over every cabbage at one table. The seller challenges her to buy or go away, and she goes away. Off behind, she comes to another table full of cabbages and again goes over them, taking up one and stripping it of most its leaves. Then she hands it to the seller. They haggle over the price, based on the weight. She cheats him by saying she hasn't the right change. Then as she puts the cabbage in her bag, she adds all the leaves she stripped off earlier, saying it would be a shame to let them go to waste.

A little boy sits in the living room with his grandfather. He asks him why he doesn't go to work and he says he's retired. What does that mean? asks the boy. That I don't have to go to work any longer, says the grandfather. Then am I retired? asks the boy. And so on. He says that when he grows up he wants to be an orphan. Cute little jokes, but with a feeling of déjâ vu.

Other scenes are harder to remember. They're Marty-like moments where the boys stand around out in a courtyard wondering what to do, exchanging grave, long-delayed comments about each other, their families, the limited possibilities for amusement. Vacation ends and the first day of school comes.

"One day after another, it seems as if life never ends," one boy comments as they sit outside on abandoned furniture in a light snow. Another friend imagines himself hitching up with his "stupid and average-looking" girlfriend to produce others like himself who will do the same. "It's the endless fruit of my loins," he sums up. Another boy thinks that their "muddling along" in school leads to a "mentality" that will not contribute to the future of socialism. Their learning is by rote, and so is their politics.

This may be a commentary on the new China. It is certainly a commentary on life in the provinces. These boys are beyond the stimulus of true urban life. They are dullards, but it's the world they live in. The director's minimalist style asks us also whether life should make us laugh or cry. He seems to lean toward laughter (as Roy Andersson also does), but there's sadness and much boredom along the way.

Hongqi Li's filmmaking has been called "mesmerizing," "scorchingly funny" and "corrosively subversive." I did not see anyone scorched from the funny in my audience, or corroded by subversion. As for mesmerizing, yes. The man next to me fell asleep for some time. Then he left, saying this director has a stunning visual sense. That's true. There was something about the arrangement of figures and objects in the long horizontal frames that was striking and original. Sometimes the color or the light verge, ironically, on the sublime. Of course Hongqi Li has something. Has not Locarno said so? There is another kind of mesmerizing: the kind that comes from watching objects move very slowly in front of one's eyes. It's a kind of hypnosis, and you can do it to a chicken. But this kind of film is a tough watch. It's not the way I want to spend a lot of my time, even though I know that's just the very kind of thing that was said when Beckett's Waiting for Godot first appeared.

When I first saw You the Living (slow, but not as tough a watch) I expressed admiration, but also wrote that Andersson's sequences sometimes seemed like "the work of a Saturday Night Live writer in need of Prozac." I commented that "Since some scenes plainly move you or draw a laugh, it's obvious that others fall a little flat." One can offer the same criticism of Hongqi Li. Roy Andersson is not for everyone but he has gained an admiring audience of fans. Li may not ever gain that wide an audience. But his success reflects the increasing focus on Asian cinema in the world. And his long shots and unmoving camera positions are a very Asian way to shoot a film.

Hongqi Li's Winter Vacation was seen and reviewed as part of the New Directors/New Films, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA March 23-April 3, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
Sunday, March 27th 2011 | 6:00 PM | FSLC
Tuesday, March 29th 2011 | 6:00 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

Mikaël Hers: Memory Lane (2010)


THIBAULT VINÇON IN MEMORY LANE

Summer and this and that

Memory Lane is the first feature of La Fémis Paris cinema school grad Mikhael Hers, a loose, unfocused film about seven twenty-somethings who return to their old middle class suburb to the southwest of Paris one summer and spend a few days together. The aimless result might be considered Éric Rohmer without the intelligent conversation. Though they like each other and have little else to do, it still takes the whole movie for fellow band members Vincent (Thibault Vinçon of Emmanuel Bourdieu's Poison Friends, NYFF 2006 ) and Christelle (Dounia Sichov) to get it on. Sisters Muriel (Lolita Chammah) and Celine (Stephanie Dehel) must deal with the recent diagnosis of their father François (Didier Sandre), but his symptoms remain mild and he, like others, is available for nice meals and walks in the park. Raphaël (Thomas Blanchard, also in Bourdieu's film) has depression problems, but they don't seem serious enough to keep him from hiking around with the others toward summer's end.

Vinçon has a charming manner combined with a soulful look that has an edge of sadness around it -- qualities well used for his key role as the university students' con-man leader in Poison Friends. Alas, this is a mere walk-through for him that offers ample opportunity to show his pleasant side but nothing more. Vincent is only vaguely the central figure (and occasional narrator) and the subject is a young generation whose youth ends with the fading of summer, thus changing them all from who they were and dooming them never again to be a band of pals.

What has happened when the last reel spins out other than some discussions, some partying, some swimming, some sex, some outdoor meals, a few songs performed by the group (who sing in English)? Unlike Rohmer, Hers provides no amorous dilemmas to be resolved. He may deserve credit for naturalism since in everyday life very often nothing much happens. But a director with the magic touch can transform that nothing much into quite a lot, and that, here, doesn't happen. Like Rohmer, the director does have an attractive young cast, and the cinematography of Sébastian Buchmann keeps them bathed in warm, natural light.

Memory Lane opened in Paris November 24, 2010, receiving fair reviews (Allociné press rating 3.0) including favorable ones from respected sources (Le Monde, Libération, Les Inrocuptibles, Télérama, L'Humanité). Some French critics however found it "flat," "anecdotal," and "without flavor." Seen and reviewed as a part of the New Directors/New Films series presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, March 23 through April 3, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
Friday, March 25th 2011 | 8:30 PM | FSLC
Sunday, March 27th 2011 | 1:30 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

Bogdan George Apetri: Outbound (2010)


ANA ULARU IN OUTBOUND



A long day's desolate ride

Romanian director Apetri's powerful Outbound has some of the tragic intensity, at least in its ending, of De Sica's Bicycle Thief or René Clément's Forbidden Games. First-timer Apetri, aided on the screenplay by a trio of experienced writers, has made one of the best films to come out of the new Romanian cinema. It takes place when a woman prisoner who's served two years of a five-year sentence gets a one-day pass to attend her mother's funeral. She has no intention of turning herself back in. Her day is a chronicle of desperation and hope, beginning with her brother and ending with a doomed train ride. Whatever the crime was, it seems the sullen-faced Matilda (Ana Ularu) wasn't the perpetrator but instead has taken the hit for Paul, the father of her 8-year-old son Toma and a thoroughly sleazy character. Matilda and Paul made a deal, but just see if she can hold him to it. But she has other scores to settle and hard knocks to take.

The Romanians show a penchant for methodical real-time intensity and Apetri is no different, though a key to the power here is a willingness to elide unnecessary details, even maintain a degree of mystery, in the interest of focusing, as the great Italians did, on a few powerful scenes. Even if Matilda is out of jail and some key scenes are enacted in a wide, desolate open space designated by the original title, Periferic, she still seems to have the bars around her, holding her in the claustrophobia of a life that went wrong early. The actress, with a face as simple as a boy's, has a fixed, sullen glare that sticks in your mind.

The narrative is in three parts focused on three names: Andri, Paul, and Toma. We find out very vividly who they are. In a prologue Matilda (Ana Ularu) leaves prison on a 24-hour pass to attend her mother's funeral. Right outside the gate she meets up with a fat trucker (Ion Sapdaru) in a sleeveless shirt: it's summer, and everybody is sweaty. Her plan is to collect money to pay this man later to drive her to the port of Constanta, where she will catch a ship to smuggle her out of the country.

The first stop is Andri (Andi Vasluianu), Matilda's handsome brother. He's not pleased to see her, though he can't entirely hide fraternal feeling. She has disgraced the family, and also ill used him. His wife Lavinia (Ioana Flora) is even more openly hostile. Nonetheless they reluctantly take her to the funeral, and in that ride we feel Matilda's determination and toughness. Lavinia's insults only make her smile. She ingratiates herself with no one, smoking a cigarette outside the cemetery and walking away from the table at the al fresco dinner afterward. Andri is shocked, maybe pleased, to learn he has an 8-year-old nephew, but he's not willing to take Matilda's son in, and Matilda leaves.

The next meeting is with the abusive, self-indulgent Paul. He will give Matilda only a fraction of the payoff, saying it's not due till five years are up. He has brutal sex with her, then reveals that their son, Toma (Timotei Duma), whom he was supposed to be caring for, is in an orphanage. So that becomes an additional stop before the truck ride to the ship, and it turns into a train ride, with more brutal surprises and the shattering finale, which yet has a poetic rightness about it.

The tight schedule Matilda must follow -- she has to meet the trucker by evening and must escape before the prison knows she's missing -- heightens all the action, but Apetri's directing never feels rushed and makes every minute count. Ularu may seem one-note at times, but her unwavering drive is the key to Outbound's urgency.

Cristian Mungiu of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days co-wrote the original story. Marius Panduru of Police, Adjective did the warm, brown-tinged photography.

Outbound has shown at Locarno, Warsaw and Toronto. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors, New Films, the series co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from March 23 through April 3, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
Thursday, March 24th 2011 | 9:00 PM | MoMA
Saturday, March 26th 2011 | 5:30 PM | FSLC