New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2013

[Chris Knipp]

Index of Filmleaf reviews of ND/NF 2013


THE ACT OF KILLING (Joshua Oppenheimer 2012)
ANTON’S RIGHT HERE (Lyubov Arkus 2012)
BLUE CAPRICE (Alexandre Moors 2012)
BURN IT UP DJASSA (Lonesome Solo 2012)
LES COQUILLETTES (Sophie Letourneur 2012)
THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON (Emil Christov 2012)
DIE WELT (Alex Pitstra 2012)
EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL (Li Luo 2013)
A HIJACKING (Tobias Lindholm2012)
JARDS (Eryk Rocha 2012)
JISEUL (O Muel 2012) 109min
KÜF (Ali Aydin 2012)
LEONES (Jazmin Lopez 2012)
L’INTERVALLO (Leonardo Di Costanzo 2012)
OUR NIXON (Penny Lane 2013)
PEOPLE’S PARK (Libbie D. Cohn & J.P. Sniadecki 2012)
RENGAINE (Rachid Djaïdani 2012)
THE SHINE OF DAY (Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel 2012)
SOLDATE JEANNETTE (Daniel Hoesl 2012)
STORIES WE TELL (Sarah Polley 2012)
THEY’LL COME BACK (Marcelo Lordello 2012)
TOWER ( Kazik Radwanski 2012)
TOWHEADS (Shannon Plumb 2013)
UPSTREAM COLOR (Shane Carruth 2012)
VIOLA (Matías Piñeiro 2013

Forums comments and notifications thread for these two series is here.


Still from A Hijacking

__________________________________________________ _________________________

Film Comment Selects (February 18-28, 2013) and NewDirectors/NewFilms (March 20- 31, 2013) are two important separate series put on early in the year by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, FCS a series chosen by staff members of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's in-house monthly, New Directors in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art. I will cover the press & industry screenings of New Directors/New Films, which generally include all the selections. Of Film Comment Selects I will see only a few. That series is spread out and lately has not had a program of press screenings. In between these two every year is the FSLC-UniFrance series, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (February 28-March 10, 2013). If I can I will provide thorough coverage of all the films of both the Rendez-Vous and New Directors, or all the new ones anyway.

Manohla Dargis has an introduction to Film Comment Selects 2013 in the NYTimes. (Feb 18, 2013).



From the New York Times online "Arts Beat" of 16 Jan. 2013:

Seven Features Announced for New Directors/New Films Series
By DAVE ITZKOFF

Sarah Polley’s documentary exploration into her own family and Shane Carruth’s followup to his 2004 debut, Primer, are among the features that will be presented at this year’s New Directors/New Films series, the annual program presented by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the organizations said on Wednesday.

Among the seven films announced so far for the program, which will run from March 20 through 31, is Stories We Tell, a nonfiction feature directed by Ms. Polley (Take This Waltz, Away From Her) that combines home movies, re-creations and interviews with family members to tell the story of her mother, Diane. The series will also present Upstream Color, a new film written and directed by Mr. Carruth, and which is described in a news release as "a love story embedded in a horrifying kidnap plot whose full import isn’t revealed until the final, poignant moments."

The five other selections for New Directors/New Films that were announced on Wednesday are The Color of the Chameleon, a darkly comic spy film by the Bulgarian director Emil Christov; A Hijacking, a thriller by the Danish director Tobias Lindholm; Hold Back, by the French director Rachid Djaïdani, about a black Christian man who becomes engaged to marry a Muslim Arab woman; Peoples Park, by J.P. Sniadecki and Libbie Dina Cohn, which explores a Chinese public square in a single tracking shot; and Viola, in which the Argentine director Matías Piñeiro updates the story of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in modern-day Buenos Aires.

[Chris Knipp]

film comment selects



More detailed descriptions of the selections are found on the Filmlinc (FSLC) site here. I'll try to cover a few of these, but no press screenings are offered and the schedule overlaps with days of R-V and ND/NF screenings.

Simon Killer
Antonio Campos, 2012, 105 mins
Monday, February 18. 8:15 pm
A chilling death dance plays out in Paris between a troubled, possibly unhinged American graduate (Brady Corbet) and a French prostitute (Mati Diop).

The We and the I
Michel Gondry, 2012, 103 mins
Thursday, February 28, 8:30 pm
Michel Gondry’s delightful and wholly unexpected lo-fi experiment is a mobile kammerspiel set entirely on a crowded bus wending its way through the Bronx as it takes its high-school student passengers home on the last day of school.

3
Pablo Stoll, 2012, 119 mins
Wednesday, February 27, 4:30 pm
A middle-aged dentist with a quietly unraveling life makes repeated and poignantly ineffectual efforts to renew his relationship with his ex-wife and adolescent daughter in this low-key and unexpected melancomédie from the co-director of Whisky.

A Borrowed Life
Wu Nien-jen, 1994, 167 mins
Sunday, February 24, 2:00 pm
A deeply-felt, epic father-and-son drama chronicling the tumultuous life and times of a provincial mining-town family in the 1950s. One of New Taiwanese Cinema’s masterpieces.

Call Girl
Mikael Marcimain, 2012, 140 mins[/b]
Wednesday, February 20, 9:00 pm
Thursday, February 21, 3:30 pm
Based on a true story, and subject of a major controversy in Sweden last year, this inevitably semi-lurid but never exploitative drama is about the corruption of a 14-year-old girl lured into a prostitution ring catering to the political establishment in the 1970s.

Dormant Beauty
Marco Bellocchio, 2012, 115 mins
Friday, February 22, 4:00 pm
Sunday, February 24, 5:15 pm
A compelling drama in which four interrelated characters struggle with the moral impasses and compromises of modern life. With Isabelle Huppert and Toni Servillo.
Wednesday, February 20. 6:30 pm

Electra Glide in Blue
James William Guercio, 1973, 114 mins
Saturday, February 23, 9:45 pm
Record producer James William Guercio’s first and last film is a visually extravagant, behaviorally loopy story of an Arizona motorcycle cop named “Big” John Wintergreen (Robert Blake) who aspires to be a big-shot Los Angeles detective.

From the Life of the Marionettes
Ingmar Bergman. 1980. 104 mins
Tuesday, February 19, 6:30 pm
Bergman’s rarely-screened study investigates the underlying emotional and psychological causes that lead a middle class business executive to murder a prostitute.

Gebo and the Shadow
Manoel De Oliveira, 2012, 95 mins
Monday, February 18, 6:00 pm
Tuesday, February 19, 4:30 pm
An impoverished civil servant faces a desperate family crisis in this nighttime kammerspiel starring Michael Lonsdale, Claudia Cardinale Jeanne Moreau and Oliveira axiom Leonor Silveira.

Here Comes the Devil
Adrián García Bogliano, 2012, 97 mins
In this creepy low-fi indie, two children return to their parents after disappearing in the wilds, unharmed but not quite themselves. Once home, strange things start happening…
Friday, February 22, 10:15 pm

Howard Zieff: Hearts of the West + Slither
Howard Zieff | | 199 mins
Thursday, February 21. 6:30 pm
Howard Zieff’s underrated 1975 comedy about the early days of Hollywood western filmmaking Hearts of the West, starring Jeff Bridges and Alan Arkin, on a double bill with his 1973 caper comedy Slither, in which James Caan demonstrates his comedic chops.

In the Fog
Sergei Loznitza, 2012, 128 mins
Sunday, February 24, 7:45 pm
Tuesday, February 26, 4:00 pm
This quietly spellbinding and masterfully directed follow-up to My Joy is a gritty behind-enemy-lines drama in which an alleged Nazi collaborator faces execution by partisans.

Miss Lovely
Ashim Ahluwalia, 2012, 110 mins
Tuesday, February 19, 9:00 pm
Wednesday, February 20, 4:00 pm
A delirious tale of filmmaking, love, betrayal and crime set in the sleazy demi-monde of gangster-controlled Bollywood exploitation film production.

Motorway
Soi Cheang | 2012 | 89 mins
Saturday, February 23, 1:00 pm
Tuesday, February 26. 6:30 pm
In this kinetic, fuel-injected thriller, a secret high-speed-pursuit unit of the Hong Kong Police called the Stealth Riders battle with underworld getaway drivers through the city’s nocturnal maze of streets and highways.

Nights with Theodore
Sébastien Betbeder, 2012, 67 mins
Friday, February 22, 6:30 pm
Thursday, February 28. 4:45 pm
A romantic connection blossoms between two young Parisians over the course of a succession of dreamlike nocturnal visits to the singular, beguiling Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.

Penance
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2012, 278 mins
Monday, February 18, 1:00 pm
After a four-year hiatus, Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns with this five-part, made-for-television psychological drama/murder mystery that tests viewer endurance, and truly rewards it.

Sightseers
Ben Wheatley, 2012, 89 mins
Thursday, February 28, 6:30 pm
A country caravan tour spins horribly out of control when a very English couple embark on a romantic getaway that gradually escalates into all-out killing spree in this blackly funny new outing from rising indie star Ben Wheatley (Kill List, Down Terrace).

Stemple Pass
James Benning. 2012, 121 mins
Saturday, February 23, 3:00 pm
Images: four landscape shots containing a replica of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, one per season. Sound: the filmmaker’s readings from Kaczynski’s texts and diary.

Wish You Were Here
Kieran Darcy-Smith | 2012 | 89 mins
Kieran Darcy-Smith’s feature debut is a calmly devastating exploration of how one misjudged moment in life has the potential to cause everything to fall to pieces.
Saturday, February 23, 7:45 pm

White Epilepsy
Philippe Grandrieux | 2013 | 68 mins
Friday, February 22, 8:30 pm
Grandrieux pushes the limits of the visible and sheds all vestiges of narrative to enter a state of total immersion that’s at once disembodied yet deeply physical, metaphysical yet grounded in the primordial reality of the body.

[Chris Knipp]

Mon., Feb. 25, 2013: the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA today announced the New Directors/New Films press & industry screening schedule.

NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2013 PRESS & INDUSTRY SCREENING SCHEDULE

MONDAY, MARCH 4
9:00AM
BLUE CAPRICE (92m), FSLC
10:45AM
EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL (70m), FSLC
12:30PM
THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON (114m), FSLC
TUESDAY, MARCH 5
9:00AM
KUF (94m), FSLC
10:45AM
TOWER (78m), FSLC
12:30PM
A HIJACKING (99m), FSLC
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6
9:00AM
BURN IT UP DJASSA (70m), FSLC
10:20AM
RENGAINE (75m), FSLC
12:00PM
SHORTS PROGRAM #1 (85m), FSLC
THURSDAY, MARCH 7
9:00AM
THE SHINE OF THE DAY (90m), FSLC
10:45AM
THE ACT OF KILLING (115m), FSLC
1:00PM
SOLDATE JEANNETTE (79m), FSLC
FRIDAY, MARCH 8
9:00AM
LES COQUILLETTES (75m), FSLC
10:30AM
JISEUL (108m), FSLC
12:45PM
LEONES (80m)

FSLC REMINDER: ALL SCREENINGS MOVING FORWARD WILL TAKE
PLACE AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART:

MONDAY, MARCH 11
9:00AM
THEY’LL COME BACK (105m), MOMA
11:00AM
DIE WELT (80m), MOMA
12:45PM
THE SEARCH FOR INSPIRATION GONE (9m) + VIOLA (63m), MOMA
TUESDAY, MARCH 12
9:00AM
RP31 (5m) + TOWHEADS (86m), MOMA
10:45AM
PEOPLE’S PARK (78m), MOMA
12:30PM
ANTON’s RIGHT HERE (120m), MOMA
3:00PM
SHORTS PROGRAM #2 (83m), MOMA
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13
9:00AM
UPSTREAM COLOR (96m), MOMA
11:00AM
STORIES WE TELL (108m), MOMA
1:15PM
L’INTERVALLO (80m), MOMA
THURSDAY, MARCH 14
9:00AM
JARDS (93m), MOMA
10:45AM
SHORTS PROGRAM #3 (86m), MOMA
12:45PM
OUR NIXON (85m)MOMA

[Chris Knipp]

ALEXANDRE MOORS: BLUE CAPRICE (2013)


Blue Caprice

New angles on a killing spree

Based on the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks (but with a tighter timeline) in which over a period of several weeks ten random victims were killed and three were wounded by a pair of snipers hidden in a Chevy Caprice (the "Blue Caprice" of the story) in Washington D.C., Alexandre Moors’s feature debut is a semi-road movie that looks at the two killers' stories prior to the event. The film follows the elder John and 17-year old Lee as they eventually prepare to carry out their acts of gun violence. Isaiah Washington and Tequan Richmond play the duo killers, the older John Allen Muhammad and the young and largely silent Lee Malvo, respectively. Abandoned by his mother for the last time on the island of Antigua, where they live, Lee is alone and hungry. He seeks out John, first seen with his three children, and is taken in by him, partly because he is barred from seeing the children again. John becomes a mentor for Lee preaching hate and teaching marksmanship in what develops into a powerful if warped father-son style relationship. Blind loyalty grows, and death becomes mundane and necessary. Alexandre Moors, who grew up in the suburbs of Paris, has chosen to focus on the relationship more than on the acts, though they indeed do come in the tense final segment of the film. Moors and his screenwriter R.F.I. Porto present the killings somewhat indirectly, focusing more on its sources than its physical trappings, though at once point we are hidden in the trunk of the Caprice with Lee as he targets people in a grocery story parking lot. More importantly we hear John's ultimately grandiose scheme to create widening mayhem, starting with random killings following no discernible pattern.

Some viewers at Sundance were troubled that Blue Caprice makes the two killers "sympathetic." It does not make them sympathetic. It explores a little of their lives immediately before they meet and during their brief period together before their rampage. This provides a narrative structure. It doesn't provide an explanation, let alone a justification.

We first see John, it's true, not as a murderer but a seemingly ordinary man playing nicely with his three children. Young Lee arrives similarly with initial sympathy because his mother has abandoned him. He is a lost boy. As time goes on, it also becomes clear that he's smart. In time Muhammad's inner sickness begins to show, and he begins to seem bent on turning Lee toward hate and cruelty. Moors doesn't avoid the final violence. He merely does not revel in or exploit it. It arrives after a period of growing tension. John Muhammad and Lee meet in the early scenes on the island of Antigua. Then they go together to Washington state. Introducing Malvo as his son, Muhammad falls in with old army pal Ray (Tim Blake Nelson) and his wife Jamie (Joey Lauren Adams). As time goes on Muhammad reveals the he feels deep rage over his own divorce and his separation from his children by his ex-wife. We never really know what Lee feels. When he shows a natural talent as a marksmen when shooting in the woods with military buddies Ray and John. This inspires John to use him as a shooter. We can only guess what moral confusion and desperate need on Lee's part would lead him to become an assassin to please his adopted "dad."

Blue Caprice is notable for its crabwise entry into the world of a pair of killers. Some will feel something is missing -- a fuller explanation of the origins of these acts; a more climactic development of the acts themselves. When the time comes for the two to be caught, nothing could be more low-keyed. You have to take your satisfaction in the blind mystery of the relationship, which has a certain clarity and beauty -- and being taken into the car, even taught how to drive it, that is going to be a frightening hidden weapon terrorizing citizens.

The film owes a lot to its excellent cast, cinematography that makes good use of constantly changing venues, and a sharp, pared-down screenplay by promising first-timer R.F.I. Porto, who was signed with UTA (United Talent Agency) at Sundance after the screening of this film. The Irish cinematographer Brian O'Carroll does some classy work with color and light. Isaiah Washington and Tequan Richmond both do outstanding work. Washington has the extraordinarily difficult task of showing John's bitterness, anger, and hatred without making him a mere villain, and Richmond does something at least equally tricky, showing motivation and emotion in a character who rarely spells out his feelings. A useful innovation of the filmmakers is to have Lee find and periodically read aloud from a military sniper manual. If Blue Caprice works, which I think it does, it's because it leaves you with memories you can't digest, and also can't get out of your mind.

Raffi Asdourian wrote a helpful short review of the film at its Sundance debut and Ty Cooper provides another. David Rooney's Hollywood Reporter review goes into a bit more detail.

Blue Caprice was screened for this review as part of the New Directors/New Films series presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, New York, in which it is the opening night presentation. The film originally appeared as part of the ten-film Next series at the January 2013 Sundance Festival.


Isiah Washington, Alexandre Moors and Tequan Richmond
at Sundance

[Chris Knipp]

LI LUO: EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL (2012)


Emperor Visits the Hell

Old tale performs new function

Winner of the Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema at the October 2012 Vancouver Film Festival, Li’'s film Emperor Visits the Hell is a film adapting three chapters of the Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West to a modern Chinese setting. The new film has been called one of the more promising recent works from an independent Chinese filmmaker. In it, Emperor Li Shimin is transformed into a bureaucratic boss in a big city, where the crooked Dragon King’s attempt to change the weather has backfired and led to a death sentence. Li pulls the rug out from under everyone, from the audience to those whose power has gone to their heads. Or so says the festival blurb. For me this film did not work. It's mundane sequences might make ironic sense if one knew the old stories very well, but even so, they would not make this into a good film. Yes, it has strange, dreamlike moments. But Li does not seem to know where he is going with all this, as indicated by a final drunken scene that has no relationship to "Monkey" and is just self-indulgent blather about the future of China.

Richard Schieb, who reviewed the film at Vancouver, points out the story has been filmed frequently. These include the Japanese film Monkey Sun (1940); the Chinese animated film Princess Iron Fan (1941) based on a partial segment of the story; the Japanese film Songoku: The Road to the West/The Adventures of Sun Wu Hung (1959); the Japanese anime Alakazam the Great (1961); the Chinese animated film The Monkey King/Havoc in Heaven (1965); the popular Japanese tv series "Monkey" (1978-9); a South Korean television series called "Journey to the West" (1982); a Japanese TV series with the same title (1993); director Jeffrey Lau’s two-part Hong Kong film A Chinese Odyssey Part 1: Pandora’s Box (1994) and Part 2: Cinderella (1995) with Stephen Chow as Monkey; a Japanese anime TV series "Monkey Magic" (1998), and so on and on including another remake by Jeffrey Lau, a US-made Jackie Chan vehicle, and more.

Sheib thinks the new story resembles Cocteau's Orphee and Black Orpeheus in turning a classic "myth" into a new form in a modern setting. Li Luo doesn't change the magical aspect of the original story, the voyage between heaven and hell including encounters with traditional gods and legends. But in order to make the setting contemporary, the director makes the emperor into a traditional calligrapher whose court is just some corporate offices, while the Dragon King is turned into a petty mobster running his operations out of a bar-cum-pool hall.

Ghosts out wandering the grounds of a palace now look like just people out for an evening stroll. Li Luo has created something quite unlike all the earlier adaptations of the traditional stories, turning toward the everyday and mundance, with a special difference. He brings out an innate humor in the material, by presenting it in a very toned down manner.

Li presents a world dominated by small-tim gangsters, corporate stiffs, and petty bureaucrats -- a satirical version of contemporary China. Or just a realistic one? But in the context of the ancient stories, these characters merely seem like odd stand-ins.

When the character representing the monk Xuanzang/Tripitaka (the hero of "The Journey to the West") arrives toward the film's end, he must get an exit visa to leave China. The film's finale is self-referential, a filming of the wrap part of the film itself. The actor playing the emperor, presumably now just being himself, drunkenly begins to complain about how hard it is to get funding for the arts in contemporary China. And so forth.

Emperor Visits the Hell was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films at Lincoln Center, March 2013.

[Chris Knipp]

EMIL CHRISTOV: THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON (2012)


Ruscen Vidinliev in The Color of the Chameleon

The crazy scheming of a nonentity in the almost-post-communist world

Blurb: "Batko Stamenov (Ruscen Vidinliev) is the ideal secret agent. Orphaned at an early age, he was adopted by his aunt, who later confessed to having been his real mother. But when she passes away and the doctor informs Batko that she died a virgin, it becomes clear to him that lying is a family trait. So when he’s approached by a member of the secret police who wants to recruit him as a spy, he’s more than happy to oblige. For his first mission, he is assigned to infiltrate the so-called "Club for New Thinking." This subversive student group meets to discuss a pseudo-philosophical novel called Zincograph, which tells the story of a raving lunatic who works at the Royal Zincography by day, and by night creates an ever-expanding — and wholly fictional — web of spies and saboteurs that bamboozles the country’s actual secret police." I might add that Batko winds up doing much the same himself, learning zinc litho printing, and reporting on the book club's members to his security boss.

Christov's Color of the Chameleon/Tsvetat na hameleona is a deliberately surreal -- and elaborately droll -- depiction of the simultaneous breakdown and perpetuation of the practices of the communist security and espionage bureaucracies after the fall of the Soviet empire focusing on the odd career of one ostensibly vacuous and unimportant man, albeit one with a zest for life and his semi-imaginary espionage roles -- who attempts to seize significance, as it were, from the jaws of nonentity. All this is in a scenario adapted by Vladislav Todorov from his own 2010 novel Zincograph, centers on young misfit/perfect fit Batko Stamenov (Ruscen Vidinliev a generally appealing tongue-in-cheek protagonist). This is an elaborate, ingenious, and beautiful film, something of which Bulgaria, which hasn't dominated the international film festival circuit of late, may be justly proud -- or might be, if it did not all seem so trivial, somehow. That is perhaps the fault of Comrade Todorov. It all seems like a droll game to him. And one does see its absurdity. But then one remembers Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's devastating study of the secret police in East Germany The Lives of Others, also just a few years before the fall of communism, and one realizes that this stuff was pretty serious and pretty awful, and Christov's and Todorov's farce seems a tad insensitive. And some of the archness seems heavy-handed from the outset: how funny can you find the protagonist's excessive masturbation, or the State's theory that it can lead to epilepsy? Still, there is fun to be had, and this is an awfully good-looking film much of the way.

Unfolding in the years just before and just after the fall of Communism, this black comedy about an irrelevant but enthusiastic secret police informant "goes down a rabbit hole into a realm of twisted absurdity," says a festival blurb -- a description that could easily be the opening of a damning review. Another blurb enticingly, if over-enthusiastically, suggests Christov has made "a black, absurdist riff on the dank literary labyrinths of Kafka, Le Carré and Don DeLillo, by way of the cinematic influence of David Lynch and Bernardo Bertolucci." Well, now. Actually Le Carré is mentioned in the dialogue, but not those other guys. And the thing is, Le Carré has had some interesting things to say about the post Berlin Wall world. If Todorov is trying to make his way from Le Carré to DiLilllo by way of Kafka, that may be his problem. But all this makes more sense than some viewers seem to have thought, even though the basic idea is a little too easy: that cold war paranoia was so absurd, after the time passed it made just as much sense to invent new security games of nothing. Hence when Batko Stamenov is fired by his state security boss for his irrelevant and self-indulgent reports, he invents his own agency of "SEX" and hires young intellectuals he knows from the book club, whose rituals mimicking his rituals with them from those of his own former boss.

By this point and indeed long before -- Todorov could have done a good deal more paring down of his novel's elaborate details -- things are becoming an intricate network of absurdist filigrees, creating an effect that some viewers find wonderfully hip, while others see it as increasingly devoid of sense. In either case, Bulgaria is back with its first film at at New Directors/New Films in New York, it's reported, in thirty-five years. Reviews by from Toronto came from David Nosair, who loathed this film (and seems not to have understood it), and James McNally, who found a number of things to admire, but not all. An online review by Joe Bendel provides some insights too. Add one to the cinematic chronicles of communist nuttiness.

The Cholor of the Chameleon, (2012) 114mins., was shown at various festivals, including Toronto. It was screened for this review at the New Directors/New Films series, a joint presentation of FSLC and MoMA, New York, March 2013.