New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2014

[Chris Knipp]

JACAPO OLMO ANTINORI AND TEA FALCO IN ME AND YOU

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI: ME AND YOU/IO E TE (2012)--FCS

A reviving retreat

As Mike D'Angelo noted in his 2012 Cannes AV Club report, Bertolucci's first film in a decade and first one in Italian in thirty years is enjoyable and well made. "Pleasurably inconsequential," he called it, but the now wheelchair-bound filmmaker, logically returning with a movie shot mostly in one small space, could be a small shot in the arm for Italy's currently lackluster cinema world. Anyway it is enjoyable. It starts with Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori), an antisocial 14-year-old with a pimply wild-eyed face. He tricks his mother into thinking he's gone off on his class's week-long ski trip, while actually holing up in the large basement under their apartment, having stocked up on a meticulously organized week's worth of supplies. These include canned goods, soft drinks, books, even an ant colony and a big magnifying glass to observe it; he's into insects and animals and probably prefers them to people. In occasional phone chats with his mom, he successfully maintains the pretense that he's up in the mountains with his teacher and classmates.

But in the event Lorenzo is not alone in his basement hideaway, because he's soon joined by his older half sister Olivia (Tea Falco), who has come here to go cold turkey from heroin. It's the only place where she can do this in secret, she says. Lorenzo, it should be noted, as played by the engaging and vivid Antinori, isn't as nerdy and strange as his behavior might imply. Though he's immediately horrified that the flamboyant Olivia will give them away and he'll be "dead," Lorenzo's behavior toward her is uniformly sweet and kindly, and their parting when she is done and he's about to go back is loving. He also has a nice relationship with his bedridden grandmother, whom he visits even while hiding. Antinori has an obvious comic flair, so while Lorenzo's behavior is self-protective it's also humorous, and lighthearted, and future integration into the urban teenage population seems (perhaps for some disappointingly) quite conceivable. But in the film as written, Olivia steals a lot of our attention away from Lorenzo. This too may disappoint some viewers, but the point of the story seems to be that these two solitaries, by being set close together, are humanized, developing a capacity for caring and affection.

Me and You mostly works to develop, without psychological clichés, a close-up of how the rapprochement of Lorenzo and Olivia takes place. An older man comes to visit Olivia and gives her money, apparently for an artwork; we see her sophisticated, witty installations or photo pieces that Lorenzo finds on the Internet. The basement seems to have wi-fi and includes a dingy shower and loo, furniture, and trunks containing the wardrobe of a deceased countess who previously occupied the family apartment. And there's music, including several David Bowie songs, headphones -- and the ants. Olivia is a considerable disruption but things would be pretty flat if she had not shown up. Robinson Crusoe gets his Girl Friday and then some. Falco is vigorous and quirky, Antinori more a natural. It's to be hoped both their talents will be on view again soon.

There's a parallelism between this film and the director's flashier 2002 The Dreamers, with it young, almost incestuous ménage à trois, also confined to one place, though not a basement storage area but a grand Haussmannian Paris apartment. Maybe in this more cramped space, without the contrived and dubious references to 1968, we get to know these characters better. But while it's nice to see Bertolucci working again, it's not yet at all certain what he'll do now will be up to his best earlier work.

Me and You/Io e te, 103 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2012. It opened in Italy 25 Oct. 2012, but in other countries not till 2013. In France (18 Sept. 2013 release) its Allociné press rating was 3.3, the same as The Dreamers got in 2002. It was in the May 2013 SFIFF. Screened for this review as part of the Feb. 2014 Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center, New York. It showed Thurs. 27 Feb 2014.

US theatrical release began 4 July 2014 at Lincoln Plaza, Broadway at 62nd Street. Metacritic rating (as of 4 July) 56%.

[Chris Knipp]

Selects

HONG SANG-SOO: OUR SUNHI (2013)--FCS


EX-STUDENT SUNHI (Jung Yu-mi) SEDUCES PROFESSOR CHOI
(Kim Sang-joong IN OUR SUNHI TO GET A BETTER RECOMMENDATION LETTER

More good Hong Sang-soo

As Scott Foundas notes in his enthusiastic Variety review at Locarno, the prolific and ultra-consistent Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo has always focused on and celebrated (attractive, young) women, but Our Sunhi and his previous film Nobody’s Daughter Haewon signal a subtle shift to more of an actual femme POV; and Our Sunhi is one of Hong's most enjoyable efforts in a while, if less emotional than Haewon. As usual, there's a movie director, there's talk of film school, and there are endless complicated and sometimes comical flirtations to be observed, with people getting drunk and overstating things.

It all begins when Sunhi returns to film school to get a letter of recommendation from Professor Choi so she can get into graduate school in America. She runs into ex-boyfriend Munsu, and they drink. Munsu's declaration of undying love (an excellent and hilarious Lee Sun-kyun here) she rejects, leading Munsu to seek out Jaehak, another faculty member, and film director, and get drunk with him (more hilarity from Lee Sun-kyun). Munsu's absurd ramble about how one must dig deep and go all the way (did he get it from Sunhi, echoing a platitude from Professor Choi?) is rejected by Jaehak, who says digging deep will only reveal one's shortcomings.

Professor Choi gives Sunhi the recommendation letter he has dashed off, which he has made "honest," in other words ambiguous and niggling, with some good comments but also some unfavorable ones. She is smart, it says, but he's not sure if she has talent or not. She was shy in class. It was evident the professor didn't want Sunhi to go abroad. This leads Sunhi to invite the professor to lunch so she can get him to write a more positive letter. He admits she was his favorite student, and not only that, that he has always been in love with her. When she gives him the nod, he is ecstatic. He drinks with Jaehak, admitting he's excited about a young woman.

But now it's Jaehak's turn to run into Sunhi, and they go drinking in the same bar, with fried chicken again ordered in by the proprietress. (Thrice now the same old nostalgic love song is played, to ironic effect.) Sunhi gets quite drunk this time, and caresses Jaehak, saying sometimes he is "lovely." As they stumble to Jaehak's building (he has left his wife), it seems they will sleep together, but they don't.

By now it's clear that all three men are in love with Sunhi, and all are fools. Sunhi is a bit of a fool herself. A recurrent issue is: if you want to make films, why waste your time in film school, either as a student or a teacher? And why all this talk, when you should be doing things? That's the biggest irony, since Hong's movies are all talk.

As has been his wont of late, Hong creates a succession of similar scenes, with drunken sessions at a bar or restaurant table predominating, and he likes making lines and themes of successive dialogues overlap or recur -- though the parallelism isn't quite as dreamlike and confusing as in the 2011 The Day He Arrives, and the theme of going abroad isn't as poignant as in the 2013 Nobody's Daughter Haewon .

Sunhi sure gets drunk a lot, but she keeps these three men at arm's length. The situation resembles one in Eric Rohmer, as in A Summer's Tale (1996), where Melvil Poupaud must choose between three young women and -- the classic pattern, found in Jane Austen -- insists on picking the least appropriate. But especially here, Hong is more minimalist and cool than Rohmer. Sunhi is't picking anybody. She's more interested in the recommendation letter than in the three men. Hong is also more of a formalist than Rohmer. He is fascinated with parallels and repetitions of patterns. But this doesn't keep there from being some terrific acting in this movie. As Sunhi, Jung Yu-mi, in her fifth outing with the director, is a combination of sexy, innocent, flirtatious, and mysterious. But the prize must go to Lee Sun-kyun as Munsu: his drunken act with a condescending Jeong Jae-yeong is real, unexpected, hilarious, a triumph. Though the POV may be Sunhi's, in a way, some of the best interactions are between the men.

Playing with patterns isn't just formalism. It's what playwrights do when they construct a well-made farce. It's certainly a new pattern when all three men meet at last at the palace park, but it's also a comic climax.

Our Sunhi, 88 mins., debuted at Locarno, where it won Best Director and was nominated for the Golden Leopard. Other important international festivals including Toronto, London, and Vancouver. Screened for this review as part of the Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center, where it was shown 17 and 20 February 2014.


"A TWO-SHOT BECOMES A THREE-SHOT": JAEHAK (Jeong Jae-yeong),
PROFESSOR CHOI (Kim Sang-joong AND MUNSU (Lee Sun-kyun)

[Chris Knipp]

Selects

PASCAL BONITZER: CHERCHEZ HORTENSE (2012)--FCS


CLAUDE RICH AND JEAN-PIERRE BACRI IN CHERCHEZ HORTENSE

A harried grown son gradually becoming a mensch

Cherchez Hortense/Look for Hortense, Pascal Bonitzer's busy, meandering, oddball French film, was included in Lincoln Center's eclectic winter series "Film Comment Selects" precisely because it doesn't fit in anywhere. It was a movie that virtually went straight to video. It opened in September 2012 ("La Rentrée, best time to open a film), got decent reviews, and was forgotten. But someone at the Film Society's house publication found and rescued it. In his series survey A.O. Scott of the New York Times said it's "an exemplary Film Comment selection in that it is a solid, satisfying movie that might too easily have been overlooked." Indeed, but Scott says nothing more, because it's hard to know what to say.

On the surface, Cherchez Hortense is an example of polished French bourgeois cinema. You have the beautiful interiors, nice locations, cool people, cafés, cigarettes. In this case it's a world above all notable for its elegant disarray, comfortably inhabited by familiar and well-loved actors from France's incestuous insider cinema world. The central couple is falling apart. She is distraught and unfaithful. He is haggard and has lost his self respect. Their little boy Noé (Marin Orcand Tourrès), curses and leaves the cap off the toothpaste tube. But they live in the middle of Paris, in a spacious apartment whose colors delicately harmonize. A bemused sadness should fill one as one walks out of the cinema.

It is the present day. Damien (Jean-Pierre Bacri), a professor of Chinese civilization at a high level business school, lives with his longtime companion Iva (Kristin Scott Thomas), a theater director, and Noé. The love has gone out of their relationship, lost in dull routine. One day, Iva persuades Damien to intercede with his distant father Sébastien (Claude Rich), a high level official with the Council of State, to save an undocumented foreign resident of mixed Balkan origins called Zorica (AKA Aurore, Isabelle Carré) from possible arrest or deportation that could happen now she's divorced from her French husband. This risky mission plunges Damien into a series of events that turn his life upside down. So the theme of Pascal Bonitzer's new film is stated. At the center of every scene is Jean-Pierre Bacri, an actor who wears exhaustion and despair like an Armani suit. Look at him and the glamorous ever-beautiful aging woman who is Kristin Scott Thomas and you'll see the still-strong preference of traditional French cinema that the women be lovely and the men hideous. The key relationship is the fanciful one between Damien and Aurore, who grew up in France and looks and sounds French (and is French, since the actress is).

To begin with, Antoine (Arthur Igual), the handsome young lead in her new play, makes a pass at Iva in a car. Guess where that leads. Sébastien is a pig, cutting Damien off at every turn. Worse, he turns out to be gay, as revealed by his saccharine interactions with the Japanese waiter, Satoshi (Masahiro Kashiwagi). If you remember anything from this film it will be the bland, smiling stonewalling of Sébastien: Claude Rich, along with Scott Thomas and Bacri, is a French cinematic monument.

Damien has a small group of cronies who hang out at a local bar and play chess. When one of them, Lobatch (Jackie Berroyer) turns suicidal Damien is the one who goes to see him and take away the pistol he's nursing.

Damien's strength is that he keeps on and that, after a lot of lying, he tells the truth -- to Aurore herself -- about his failure to guarantee her security in France. In the end it doesn't matter. Damien is pursued by his own good fortune. The "Hortense" of the title (Philippe Duclos) is the VIP whom Sébastien refuses to approach about Aurore. In the event, Damien, slowly becoming a mensch after all, goes to Hortense by himself. He, like the head of the police station when Damien gets arrested to protect Aurore, defers to Damien because of his expertise about China -- the place where world power is going. This is as if to say all this French stuff is irrelevant. But it still matters.

But does it matter? Does this film matter? It does if you admire what one critic, for the weekly Positif, called "comfortable, Parisian, leftist French comedy." And this is a rather special genre, one found, of course, only in France. The main faces may be familiar, but they provide nothing but class all the way. Some of these people one would enjoy watching read from a telephone book. Bonitzer has been a Rivette, Ruiz and Téchiné collaborator, mostly in the writing category, as well as a former critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, but this is his seventh film as a director. Agnès de Sacy is the cowriter.

Cherchez Hortense, 101 mins., debuted at Venice out of competition 31 August 2012. It opened in in France in September 2012 (Allociné press rating 3.5). Screened for this review as part of Film Comment Selects at Lincoln Center where it showed 18 and 25 February 2014.

[Chris Knipp]

ANA LILY AMIRPOUR: A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (2013)--ND/NF


SHIELA VAND IN A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

A self-conscious vampire movie, in Farsi

In striking black and white, the American-based Iranian director Ana Lily Amirpour's debut future is an unusual vampire picture heavy on the downbeat hipster atmosphere. This got plenty of favorable mentions and some raves when it debuted at Sundance 2014. However it is really a very modest beginning, though a stylish one, and it surely is overshadowed by Jim Jarmusch's lush, atmospheric, beautiful (if ultimately uninvolving) Last Lovers on Earth. To me A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night seemed somewhat like a music video without the music, or an introduction that dragged on too long. The molasses-in-January movement in scenes may seem hypnotic, or just dragged-out. Much sympathy for the genre twisting is a prerequisite for appreciation.

The film does have faith in its convictions, never fails to compose its shots carefully, and makes the most of its key characters and props, notably a beautiful vintage Ford Thunderbird and a cat. In keeping with the early Sixties look the boy interest, Arash (Arash Marandi), owner of the car, wears wavy dark hair, jeans and a tight white T shirt. The car is taken away by evil tattooed drug dealer Saeed (Dominic Rains) to pay for product supplied to the boy's addict father Hossein (Marshall Manesh).

The Girl (Sheila Vand), the lonely street-wandering, skateboard-riding, hijab wearing vampire or Nosferata of Bad City, a location Guy Lodge in Variety called "an imaginary Iranian underworld" (there might be livelier real ones), is destined to take care of Saeed posthaste. He makes the mistake of assuming he can abuse her as he does the aging prostitute (Mozhan Marno) whom he occasionally pimps out on the dark empty streets. Subsequently The Girl and Arash develop a love interest -- thus as in the Twilight series constituting a mixed normal and undead couple whose future is uncertain. Their tender relationship is shown coming into being when out in the darkness instead of baring her teeth at Arash, The Girl lets him pierce her ears so she can wear earrings he has given her -- possibly an oddly traditional female, passive scene given the vampire girl's previous gestures for women's rights.

Unlike Let the Right One In, which Lodge mentions as a vampire movie that has more mainstream potential (and did get a decent Hollywood remake), this new film doesn't cross over from its genre mashup ponderousness, which mixes self-conscious mood with feminism, David Lynch, and spaghetti Westerns. It seems sometimes about to launch into a schtick out of early Jarmusch at some points, and its use of loud musical transitions could owe something to Tarantino; except that there is not enough use made of dialogue for that, and all the talk is, besides, in Farsi.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is an odd mixture culturally and geographically. It is set in Tehran, its dialogue is in the language of that country and it clearly has an interest in the changing status of women there. But it was shot in California, with cramped interiors and cold industrial streets and an electrical power station that do not look at all like Iran. Doubtless Amirppour shows courage and independence in welding together such a unique mixture and getting it shown at Sundance, and the number of major publications that have published favorable reviews indicates that we'll hear from her again. Part of her promise is indicated by her ability to put together a polished looking and sounding package marked by the striking cinematography of Lyle Vincent and sound design by Jay Nierenberg that's precise and enjoyable.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night 107 mins., debuted in the Next series at Sundance January 2014. It was screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, New Directors/New Films, scheduled there for Wednesday, March 19, 7:00pm & 8:00pm at MoM. Elijah Wood is a producer.

[Chris Knipp]

HUBERT SAUPER: WE COME AS FRIENDS (2014)--ND/NF



Sauper looks at new variations on colonization and exploitation in South Sudan

We Come As Friends, Hubert Sauper's followup to his stunning, controversial, Oscar-nominated 2004 documentary Darwin's Nightmare about Tanzania, is deceptive. It seems casual and disorganized, rambling from Chinese to Americans to UN peacekeepers to Christian missionaries from Texas. It makes Sauper look like a harmless crank, coming from France and traveling around Sudan in a small homemade airplane that is little more than a tin can with an outboard motor. He talks to no high level officials or experts, and consults, among others, some pretty scruffy and uneducated locals. But all this hides how searching this films is. Focusing this time on a wider topic than the pollution of a like -- the split-up of Sudan and the various colonizers and exploiters of the new South Sudan -- Sauper considers this new upbeat, yet by implication dark, development as a case study in what has been happening to Africa since the white man came there centuries ago. At the end of We Came As Friends one feels exhausted. The plane and Sauper's vivid, artful photo images make his scenes feel other worldly. When we hear Africans say the Americans have colonized the moon we realize this is, for them, and now for us, a nightmare dream, We Come As Friends a message on a postcard from hell -- one it took the filmmaker six years to write. And the plane isn't a wild gesture, except for signaling the lengths the Austrian-born, French-resident Sauper goes to to make his films. He built it "to be able to land on small fields in military-controlled areas where" he "never would have been able to go by invitation," he has explained.

There are men in the new Christian South Sudan who fought the Muslim Arabs in the north for thirty years, and now they are "leasing" huge tracts of land for a pittance, or nothing, for 99 years to outside countries who come to exploit their mineral wealth, and they think they are getting a good deal. Exploitation of resources by corporate entities at the expense of the local inhabitants happens in Europe and the United States, but it seems cruder and easier here. A blatant example is the Chinese who've come to take out oil. Their methods are poisoning the water for the locals. That happens in the US, but in South Sudan, the Chinese are total outsiders, indifferent to Africans. Sauper got candid talk from the Chinese. They say environmental protection is the local people's responsibility: they blame the victims.

It is true that this film is a little too long; if unnecessary repetitions were trimmed it could be 15 or 20 minutes shorter. But some situations are so devastating that it's important not only to learn a lot, but to feel nauseated by what one learns. And again, as in Darwin's Nightmare, this is an individual and impressionistic film that makes no claim to be "objective." This is the second in a planned trilogy that began with Darwin’s Nightmare. Each of these is a worthy starting point for controversy, debate, and study. This is a film to be studied, analyzed, rebuffed, explained. And he plans his third film in the trilogy will be an explanation, justification, and followup on Darwin's Nightmare and all the controversy and opposition from the Tasmanian government it gave rise to.

We Come As Friends, 110 mins., which is in English, Chinese, Arabic, Ma’di, and Toposa with English subtitles, debuted at Sundance, where it won the Special Jury Prize in World Documentary. In Feb. 2014 it was at the Berlinale, where it won the Peace Film Award. It was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films series (March 2014).
Thursday, March 20, 6:15pm – MoMA
Saturday, March 22, 3:45pm – FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

BENEDICKT ERLINGSSON: OF HORSES AND MEN (2013)--ND/NF


KJARTAN RAGNARSSON AND SIGRIDUR MARIA EGILSDOTTIR IN OF HORSES AND MEN

Horses and woes in an Icelandic valley

Of Horses and Men is a movie rooted in a special place and makes much good use of the people and the horses found there. And so it's a feature that has a strong documentary element. But like others of this genre, it also has elements that are purely fanciful. We may doubt that a Latin American (Juan Camillo Roman Estrada) got lost here in a snow storm and saved himself by killing his short-legged local horse, gutting it, and hiding inside it till he was found desperate but alive the next day. It seems rather unlikely what happens to the middle-aged farmer Kolbeinn (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson). Courting a respectable horse-owning lady called Solveing (Charlotte Bøving), he is about to leave her dressed in fine riding clothes when she is mortified to see one of her young stallions break loose from a fence and mount Kolbein's pretty young white mare while he he is mounted on her about to ride away.

There are several other events involving the local horses that are equally vivid, equally dire, and also slightly implausible, though each of these incidents doubtless brings in aspects of local life, such as a tendency to drunkenness and disputes over fences and the freedom to traverse public spaces, not to mention great skill at wrangling horses. Here and there a death occurs as a result of these adventures, or mishaps. And the gathering of the community in a small wood church for the farewell, with a few words spoken about the deceased, could be from a film by Bergman, but is equally rooted in all traditional Nordic life.

Each incident involves a horse, and begins with the camera peering into its eye and finding the main character of the tale reflected there. The film doesn't seek to penetrate into the mind of horses. It does show the close integration of these people's lives with their horses.

Bright exterior light and a sense of wide open space contribute to the feel of this film, in which nature itself is a stage. A certain staged artificiality is indicated at the very outset when Erlingsson archly and insistently shows us neighbors on far-flung sides of the valley viewing events with binoculars to see Kolbeinn trot smartly on his white mare to visit Solveing. Also stagy and a strong hint of Erlingsson's background in making short films are the vivid use of tableaux and the minimalism of the dialogue. The series of incidents shows that this is, basically, a set of related short films loosely linked together by location and the horses. Having everything happen with a horse is a little gimmicky, though, and doesn't truly unify the narrative in human terms. This segmented, and simplistic, overlying aspect of Of Horses and Men keeps it from being anything but a novelty as a feature film, however arresting and at several points shocking it may be. Nonetheless Erlingsson has conceived and executed each segment with the mind and eye of a fine storyteller, worthy of a Nordic Boccaccio. In its special way this is still a good film, exhibiting remarkable ingenuity in the staging, good acting, and striking use of locations. But it remains a film with oddities and limitations that withhold if from developing mainstream potential.

Of Horses and Men/Hross í oss 80 mins., in Icelandic, Swedish, Spanish, Russian, and English with English subtitles, debuted at San Sebastián in September 2013 after an August Icelandic release. It has won a number of nominations and some awards, notably Best Director at Tokyo, Best New Director at San Sebastián, and two FIPRESCI Awards elsewhere. It is the director's feature debut and was Iceland’s 2014 Oscar submission. It was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films series in March 2014. Showings at ND/NF: Saturday, March 22, 6:15pm – MoMA
Monday, March 24, 6:30pm - FSLC.

[Chris Knipp]

GILLES DEROO, MARIANNE PISTONE: MOUTON/SHEEP (2013)--ND/NF


DAVID MÉRABET IN MOUTON

The randomness of life, as seen in the Norman fishing town of Courseulles-sur-Mer

An experimental film that may be experimental enough to gain cult status but may gain indifference from many viewers uses documentary realism and minimal camera movements to focus on one character and then more than half-way through to switch away from him to minor characters.

We start with Mouton, real name Aurelien (David Merabet), 17, who is granted legally independent status from his alcoholic mother (seen unwillingly signing off on this in the opening scene) and he goes to live at the inn and seaside restaurant where he's a prep chef, which includes several other very young kitchen workers. The scenes, camera always a a distance, light natural, focus on kitchen routine till Audrey (Audrey Clement), a young woman, comes to be a waitress and almost immediately becomes Mouton's girlfriend. Mouton doesn't talk much. He smiles a lot. The camera shows him and Audrey undressing to have sex, and zeroes in on him sucking her nipple. It's that kind of camera.

The film creates the rhythm of the almost purely and mindlessly physical life of a worker who enjoys work, meals, sex, cigarette breaks. He is excited about sharing a big local event with Audrey, the Feast of St Anne. But when it comes, with the long day on the pier dancing, making out, and eating seafood dishes, a man who has made a pass at Audrey and been rejected suddenly attacks Mouton with a power saw and cuts his arm. He looks a goner, but now a voiceover comes in to tell us he was saved, but lost his arm. His career as a kitchen worker is over. He disappears from the film.

Later there is a trial, its final decision shown with the camera high up, and the attacker is sentenced to ten years. But Mouton has wanted life or more, and other friends and family declare this a travesty. Mouton has gone away to live with an uncle in another town. Audrey marries another guy and in a year has a baby. She writes Mouton a short note about her life now ending "I will always remember you." A scene shows two twin brothers (Emmanuel and Sebastien Legrand) using a prostitute in a van. The originally restrained, now nosey camera looks long at her crotch. Other former associates of Mouton get coverage. Mimi (Michael Mormentyn) works at a dog kennel. His wife is Louise (Cindy Dumont).

And then it ends. This style here oscillates between a keen affirmation of life and the homme moyen sensuel, such as one gets in Henry Green's Living, and a kind of Seventies kitchen sink brutality of realism, symbolized by the group of male friends who come up and spit into Mouton's face, apparently a gesture of friendship or initiation, and his sudden maiming and the prostitutes's hairy crotch. There are times when, certainly, it is difficult to tell the people in the film from what they must be in real life. For example, David Merabet does appear to be a non-actor who does prep work at a seafood restaurant. There are funny, ultra-natural scenes. But the effect overall, for this viewer, was offputting and alienating, at least once Mouton had lost his arm and disappeared from the film. One retains, however, a sense of the small town, seen off-season, and the filmmakers have stayed close to their milieu and people, certainly. But this kind of naturalism risks seeming condescending toward its subjects. And the brutal gesture eliminating Mouton from the story seems crude and arbitrary beyond reason.

Mouton/Sheep, 100 mins., shot in 16 mm, won two prizes at Locarno 2013. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films, 2014. Viewing times Thursday, March 20, 9:00pm – MoMA; Saturday, March 22, 6:30pm – FSLC