New York Film Festival 2011

[Chris Knipp]

ULLRICH KÖHLER: SLEEPING SICKNESS (2011)


PIERRE BOKMA AND JEAN-CHRISTOPHE FOLLY IN SLEEPING SICKNESS

Up river

The German director Ulrich Köhler's third film, Schlafkrankheit in the original, is about Africa, where he lived happily as a boy, by his own account, when his parents were European medical relief personel in the Congo. His film is in two parts, which don't mesh particularly well. The first part is about a Dutch-born doctor, Ebbo Velten (Pierre Bokma), who's been in Cameroon too long and says goodbye to his German wife (Jenny Schily) and teenage daughter (Maria Elise Miller), but can't bring himself to leave. The Mr. Kurtz analogy would be excessive: the locals seem quite tame, for one thing -- but Velten has become one of those culturally split personalities who can't quite fit in in either world, this one or the one he left a long time ago. The second half comes three years later when Alex Nzila (Jean-Christophe Folly), a young French doctor of Congolese descent who's lived all his life in Paris, arrives on his first assignment from WHO to do an assessment of Velten's local program to eradicate sleeping sickness. Good performances, believable incidents, and totally authentic locales don't make this come together as a well-made film. It becomes increasingly unfulfilling as it progresses. The writing and editing are at fault here, but Sleeping Sickness won a festival slot (and even a Silver Bear award at the Berlinale for Köhler's direction) through its interesting and lived-in subject matter and atmosphere.

Velten loves his German wife, but an unappetizing bed scene shows their sex life may have died out. Yet when Gaspard (Hippolyte Girardot) suggests he join up for some play with pretty young African women, he declines. That has changed when the screen goes black and the narrative resumes, three years later, focused on Dr. Nzila and France. Velten's interest in African women has developed now, three years later, when Dr. Nzila arrives in Cameroon to do the WHO evaluation. Things are rough for Nzila: even getting from the airport is a huge hassle. By now, it turns out, Velten has a young African wife about to have a baby. Velten is off somewhere, his underlings covering for him as Nzila frantically waits. Nzila is even called on to perform a Cesarian section, which he has never done and doesn't even have the stomach for. And then he gets sick. Nzila goes through a series of scenes that are vivid images of a westerner plunged into a primitive setting and far out of his depth. He's also treated differently because he's black, dumped off at a hovel in the dark of night when he first arrives.

When Velten finally shows up several days later, treating the ill Nzila and performing the cesarian, which turns out to be on his wife, it also gradually becomes clear that sleeping sickness has been so nearly eradicated through Velten's good offices that the program and funding aren't needed. We've already seen in the first part of the film that Velten acknowledges this but local bureaucrats want more funding, not less. Velten isn't really needed either, most likely. He's trained the locals, and done himself out of a job. But of course he has no life elsewhere. What is Nzila to do?

That question is never really answered. Köhler takes Gaspard, Velten, and Nzila hunting by night along a river, and we get a whiff of a Heart of Darkness situation as Nzila becomes terrified and is separated from the other men. The film's ending is open-ended, which is fine, except that the contrast between Velten and Nzila, who are obviously polar opposites of the colonial spectrum, is never developed in an interesting or revealing way. Velten has a certain sleazy charisma. But it's the first shocking days of Nzila's mission that leave the most vivid impressions. In his final moment, after a night alone, he comes to the river's edge dazed and is pushed into a long rowboat. Gaspard and Velten are nowhere to be seen, and as the boat slips away a large, menacing hippo appears. It's a memorable moment -- this film has a few -- but a completely ambiguous one.

It's hard not to compare this with Claire Denis's White Material, also a treatment of Europeans in Africa whose time has run out. Though Denis isn't at her best in that film, it certainly develops the whole colonial-African context far more clearly and richly. Köhler's specific local details are very convincing, more intimate and real in an everyday sense than Denis', but he doesn't do enough with them. Denis' Africa may be more mythological and generalized, but it's also more resonant.

Sleeping Sickness debuted at Berlin in February 2011, and was released in Germany, the Netherlands and Poland in June, July and August, respectively. It was chosen to be part of the New York Film Festival in October, and it was screened there for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

NURI BILGE CEYLAN: ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (2011)



A long and winding road to an autopsy

I can do no better than Mike D'Angelo's appreciative but unconvinced report on the Turkish direictor Nuri Bilge Ceylan's new film, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Here's what D'Angelo posted for the AV Club from Cannes last May: "The latter is an intelligent, meticulous, incredibly beautiful movie that’s offered plenty of food for thought since I saw it, but that I found downright torturous to actually sit through. Mostly, that’s because Ceylan is playing a deliberate, formalist game of keep-away, introducing what looks on the surface like an exciting narrative—the film opens at night, with a bunch of cops and other officials toting two criminals around gorgeously barren landscapes in search of a corpse—only to slow the 'action' to a crawl (it takes 90 minutes of this two-and-a-half hour movie just for them to find the body) and focus our attention on bureaucratic trivia and raw bits of the characters’ psyches. Ceylan knows precisely what he’s doing—a lengthy shot of an apple tumbling downhill into a stream, merely to come to rest beside other rotted apples, all but chides us for seeking direct answers—and he uses car headlights the way Kubrick used candles in Barry Lyndon, but I still had enormous trouble staying alert amidst the endless trudging and sniping and sharing of seemingly random anecdotes."

He doesn't trust his reaction, pleading that he saw it late at night (he tends to have five-film days at festivals) and thinks Cannes' high regard (this co-won the Grand Prize with the Dardennes' estimable and consistent The Kid with the Bike) means he "might want to take a second look in future."

When he's on point as he is here, D'Angelo is vivid and accurate, and I can only agree that the wide aspect photography, with its tinges of yellow and digital luminosity, is gorgeous in the early segments as the three cars trail through the stark flat hills, so much so that simply watching the images is a pleasure in itself. The sudden alternating, contrasting closeups of men packed into a car, an aggressive police officer who's tried to stop smoking, a man they call "Arab" who does the driving, a sly, quiet doctor (who emerges as the film's favorite character) and a well-dressed prosecutor with a pock-marked face, with the main prisoner in the middle in the back, and the endless trivial conversation -- all this seems just an ironic joke to contrast with the beautiful landscape outside, which is heightened by thunder and lightning and a threat of heavy rain (which never comes).

Then there is the starting and stopping, the prisoner, angular and gypsy-like, abused by the police officer and his cohorts, repeatedly saying no, this isn't the place. They are trying to find where he buried a man he killed.

After a while when it's very late but still dark, they all stop, three cars, at a small village, where the local mukhtar (mayor) gives them dinner, and they are served by his young, beautiful daughter, who brings in a tray of tea with an array of small lamps that remind one even more of Kubrick's use of candles in Barry Lyndon, if you're so inclined. The prisoner, who dines with them, comes up with a confusing revelation. And then they go on and by the time it becomes light, the prisoner finds the burial place and they dig up the corpse of the man he killed, and there's a fuss about the fact that the dead man has been hog-tied, which turns into a mordant joke when they prepare to haul the dead man back with them to their town.

And everyone is exhausted, we too, and finally there is a rather gruesome autopsy, as the doctor peers out a big window and sees the murdered man's widow and her young son, who has a haunting face, wander away over a hill with a crowd of small boys playing below them.

If that floats your boat, rush to see Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. (The Cinema Guild has acquired U.S. distribution rights.) Ceylan has done fine, resonant, wry work in the past, but he goes very much his own stubborn way -- perhaps this time too much so. I would suggest that this, for all its meticulously observed characters and almost real-time examination of a curiously uninteresting and yet in some ways haunting police procedural, is more in the order of an auteurist shaggy dog story than anything I've seen before at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. Here, as at Cannes for Mike D'Angelo, it was "downright torturous to actually sit through." Since Cannes, it has been in at least eight other festivals, including Toronto. It will be released theatrically in Turkey, Greece, and France in September, October, and November, respectively.

[Chris Knipp]

JAAFAR PANAHI: THIS IS NOT A FILM (2011)


JAAFAR PANAHI IN THIS IS NOT A FILM

A muzzled artist speaks

It may indeed not be a film. But it is something else: a statement about repression. The celebrated Iranian director Jaafar Panahi (Crimson Gold, Offside) chose this title because he has been prohibited from making films by the Iranian government. This is not a film because if it were, Panahi would be violating the mullahs' orders. Apparently for supporting the protests against the reelection of Ahmadinejad, Panahi was arrested several times in 2010. Late in the year he was put under house arrest and officially prohibited by the Iranian government from plying his trade as a filmmaker for the next 20 years: no directing, no screenwriting, no interviews, no departures from the country. And a prison sentence is pending.

So This Is Not a Film, made by Panahi with help from the documentary filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb without leaving his apartment and smuggled out of Iran, it is said, on a USB thumb drive hidden in a loaf of bread, is an act of subversion and protest against his repression by the regime, not to mention the general repression of Iranian filmmakers. Nearly every Iranian film today is an overt or veiled criticism of the situation in the country. But This Is Not a Film is raw evidence of the deteriorating current situation in which one of the most prestigious of the country's directors can be silenced for nothing other than giving the nod to in demonstrations in which thousands of other Iranians were involved.

In post-modern art, ideas are exhausted or imagination is dead so the artist must try to make art out of nothing. But Panahi's problem is a more simple one. How do you make a film when you are prohibited from making one?

In This Is Not a Film, whose credits list it as an "effot" by the director rather than a "film" and gives Mirtahmasb as a collaborator but leaves all other staff names blank, things begin simply with Panahi having breakfast at a table and calling Mirtahmasb. The scene could be something by Elia Suleiman, the Palestinian director, whose situation of living under Israeli occupation is similar. In both cases, in the innocuous moment, you feel the walls around the walls.

Panahi asks his colleague to come quickly because he has something for him to do, and not to tell anyone where he's going. A phone message recorded while the empty bedroom is filmed says Panahi's son has set up the camera. This would mean Panahi is not breaking the ban, though he later does carry the camera, after Mirtahmasb leaves, filming a man who says he's filling in for the janitor (is he a government spy? If so he's a good natured one, even an admirer).

Events are somewhat random. First, Panahi talks to his lawyer on the phone. She tells him that it is likely she can get his prison sentence lowered -- to six years. But she thinks the 20-year prohibition from working will stick. He has waited for the response to the appeal for months, and is still waiting, but thinks the result may come at any moment.

Amusement and absurdity come when Panahi waters plants, tries to feed a big pet iguana called Igi, and fends Igi off when the lizard, suddenly friendly as a cat, climbs all over him as he tries to type. Further comedy arrives when a neighbor tries to leave off her little dog, Mickey. It's obvious Mickey and Igi are not going to get on and Panahi sends Mickey away immediately. But the sad heart of This Is Not a Film is Panahi's vivid attempt, as his friend wields the camera, to recreate the first scene of the film he was about to make when he was arrested. He puts tape on the floor to outline the small room of a poor girl whose religious family are barring her from going to the university. Panahi breaks down in the middle of this recitation and demonstration, saying, "If we could tell a film, then why make a film?"

Fascinatingly, Panahi also briefly talks about two of his earlier films, showing clips on a big flatscreen monitor. In the first film a young girl on a bus rips off her cast. She is an actress in a film, but she refuses to participate in the pretense that she is a little girl who got on a bus going the wrong way. The camera catches the filmmakers struggling as she throws off her cast, vehemently protesting, and gets off the bus, refusing to act any more. Using a DVD of Crimson Gold, Panahi shows a scene where the family is rudely treated by the jewelry shop owner and the main character (played by a real-life pizza delivery man) throws back his head and glares heavenward. Panahi says in both these scenes the non-actors took over and did the directing. He had not planned for the shop owner to be so condescending or for the pizza man to be so oddly dramatic.

Using unplanned elements is key even in the most precisely orchestrated films at times. But how much is "vérité" ever "vérité"? How much events like the iguana's antics, the phone calls, a food delivery, or the arrival of the university student subbing for the janitor may be pre-planned or orchestrated by Panahi himself as scenes in the film is uncertain. But for a film about nothing that is not a film, This Is Not a Film manages to be pretty lively. A background of the Dogville-like diagraming of the projected film about the poor would-be student and everything else becomes the sound of explosions, which turns out to be fireworks for Nowruz, Iranian New Year. These explosions are the background for Panahi's conversation with the sustitute janitor. And that conversation develops into the big set piece of the film when Mirtahmasb leaves and Panahi, after using his iPhone to film for quite a while (footage edited into the film), grabs the big HD video camera and gets on the elevator with him riding from floor to floor, gathering garbage.

The student/janitor tells about himself. He is a masters candidate at the Arts University. He works at many jobs. He tries to tell an extended story that keeps getting interrupted as he stops at floors and looks out to see if the tenants have put out their garbage. Eventually the lady from the lower floor appears and tries to foist Mickey on the young janitor. The way the young man walks off through a parking garage into the darkness with fireworks blazing nearby is a curiously moving finale.

It is likely that all this is very well worked out and yet it seems utterly casual. In either case it is a sign that Panahi's skill as a weilder of Iranian neorealist style, now applied to himself, has not diminished. And the aim has been achieved: of giving us a look at a filmmaker whose hands have been tied by an oppressive regime, and who refuses to be silenced.

Jaafar Panahi has been celebrated at international film festivals since his debut feature White Balloon won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 1995. His The Circle, which is about a woman trapped in a world of Islamist opporssion, won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2000 and many other accolades. Crimson Gold, a sly study of class resentment, won the Un Certain Regard prize, again at Cannes, in 2003. Offside (NYFF 2006) again touches on the role of women in Iranian society, with wry wit and a realism that creeps up on you. It won the Silver Bear at Berlin.

This Is Not a Film (78 min.) debuted at Cannes in May 2011. It has had a theatrical release in France, and will have similar ones in Sweden and Australia and, apparently, the US. It has been shown at other international film festivals, including New York, where it was screened for this review. What decision if any has been meted out on Panahi's appeal to the court we do not know. Many distinguished international figures have protested Panahi's confinement.

[Chris Knipp]

DAVID CRONENBERG: A DANGEROUS METHOD (2011)


FASSBENDER AND MORTENSEN IN A DANGEROUS METHOD

A waxen gala

A Dangerous Method is a beautifully made but curiously and depressingly safe film. It tells the true story of a Russian Jewish woman called Sabina Spielrein, at first a patient of Karl Jung, then his lover, who eventually came to be associated with Jung's Viennese colleague and eventual adversary, Sigmund Freud, and later, through the encouragement of both men, became a pioneer in psychotherapy in her own right. The joint connection came to define and crystalilze the fraught relationship between the two leading early figures in psychological theory and psychoanalysis. Christopher Hampton, the playwright and screenwriter, originally developed the script from a book called A Dangerous Method by John Kerr, for a film that didn't get made. Undaunted, the tireless adaptor instead turned it into a play called The Talking Cure that was produced on the London stage, and later he turned that into the screenplay from which Cronenberg made this film starring Michael Fassbender (as a sensitive but slightly too dapper Jung) and Viggo Mortensen (as an almost equally dapper, slightly older, constantly cigar-smoking Freud) and Keira Knightly (as a mugging, twisting, Russian-accent affecting Spielrein). The film is beautiful, elegant, and lifeless. Even the S&M scenes are like postcards of a swiss kitchen.

The lifelessness begins with the screenplay, a handsomely crafted piece of work which seems a little too much like an articulate Brit's Freud and Jung for Dummies. Hampton is great at the well-made play or the filmable adaptation, but boy does he do it by the numbers sometimes. (Dangerous Liaisons was another story.) Everything is clarified and simplified to the point where it contains virtually nothing about psychology that will be news to a basic student. This concerns two of the most exciting intellectual figures of the twentieth century, men whose work changed how we think about sex, emotion, the mind. And yet, here, in this film by a director who has dealt in horror and madness, it has all become so tidy and Germanic that it's like looking at a diagram.

Another problem is the casting. Knightley impresses when she is prim and beautiful. A raging neurotic with huge daddy issues, and Russian Jewish to boot, is way out of her range. Both Mortensen and Fassbender are wild men. Cut them loose and they can give you an edge of macho danger that's first class. The old Cronenberg, or what was left of him in A History of Violence, gave Mortensen room to be a mild mannered man who killed men with sudden precision. Fassbender likewise works well with extremes as he got a chance to do in Inglourious Basterda and the more recent X-Men: First Class, not to mention the ultimate testing he went through as Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen's searing Hunger. If you compare him in Jane Eyre and as the Irish seducer of his girlfriend's young daughter in Andrea Arnold's excellent Fish Tank you can see he can get stiff and remote in period costume, while given something closer to home he can chill you and charm you like nobody else you've ever seen. Even though there are sex scenes, he doesn't even seem to take his pants off for them as Jung. This Freud and Jung look too similar physically and too close in age. Good for Mortensen, who is actually 19 years older than Fassbender, but he looks very much younger. Both men are way more sexy than this. They are on their good behavior. Fassbender has some good moments. But Mortensen seems to be on Valium, delivering every line in the same slow, easy, somnolent pace.

It's hard to pass over the fact that the whole thing is done in English (though Fassbender in real life speaks German), the two men speaking a standardized version and Knightley, her version of a Russian accent (which perhaps fortunately comes and goes). Along with this, the production. It is beautiful. But nothing is allowed to be dark and messy. Freud's office was a huge disappointment. We all know what it looked like, the oriental rugs, the clutter. But the clutter is all swept to one side, lined up along the walls. The filmmakers prefer to shoot their people in brightly lit rooms or outside in very sunny open spaces. Gosh, I mean, wasn't the unconscious a dark and scary place? Weren't archetypes huge and mysterious and powerful? One is overwhelmed by starched white linen here.

Is there any need to point out that we don't get to delve into these men's revolutionary and controversial ideas? The "talking cure" is just that. Jung sits behind the twisty Fraulein Spielrein and asks her questions. That seems to be all that was required to turn her from a raving maniac into an outstanding medical student. Those Russian Jewish girls are quick studies. This is Jung using Freud's methods of psychoanalysis. He never really gets to explore his own ideas, just to listen to Freud calling them quackery that will spoil the new methodology's reputation. We want Freud to be broody and difficult and messed up and brilliant and Jung to be a little wild and visionary and mystical. None of that. Too much starched linen.

It's official now: David Cronenberg has fallen in love with his new respectability as an auteur. The respectability was probably creeping in with Spider, and the mantle was bestowed with A History of Violence and ratified with Eastern Promises. Since Viggo was important in both of these, he doubtless had to be kept on for A Dangerous Method, and the job of playing Freud was open. Where is the "king of venereal horror," the "baron of blood"? The guy who gave us eXistenZ, and before that Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and The Fly? Or the gloriously sicko Dead Ringers, which gave even Japan horror fans the creeps? I personally love the man's Naked Lunch. Burroughs' book is unfilmable, but Cronenberg made something deliriously and hilariously trippy out of it nonetheless. You could hash over many other titles, and some of them may drift further toward art or hack work. But when you look over these, it's hard to see A Dangerous Method as a job for this director.

A Dangerous Method, chosen to be a "gala screening" of the 2011 New York Film Festival along with Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In, is one of those ceremonial moments in a film festival. It is a chance to celebrate a lifetime of interesting work by rewarding something impeccable but unexciting. Mortensen has done great stuff for the Canadian director. Fassbender is one of the hottest actors of today. And Knightley is, well, the flavor of last month. But if this was meant to generate the kind of excitement that arose from the David Finccher-Aaron Sorkin collaboration The Social Network last year, or the level of pop-historical genius the NYFF jury anointed in the Stephen Frears-Peter Morgan partnership that produced The Queen for NYFF 2006, they were very sadly mistaken.

A Dangerous Method, one of two NYFF films starring Michael Fassbender (the other being Steve McQueen's Shame), will be released by Universal Pictures in the US November 23; in the UK February 10, 2012.

[Chris Knipp]

SEAN DURKIN: MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (2011)


ELIZABETH OLSON AND SARAH PAULSON IN MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

Nowhere to run

This Sundance Institute-assisted film by the very talented young NYU Film School-trained director Sean Durkin begins with its protagonist's dawn escape from the Catskills cult she's been living with for two years. She's followed and approached at a village diner where she's having breakfast by a young cult member called Watts (Brady Corbet) but he lets her leave and she calls her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) on a pay phone. Corbet, of the Funny Games remake, is naturally creepy here; he plays a key minor role in Von Trier's Melancholia. That call is all we need to see this young woman's desperation and confusion. The title is a spread of names, because typically for a cult, its leader, Patrick (indie vet John Hawkes), gives new arrivals new names. She tells Patrick her name is Martha but he dubs her Marcy May. The skill of Durkin's beautifully shot and well-acted psychological horror movie is in the way it delineates Martha/Marcy May/Marlene's confusion in telling her story. When she is taken to stay with Lucy and her ambitious Brit architect husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) in their big rented lake house in Connecticut, she has no clear sense of space or time, and has lost her awareness of social and sexual boundaries as well.

Durkin conveys Martha's blurry, disturbed sensibility by the seamless, sometimes deliberately confusing way the film slips back and forth between the present and the cult experience, in some parts of which she can't distinguish memories from recalled dreams. The film's sly paradox is that though Patrick's commune had become nightmarish and dangerous enough for Martha to run away from it and it has left her fearful and paranoid, it was also seductive and pleasurable for her. Ironically, because Lucy's and Martha's family history is chilly and Lucy and Ted's judgmental bourgeois sense of boundaries leads them to see her as more in need of disciplining than of love and care, the place she has come to isn't warmer and friendlier than the place she has escaped from. Thus as Martha slips back and forth in her mind from the Catskills cult to the Connecticut household, she not only doesn't know who she is or how she should behave, but also doesn't know where the happy place is. No wonder she spends a lot of her time curled up in the fetal position sleeping.

Martha Marcy May Marlene isn't, therefore, a fun watch and isn't meant to be. The pleasure it gives is in the originality of its vision and its success can be measured in how uncomfortable it keeps you at any given moment. It's disturbing to find in flashbacks that Patrick seems seductive and even nice. He perceives that "Marcy May" wasn't appreciated by her biological family and he and the other cult members promise her a new warmer substitute family where everything, clothing, food, sexual favors, is shared; where she is recognized as "a teacher and a leader." Schedules and habits are new. There is only one meal a day in the evening, shared by women together, after the men, whom they outnumber. They seem radiant and happy despite shabby dresses, which they share indiscriminately. They choose their "roles," what work they will contribute. "Marcy May" becomes a good gardener, as Lucy notes when she has escaped. Patrick has sexual control, but his favors are looked on as an honor and delight. He tells "Marcy May" she is his "favorite." Of course all this is woven in confusedly with the present time where Martha says uneasily with Lucy and Ted.

Martha never tells Lucy where she has been or what has happened, and perhaps surprisingly Lucy never comes close to guessing. This is the viewer's situation in the film's early scenes. We don't know much about Patrick's farm, only that there was a big, shabby house, in the painterly images of the beautiful setting, smiling women, kids playing aimlessly and a little ominously outside. Judicious use is made of sound effects to convey disorder, fear, danger at the commune. But later Patrick's seductiveness appears when, before the others, he sings a folk song he has composed for "Marcy May." Eventually the dark side of the commune appears to us through the flashbacks -- darker and darker. Durkin is astute in portraying Patrick's ways of shaping and converting members subtly, never using shock tactics or exaggerating anything, relying on careful study of actual communes and cults -- but also not spelling too much out for us of the details.

There are climactic elements, underlined by the beautiful images of cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes and the quietly ominous sound design, but somehow the film feels a little too loosely edited in places and a little too open-ended in its finale.

John Hawkes has a key supporting role in this as he did in Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, and as he has himself noted both indie film breakthroughs featured young unknown female stars of beauty, assurance, and star quality, Jennifer Lawrence in last year's film and Elizabeth Olson in this one. Olson shines in the way she shifts from glowing to desperate, tentative to stubbornly resistant, vividly strange to Lucy and Ted, a motherly helper to newcomers at Patrick's cult, a shivering wreck at the two years' end. At the Connecticut house, she challenges her sister, and engages her brother-in-law's brittle wrath. There are a lot of modes here, and Olson slides into each of them as the film slides back and forth from present to past. Hawkes has an interesting role here too, gong from warm and welcoming to sleazy to scary and creepy from scene to scene.

Martha Marcy May Marlene debuted at Sundance in January 2011 and has subsequently been shown at Cannes, Toronto, and other festivals including the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center where it was screened for this review. It goes into limited US theatrical release (through Fox Searchlight) October 21, 2011, UK and France releases February 3 and 29, 2012, respectively.

[Chris Knipp]

JEAN-PIERRE AND LUC DARDENNE: THE KID WITH THE BIKE (2011)


THOMAS DORET IN THE KID WITH THE BIKE

Purity of emotion: love and hope (second viewing)

As I noted in the earlier review in my May Paris Movie Report, in The Kid with a Bike/Le gamin au vélo the Dardenne brothers are "on strong familiar ground," "depicting a troubled boy struggling to get attention from his derelict, immature dad and tempted to a life of crime by an older boy who exploits him." And the Dardennes' discovery, 13-year-old Thomas Doret, who plays Cyril, the 11-year-old reject, is "excellent, if quite uncharming and uncute." But what I ought to have noted was not only the incredible drive Doret has but the emotional wallop the film packs. I was more deeply moved this time, viewing the film again at the New York Film Festival.

It's telling that the Dardennes cast Jérémie Renier as Cyril's derelict dad. Renier was a kid of 15 himself in 1996 when he played the son to Olivier Gourmet's reprehensible dad in the Dardennes' breakthrough La Promesse, and Thomas Doret may well go on to have an acting career like Renier. I noted that Cécile de France, who plays Cyril's working class, hairdresser surrogate mother, adds her usual "perky good looks and soul." But I ought to have added that de France's role adds a sweetness and warmth and hope unusual in a Dardenne film up to now. And of course love, the thing Cyril needs and so ardently seeks, sometimes in just the wrong places.

There has been no moment in the 2011 New York Film Festival as heartbreaking as the scene when Cyril's cowardly dad, forced by Samantha (de France) tells the boy he doesn't want to see him any more, ever, and the boy acts out his hurt and anger in Samantha's car. Then Cyril has his period of going bad, falling for the offer of preference and friendship he gets from the gangsterish Wes (Egon Di Mateo), who merely trains him to assault and rob a man carrying money from his newsstand sales, along with his son. Then comes Cyril's apology and Samantha's agreement to pay the damages, and the later fight between Cyril and the man's son.

When all that is over, and he's been even more decisively rejected by his dad, Cyril tells Samantha he wants to live with her full time, and they do.

I wrote in May that "What's so great with the Dardennes is the irresistible force of the chase, the hunt, or whatever is going on in the somewhat dogged narrative at hand, and a use of actors and non-actors so seamless that one never has a chance to stop and think 'this is a movie.'" Cyril goes everywhere at breakneck speed and he may have a more intense drive than any previous Dardennes character. But his dad stops Cyril, and so does his failure with Wes. So Cyril escapes from the group home, gets into his dad's former apartment, finds his dad, gets his bike back every time it's stolen, even carries out Wes' robbery plan, but it's all as nothing, because he has no one and is nothing till he accepts Samantha. Samantha, as I said in May, is "a saintly woman with tough love." And she's willing to deal with Cyril, even though he's such a handful. When her current boyfriend Gilles (Laurent Caron) says "you have to choose him or me," she says, "Him."

The film not only "ends on a note of hope." It is idyllic, when it shows Cyril and Samantha riding bikes together and going for a Sunday picnic. It suggests that they can have a nice life together, if he stays away from people like Wes in future. This isn't the Dardennes' only highly emotional film. Their films are often full of heartbreak and also full of forgiveness. But the level of hope here is unusually high, and I don't think it's a softening, just an affirmation.

The camerawork by Alain Marcoen is not jerky, as some have suggested. As I wrote earlier it is "(for these filmmakers) smoother than usual." What is also different, as was noted by Jean-Pierre and Luc at the New York Film Festival P&I press conference, are moments of music, powerful bursts of classical strings that evoke Italian neorealism. They said this was nearly a first for them, and that it added an element that was lacking in Cyril's life, the "element of love." I was struck this time by how those short bursts of music introduced to celebrate Cyril add a powerful note of humanism and warmth. This is an understated but very strong addition that I failed to note before but was strongly aware of this time. Again I was struck by the fact that the Dardennes' complete control over their medium, simple and single-minded, keeps our attention riveted for every minute of the film. It's a technique that leaves one feeling exhausted but fulfilled. The film seemed more emotional and more positive to me this time. It doesn't really matter that the directors are on more familiar ground than their previous Lorna's Silence. The emotional power, the intensity and speed of the little protagonist, and the positivity are something a little new, and the sense of things being just a little too much manipulated (but with masters' hands) is really no stronger here than it has been in nearly every one of the Dardennes' previous films. I am more impressed than I was in Paris and think this is brilliant work. But I understand why after so many at least superficially similar works the Cannes jury doubled this up with Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film and I very much understand why that film did not get a prize all to itself. I merely question whether it should have won anything.

I first watched The Kid with the Bike May 18, 2011 in Paris, the day of its French theatrical release. I watched it again October 5, 2011, as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. The directors were present afterward with Richard Peña, Film Society director, for a Q&A. As mentioned before, the film co-won the Grand Prize at Cannes, sharing it with Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. The film has been bought for US distribution by Sundance Selects, to be released in March 2012.

[Chris Knipp]

STEVE MCQUEEN: SHAME (2011)


CAREY MULLIGAN AND MICHAEL FASSBENDER IN SHAME

A cold wall of sex in Manhattan

Steve McQueen is the Turner Prize-winning British artist whose stunning depiction of the imprisonment and death of Bobby Sands in Hunger (NYFF 2008) won the first-time filmmaker Caméra d'Or award at Cannes in 2008. Hungerstarred Michael Fassbender in a physically wrenching performance that put him on the international map as a film actor. Fassbender and McQueen have teamed up a second time for an equally extreme but far different theme in Shame, a film about a handsome but very cold New York corporate employee who is a raging sex addict. Along with Fassbender, whose character is called Brandon, Carey Mulligan ups the acting level further in an excellent performance as Sissy, Brandon's garrulous and needy sister, a cafe singer, who temporarily moves in with him. Nicole Beharie is fine as Marianne, a coworker who tries to have an affair with the intimacy-averse Brandon, and James Badge Dale is good as David, Brandon's fast-talking boss. This shows that for Fassbender, who since Hunger has been increasingly in demand and delivered some brilliant performances for other directors, particularly Quentin Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds and Andrea Arnold in Fish Tank, demonstrates that McQueen may still be the Scorsese to his DeNiro. This is a collaboration that produces outstanding work. But this being a glass-and-steel study of alienation and lack of affect, it doesn't provide the kind of catharsis Hunger did, nor does its style, though elegant, have the rigor and intensity McQueen achieved in his remarkable first feature.

The emotional numbness of the addict and the sense of desperation are evident from the opening sequence, where Brandon prepares for work, ignoring desperate phone calls (they later turn out to have been from Sissy), masturbating hastily in the shower, walking around in a display of casual frontal nudity that shows the necessary equipment is in good order but the face on the man is wary and strained. Again in contrast to Hunger, which shows a precise progression, Brandon's life of wanks, online porno, quickies with pickups and visits from prostitutes without meaningful communication or friendship, produces a sense of narrative as well as emotional chaos. The question gradually arises, How should we care about this man? The answer is that we slowly begin to feel a mixture of pity and disgust, but the caring comes in with the surprise appearance of Carey Mulligan, nude, in Brandon's bath. No information about the siblings, but he says (logically, since it's true of the actor) that he was born in Ireland but they grew up in New Jersey. It's obvious they share some kind of painful family background, and that they are all each other has. Brandon cannot acknowledge need; Sissy can do nothing else. "We're not bad people," Sissy tells her brother. "We just come from a bad place." Sissy is a lost soul, but her despairing warmth saves the film from being as frozen as the deepest bolgia of Dante's Hell.

There are several memorable sequences. In one, Sissy performs the slowest ever version of "New York, New York" in a stylish cafe watched by David and Brandon. Brandon can't seem to muster even mild enthusiasm for Sissy's performance, and perhaps to compensate, she has sex with David later in her brother's apartment, where she's now staying. Further along, Brandon's date with Marianne begins with awkwardness and a silly waiter in a restaurant and ends without a kiss or a hug. The next day Brandon hits on Marianne heavily at work and they end up in a showy room at the Standard Hotel at the High Line but the fact that she really cares for him makes him impotent. He asks her to leave and calls in a prostitute whom he showily screws up against the big plate glass window. Finally, Brandon goes into a downward spiral into the wild side that includes a gay rough trade bar and a seedy dive where his obscene come-on to a woman in front of her husband gets him beaten up. Meanwhile once again he is ignoring Sissy's increasingly desperate calls, with a dire result that somehow may be positive.

At the New York Film Festival Q&A McQueen and Fassbender showed a camaraderie that was quite the opposite of the film's chilly anomie. McQueen's answers showed his purpose was indeed to make a movie about sex addiction, and Shame was set in New York because true-life informants about the subject were available there and unwilling to talk in London. The director alluded to Days of Wine and Roses but here the addict never acknowledges his problem or seems aware of his downward spiral -- except in the gesture of throwing out his porn collection. The film seems to adopt a detached, aestheticized, almost glamorizing view of addiction, though this may not have been at all intended. New York becomes a hell of sterility and coldness that the two talented collaborators may not have understood as well as London -- a place a little too like Steven Soderbergh's affectless call girl's surroundings in his chilly digital The Girlfriend Experience, though this is clearly a richer and, despite the protagonist's isolation, a warmer film. Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt and editor Joe Walker, who worked on Hunger too, continue their style of powerful long takes, but the familiarly cold Manhattan setting and dislocated sensibility make this more like other films than McQueen's distinctive debut. A hero's struggle for national liberation must inevitably engage more than the conundrum of a dysfunctional modern urban man's inaccessibility even to himself. I would rather that Bach's keyboard music (even the immortal Glenn Gould recordings) were not elicited as a theme. Bach has not been so debased since Silence of the Lambs.

Shame debuted at Venice and was shown also at Toronto; and New York, where it was screened for this review. Fox Searchlight bought the film for US release, planned for December 2, 2011. The French release is to be December 7; UK, January 13, 2012. In the US it has received an NC-17 rating.