New York Film Festival 2015

[Chris Knipp]

TODD HAYNES: CAROL (2015)


ROONEY MARA IN CAROL

Glamorous prison of conventionality

Carol, Todd Haynes' adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's early novel The Price of Salt, is a swoon. Despite its edge of late Forties-early Fifties homophobia and otherwise rigid convention, the movie is rapturously beautiful, beginning with Highsmiith's declared inspiration, a glamorous blonde lady in a fur coat appearing in a department store just before Christmas who meets a young clerk and they fall in love. Cate Blanchett appears to Rooney Mara like a dream. She has a slightly fuzzy glow about her like old Hollywood publicity portraits. Haynes revels in period costume, set, and those invaluable vintage cars. (It looks as if everybody drives a Packard, a Cadillac, or a Hudson.) You need to fall right away under the aesthetic spell of the movie's lovely images (they are a combination of splendid mise-en-scène and the Super-16 film magic of Ed Lachman). If you don't, watching Carol will be no fun at all. It will be like plodding through marshmallow, or honey. It is appropriate that in the story Carol's young beloved is an aspiring photographer. We are aware of photographic images from first to last. There are some hazy street images that could have been the early color work of Saul Leiter.

When Carol and Therese run away together to motels like Lolita and Humbert Humbert one is reminded of the Italian countess cited by Salvador Dalí in his Secret Life eating ice cream, when it had first been invented, who declared that if only it were a sin it would be perfect. Carol (Blanchett) loses custody of her little girl because Harge (Kyle Chandler) proves she is involved in unnatural behavior. This is a time when same-sex relations were shrouded in mystery and unknowing and also had the dangerous excitement of being forbidden. Gay artists may be occasionally allowed the wicked nostalgia of reveling in that lost naughtiness. This is not the dangerous transgression of Brokeback Mountain but a rich lady and an essentially unattached young woman (her tie to boyfriend Jake Lacy is frangible) in the sophisticated world of New York city.

Let us qualify the statement that Carol was Highsmith's first novel by pointing out that it was published at first under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. It is also not like most of her other fiction, which generally concerns evildoing. But then, remember the countess. At this time, the love of Carol and Therese could be seen as a crime, and they are being followed by a detective, from whom they escape after he catches up with them, like something Tom Ripley would do. But it's not easy or necessary to connect this novel to Highsmith's other work. The connection is that Highsmith herself was a lesbian, and she was working in a department store like Therese when a woman in a fur coat came in, and she ran home and wrote out the scheme of the novel. For the way the rich lady's husband uses her lesbianism to skew the divorce in his favor Highsmoth drew on the experiences of her own former love, a Philadelphia socialite.

And voilà! You have the very simple setup on which an elaborate and wonderful edifice of teasing and expectation is built. The devil is in the details, the delays, as Therese and Carol navigate their way toward each other past convention, prohibition, and inexperience. Blanchett and Mara work wonders together. Both are terrific, though only Mara got the acting prize at Cannes. This is a wold of underplaying, where atmosphere allows period to bloom so the touch of a hand brings a frisson and Carol rushes to put on her shoes when Harge appears and finds her with Therese -- because removed shoes with a guest is négligé. It is nearly an hour of unhurried screen time before that first kiss. This too like the beauty of Ed Lachman's images you must tune into, or you are lost and instead of swooning, will yawn.

As for the images, Mike D'Angelo declares in his Dissolve Cannes review that the "vivid retro look" can be clearly distinguished from both the "Technicolor lushness" of his other period same sex study Far From Heaven, and the "drab claustrophobia" of his Mildred Pierce miniseries, all shot by Ed Lachman. The Carol images are the most unabashedly exquisite as the film is the most celebratory. Carol doesn't really suffer. Though "just when things couldnt be worse" she runs out of cigarettes. That's as bad as it gets. She adores her daughter, and yet she is willing to give her up if necessary. This may be essentially a "problem" picture like Far from Heaven, but I don't have the same problems this time. Carol is unquestionably one of the best and most unique American films of the year and one of the most enjoyable. Its images, its lead performances, and the Carter Burwell music are to be savored.

Carol, 118 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015; about a dozen festival showings including Telluride and London. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival. US theatrical release date 20 Nov. 2015; UK, 27 Nov., France, 13 Jan. 2016. Weinstein Company release.

[Chris Knipp]

JAMES SOLOMAN: THE WITNESS (2015)


KITTY GENOVESE

Spotlight on Documentary

Obsessive investigation of a sister's death falls short of a sense of closure

Bill, younger brother of Kitty Genovese, a favorite of hers and sixteen when she died, is filmed in this documentary by writer-producer James Solomon, who covers Bill's tireless effort fifty years later to investigate the famous case of his sister's murder. On 13 March 1964 in Kew Gardens, Queens, below the Mowbray apartments, Kitty was robbed, raped, and stabbed to death with many watching and doing nothing, so a New York Times story said. The case became universal symbol of modern urban anomie, human coldness and indifference. Bill investigates this legend and exhaustively ferrets out details about the crime and Kitty herself in search of closure that proves elusive.

Solomon stays out of the picture, with Bill Genovese the narrator and protagonist, missing both legs (lost as a Marine in Vietnam) but vigorously active, contacting sources and visiting them. Bill's first question is whether the Times story was true. Were there really 38 witnesses who did nothing? Yes and no, and maybe not. It is not clear that it happened that way. Very few saw anything, others only heard, and some may not have understood what the sounds meant. Some apparently did do something, called the police, more than one, at least according to one interviewed witness. But if so, why was she not saved? The auditory witnesses seem to ahve been confused by the the fact that the perpetrator, Winston Moseley, fled the scene for twenty minutes or so and then returned to finish off his victim.

A surprise discovery is that Kitty did not die alone: a woman friend (heard from near the end) rushed down to her and Kitty died in her arms. There was nothing of this in news stories or police reports.

Next comes the investigation of Kitty herself. Her death had clouded a sense of her life. It's said that she was not a barmaid as first reported, but a bar manager. She sometimes handled illegal betting in the bar, and it turns out the photo shown above was a police mug shot from a time when she was arrested for this activity. She was smart, a maverick who often cut class in high school, yet popular and a leader of the pack. We see numerous film clips of her, a lean, lively life of the party who drove a red FIAT. Bright though she was she chose not to go to college. When the family moved to Connecticut to be in a safer place she chose to stay in NYC. Perhaps an explanation is that -- a surprise to Bill Genovese, perhaps to all her family -- it turns out that though briefly married, Kitty was a lesbian. Her supposed roommate in the Mowbray apartment was her lover (also heard from). Her sexuality may have had much to do with her choosing to remain in the freer atmosphere of the big city where she could live with her girlfriend.

Later Bill/Solomon delve deeply into press coverage as well as later TV reexaminations of the murder case, revealing that author of the original front page Times story consciously overstated the indifference of witnesses to make a better story. The film is excellent in the thoroughness of its investigation of this, with numerous interviews, including one with the late Mike Wallace.

Finally we learn about Winston Moseley, the diminutive light-skinned black man who confessed to this and another murder, and also later escaped from prison, committed more crimes, and was caught. He was bright, with an IQ of 130, and eventually got a correspondence degree in sociology. Prosecutors and lawmen are interviewed. The word for Moseley's personality is "ice." He is clearly a sociopath who might, if he'd remained at large, have turned into a serial killer. Apart from his escape he has remained in prison for fifty years and every parole application has been denied. Bill meets with one of his sons, a man of the cloth, in compensation, perhaps, who nonetheless appears to believe false justifications for his father's crime. The rapist-murderer himself unfortunately refuses to meet with Bill. But later he sends him a preposterous letter inventing a story according to which a mafia gangster perpetrated the crime in his presence. It's a sad way for things to end, with lying and delusion, and at this point I began to wonder if The Witness provides enlightenment or only confusion.

All this aside, the Kitty Genovese story remains a tenacious modern myth of human indifference, even if it's a distortion of the facts it was originally based on. James Solomon and Bill Genovese's film represents an impressively thorough investigation. Alas, it does not leave one feeling enlightened about the crime or the legend it credated. There are many versions of the Kitty Genovese story in fiction, film and TV, and some are alluded to in this film. One I recently reviewed was Lucas Belvaux's 2012 feature film 38 Témoins ("38 Witnesses"), from a French novel, starring Yvan Attal, and focused on the subsequent tormenting sense of guilt felt by one of the witnesses to a parallel scene of murder and indifference set in Le Havre. This film is not satisfying either, but it represents an important topic that The Witness, despite its title, doesn't provide access to: the guilt the witnesses may have felt in Kew Gardens when they learned a horrible crime had happened that they might have stopped.

Solomon's film is an interesting portrait of a family member's tireless investigation of his sister's legendary death. At one point I was thinking it might turn out to be one of the best documentaries of the year, perhaps even comparable to Nathaniel Kahn's extraordinary investigation of his father, the great architect but very flawed father Louis Kahn in the 2003 film My Architect. But The Witness, though about a worthy topic, leaves us, like Bill Genovese, without ultimate closure. Its over-thoroughness becomes under-revealing. It lacks My Architect's emotional rewards and beautiful shape. The investigation itself is at fault, but also the vagueness of Solomon's role.

The Witness, 96 mins., debuted at the 2015 New York Film Festival (6 Oct.) as part of the sidebar Spotlight on Documentary series. A Submarine release. It is to open in NYC 3 June 2016. At Roxie Center, San Francisco 29 July 2016.

[Chris Knipp]

LAURIE ANDERSON: HEART OF A DOG (2015)


LOLABELLE IN HEART OF A DOG

Special Events

A good-natured mélange of thoughts, anecdotes and whimsy

Dogs have clearly become an avant-gardist’s best friend. First Jean-Luc Godard delivered a funny 3D valentine to a pooch named Roxy Mieville in Goodbye to Language, and now the New York-based musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson has woven a tide of personal stories, insights and visual-musical riffs into a more accessible but no less singular consideration of the species in Heart of a Dog. While this alternately goofy, serious, lyrical and beguiling cine-essay serves primarily as a loving tribute to the memory of Anderson’s rat terrier, Lolabelle, its roving, free-associative structure brings together all manner of richly eccentric musings on the evasions of memory, the limitations of language and storytelling, the strangeness of life in a post-9/11 surveillance state, and the difficulty and necessity of coming to terms with death.--Justin Chang, Variety

I can't add much to what Justin Chang said about this genial, meandering film. It partakes of the spirit of Laurie Anderson's performances that go back to the early Seventies. This one is dedicated to the memory of her husband Lou Reed who died in October 2013 at the age of 71 -- though there is not much of or about Lou Reed in Heart of a Dog. Most of this film is in the first person, and dominated by Anderson's voice, which almost never lets up. An interlude of silence, a grove of winter trees with light snow falling, is one of the most memorable parts of the film.

From her photos and citations of neighbors we learn Anderson lived on West Eleventh Street, in the same block as Julian Schnabel's pink "Palazzo del Popolo" -- within breathing distance of the World Trade Center and, she tells, confronted with a roadway and land along the West River near her street covered with white dust. The two overriding themes of Heart of a Dog are 9/11 (and its aftermath) and her dog, with some philosophizing and several digressions to talk about major events in her early life. Notable among these is a long period spent in hospital with a broken back after jumping off a diving board and hitting the pool's cement edge, and the time when when she took two little brothers out on a lake in winter and they fell through the ice and she saved them.

Lolabelle, Laurie's rat terrier, turns out, pushed by the artist-filmmaker's whimsy, to have surprising talents. Though she may have been pushed to reveal them, the dog learns to "make art" and "play" the piano. Seeking to escape 9/11 paranoia, Anderson took Lolabella on a trip to Northern California. She tells us rat terriers are said to be capable of mastering 500 words, and she aimed to discover "which words they were." But this project she abandoned in favor of simply enjoying the beauties of the hills and coast.

The music is powerful, though for complexity and richness of images Godard's Goodbye to Language has the edge. Anderson's film is "more accessible" but also less complex, less intellectually challenging. Her observations, sometimes relying on her Buddhist teacher, are on the obvious slide. There is a reminiscence of the unique, short-lived artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who was a friend, and died at only 35. She tells how he invited his friends to the hospital in his last days and read to them. This is a good-natured work that it's impossible to dislike.

Heart of a Dog, 75 mins., debuted at Telluride. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival where it was presented as a Special Event. Anderson designed this year's New York Film Festival poster. A US theatrical release of the film begins in NYC 19 Oct. 2015 (Film Forum).

[Chris Knipp]

REBECCA MILER: MAGGIE'S PLAN (2015)


GRETA GERWIG AND ETHAN HAWKE IN MAGGIE'S PLAN

The independent doormat

Rebecca Miller's sort-of rom-com Maggie's Plan is a bit too into itself and its Manhattan settings, but it has some new things to offer. Miller's turning from drama to comedy. "Vikings" star and former Calvin Klein underwear god Travis Fimmel as a pickle entrepreneur sperm donor (to Grata Gerwig's character). Tragic drama queen Julianne Moore showing how ridiculous and funny she can be as a Danish professor married to Ethan Hawke. (She could as well be Icelandic, with her weird accent and her outfits that might have be on loan from Björk, but that's the point: she's from outer space.) Ethan Hawke for the first time working with a woman director -- and with three women, essentially, since Maggie's Plan is dominated by Georgette (Moore) and Maggie (Gerwig), whom his character, John, gets tossed back and forth between.

The tossing is what bothers me, because Maggie's Plan -- which is as intentionally messy in plot as Maggie herself, a self-reliant, centered young woman with a Quaker background, is organized -- does what too many American rom-coms do today. It loses all sense of narrative structure. And then again, that it winds up where it started out is quite intentional too.

The premise is simple and clear enough. Maggie, wanting to have a child but aware she can't seem to stay with one man more than six months (which, by the way, doesn't quite fit the stable, organized Quaker), looks for a sperm donor (the long-bearded Fimmel). And it's good she calls on a Viking, because all this happens in New York in wintertime -- with a side trip to Quebec for an academic conference. But then she meets John in Washington Square and winds up agreeing to read the manuscript of his novel. She is an administrator at the New School where he is a hottie new teacher. And one thing leads to another, with John's iffy marriage to Georgette derailed by his love affair with Maggie, who falls in love with him as well.

Georgette is an absurdly self-centered academic star herself. The arcane academic specialties of this couple are tossed out for laughs, but they went over my head. ( Something about anthorpology and commodities, for John.) John and Georgette have a couple of noisy, bratty little darlings and an older, grown-up girl who can talk. Wallace Shawn has a one-line appearance, and Bill Hader, who's in touch with his feminine side and delivers lines well, is that rom-com staple, Maggie's longtime pal, with advice.

Jump ahead three years. John and Maggie are married and have their own little girl (what happened to the pickle entrepreneur's Viking's sperm? It got dumped for an early meeting with John). Maggie is so good at organizing things and caring for the three kids, both Georgette and John can pursue their academic work and John can continue with his novel -- except that the novel isn't getting anywhere. And life with Maggie is too perfect. Maggie realizes that John needed to deal with the craziness and self-absorption of Georgette. It kept him from being too absorbed in his work or his novel. We can't really believe in the brilliance of Georgette (only her oddity) or of John, they're just givens. John doesn't sound bright to me. He uses "fuck" a lot, like any ordinary dude.

So Maggie's Plan, the main one, is to get John back with Georgette. And so it turns out that the independent young woman played by Gerwig here is the perfect doormat. As the only stable, responsible partner, that's the role she winds up playing.

I did not find any of this believable, or engaging. Julianne Moore is droll, and Greta Gerwig is, as usual, smooth and natural. Ethan Hawke is glib, but one feels no emotion. I thought of that famous early scene for Hawke in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams struggles to make his young preppie character learn to emote. It seems he has lost the shyness of that young Hawke but still can't emote. Well over half the movie is devoted to talking about getting Georgette and John back together again. It gets beyond tiresome. But the Lower Manhattan atmosphere and in-jokey stuff about academe make this an original treatment of the kind of confusion of relationships that might be dealt with in a more conventional, less into-itself comedy, like the current Sleeping with Other People. This may be, as they're saying, Rebecca Miller's most successful, widely appealing film, but I liked her less successful ones. This is based on an unpublished novel. Hmmm. . .

Maggie's Plan a longish 96 mins., debuted at Toronto, where Miller apologized for its appearing without a distributor (but isn't that what festivals are for, to find them?). It was also part of the 2015 New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. The inclusion in the NYFF Main Slate is explicable given its family resemblance to Noah Baumbach's work and inclusion of Baumbach's girlfriend, together with lots of very natural photography of New York whose realistic color contrasted, not unappealingly, with the gloriously dreamlike Ed Lachman Gotham images of another, much better NYFF 2015 film, Todd Haynes's Carol. Maggie has been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics.

(Release date 20 May 2016. Metacritic rating a fawning, deluded 75%.)

[Chris Knipp]

CORNELIU PORUMBOIU: THE TREASURE/COMOARA (2015)


TOMA CUZIN, CORNELIU COZMEI AND ADRIAN PURCARESCU IN THE TREASURE

Digging, finally finding and then (partly) giving away

In the Romanian director Cornelieu Porumboiu's deadpan new film, Adrian (Adrian Purcarescu), who's lost his publishing business and is badly behind in his mortgage payments, lures his neighbor Costi (Toma Cuzin), a real estate worker who's having trouble paying his bills too, into a venture to find treasure he suspects is hidden on inherited property. At first Adrian just says he is strapped for cash and asks to borrow 800 euros. When Costi says no, Adrian explains about the treasure and offers to go halves on whatever they find if he'll put up the money. It's needed for a metal detector. Apparently you can't just buy one in Romania; you have to hire a specialist. To round up the cash, Costi must persuade his wife (Cristina Toma).

"This idea might have made for an amusing half-hour short," Mike D'Anelo commented from Cannes, where The Treasure debuted; " at 89 minutes, it feels extremely shaggy-dog." Indeed, a lot of screen time is devoted to watching two men dig a hole in a garden, with a pretty anticlimactic result. The ending, a sort of punchline, like the finale of Porumboiu's Police, Adjective (NYFF 2009), is perhaps just more peculiar (and vaguely symbolic) than shaggy-dog, but indeed the film feels dragged-out, a long trek to a small payoff.

Like Police, Adjective this new effort from Porumboiu, who made the more self-consciously modernistic When Evening Falls on Bucharest two years ago (NYFF 2013), is a curious combination of the doggedly realistic and the didactic. This time, Porumboliu chooses to scrub out the local color of Police, Adjective, posing characters in front of blank walls or bare ground for his Asian-style static middle-distance shots. The men do dig in real dirt, though, and they have to go pretty deep. As it dragged on, I wondered if the actors were actually doing this digging.

One fellow viewer thought the whole film was a joke; I could not see that, but there is some humor about a boss who insists Cristi must be cheating on his wife because he lies about his arrangements for the metal detector. After the treasure is found -- its exact nature a bit of a surprise, its cashing in full of bureaucratic detail, Costi, who's been reading Robin Hood to his little boy (Nicodim Toma), gives some of his cut away to children in the form of handfuls of valuable jewelry. This odd behavior seems inspired by his son's expectations from Robin Hood and the word "treasure." Much is made of the fact that under remnants of communist law, any valuables found must be shown to police and if determined to be part of the "national heritage," only a third goes to the finders.

When it gets late and the digging goes deeper and deeper with no results and Adrian and Costi doubt that Cornel, the metal detector specialist, knows what he's doing, the three start to quarrel. It's beginning to look as if things might turn homicidal, as in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. No such luck. Porumboliu is too humorless and deadpan for that -- and he is moving on, laboriously, to his Robin Hood finale. What it means is anyone's guess. A viewer of Serbo-Croatian origin with whom I spoke after the screening thought it too was a reference to communism -- a longing, perhaps, for less selfish days. The film's obviously opens with a focus on today's economic woes.

There are some ideas hovering around here somewhere, but The Treasure winds up as yet another variation on the minimalist current Romanian filmmaking style, short on entertainment and not long on sense.

The Treasure/Comoara, 89 mins., debuted in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes May 2015, winning the Certain Talent prize; also shown at well over a dozen other international festivals. Screened for this review as part of the Main Slate of the 2015 New York Film Festival.

[Chris Knipp]

HONG SANG-SOO: RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN (2015)


KIM MINHEE AND JUNG JAEYOUNG IN RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN (FIRST MEETING)

He said, she said? Or she said, he said?

Right Now, Wrong Then, simpler in plot than some of Hong Sang-soo's earlier films, begins with his standard situation of an art film director, an ironic version of himself, not making movies but on a professional jaunt and doing some drinking and womanizing (or flirting, anyway). Ham Chunsu (Jung Jaeyoung, of Hong's 2013 Our Sunhi) has come to Suwon, south of Seoul, to attend a special screening of one of his films and answer questions afterwards. He's a day early. Flirtation and drinking take precedence; the film screening comes in second.

Going to a peaceful pavilion , the historic "Blessing Hall" palace, Ham spots a beautiful young woman, Yoon Heejung (Kim Minhee), sipping banana water. He is immediately attracted and invites her for coffee. She appreciates his attention, thrilled to learn who he is, even though she's never actually seen any of his movies. She's a fledgling artist, and invites Ham to her studio, and then to a cafe where they both get drunk. She remembers she's got a date to spend the evening with a woman she knows who runs a restaurant. They both go there, and get drunker. The next day, the hungover Ham meets the audience at the screening.

More and more Hong is into rhythmic repetition, sometimes to surreal effect, but he varies the forms this repetition takes every time. In his 2011 The Day He Arrives, for instance, which has similar bar scenes, the director protagonist, Seong-jun (Yu Jun-sang), keeps running into the same situations and the same people. In that film, the parallelisms are overlapping. In the 2009 Like You Know It All (FCS 2010) the film is divided into two parts twelve days apart, where similar things happen.

Right Now, Wrong Then resembles Like You Know It All in being divided into equal two halves, with the movie titles coming in the middle to divide them. But this time they are flat-out alternative versions of the same sequence of events I've outlined above. Both versions begin very similarly in the pavilion where Ham and Heejung first meet; then things develop differently. In the first version, Han praises Heejung's painting, but in the second he is more critical. In the first version there is a man at the restaurant who is only seen outside in the second version. In the second version, the drunken Ham takes all his clothes off for two socked strangers at the restaurant; Heejung only learns of this when Ham is with her near her house. She laughs and excuses it and kisses him, saying she will go home and greet her mother and let her go to sleep, then sneak out to spend more time with him, though she never does, and it's cold so he leaves. In the first version, hardly anyone turns up for the next day's screening, and the moderator is, in Ham's vehemently expressed view later, a conceited creep (an idea that has come in earlier films). Ham, still drunk from the night before, gives a wild speech and stomps out. In the second version, the screening is well attended and goes well and people express admiration and gratitude to him outside afterward.

With Nobody's Daughter Haewon (NYFF 2013) Hong presented his story from a woman's point of view. In Right Now, Wrong Then, he may be presenting first the man's then the woman's memory of events -- though which one is which may be debatable, and an irate young French woman with a feminist bent after the NYFF screening complained that this new film is just the celebration of a womanizer. Well, that Han has the repetition of a womanizer is brought up in both the first and second versions of events; on the other hand, unlike some of Hong's films, no sex takes place and Ham's relationship with Heejung seems quite chaste, his declaration that he would like to marry her rather sweet.

Mike D'Angelo says in his review of Hong's 2012 Another Country that "Hong tends to make the same movie over and over." True indeed, but always with variations, naturally. To compare and classify these repetitions with variation would require the kind of careful study an academic researcher might do, and a more precise memory than I can muster now. On Letterboxd D'Angelo calls this new film the "Hong diptych" he's "been waiting for," and calls it "Mulholland Dr. in reverse: grim reality first, wish-fulfillment fantasy second" -- but then he admits he doesn't quite know for sure if the two halves are her memory, and then his; or the reverse. Either way, he finds this one of Hong's most enjoyable films. He's right to want to see it again. There is much to puzzle over this time, though since this is the ninth Hong film in a New York Film Festival and I've seen one or two of his films elsewhere, it's getting harder for me to remember all the different parallel and overlapping story lines. Last year's NYFF Hong film, Hill of Freedom, includes (as I recall) recurrent sequences in a guest house with Ryô Kase that parallel the ones in the pavilion this time. There was a haunting sense of déjà vu even though what happens in the two spaces is quite different. A jaundiced viewer may say the director didn't have enough material and filled up two hours by running the same story twice. But I am a Hongista and am happy to observe the nuances. (See my Hill of Freedom review for links to all my other Hong Sang-soo reviews. Boyd Van Hoeij's enthusiastic review of the new film for Hollywood Reporter provides insights.)

Right Now, Wrong Then / 지금은맞고그때는틀리다, 121 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 2015, where it won three prizes, including the Golden Leopard (best picture) and Best Actor. Other festivals, including Vancouver, London and Toronto. It was screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival (US premiere, Oct. 9 & 10). US theatrical release beginning 24 June 2016.


KIM MINHEE AND JUNG JAEYOUNG IN RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN (IN THE RESTAURANT)

[Chris Knipp]

STEPHANE BRIZÉ: THE MEASURE OF A MAN/LA LOI DU MARCHÉ (2015)


VINCENT LINDON IN THE MEASURE OF A MAN

How much must one compromise to have a job?

This is an issue film and a character study that treads Dardenne brothers territory but without the final uplift. Judging by the other two Stéphane Brizé films I've seen, Not Here to be Loved, about an ultra-dour bailiff (Patrick Chesnais), and Mademoiselle Chambon (with Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain), concerning a lonely schoolteacher's brief romance with a married man, Brizé likes his stories a bit down at the mouth. And this is the flaw of his new film, with its rock-solid performance by the always impeccable Lindon that won him the best acting award at Cannes. The film is so unrelentingly grim it leaves you feeling more worn down than enlightened. But its lesson about the moral limits of compromise for a man seeking employment in a down economy is a dose of medicine that can't be pushed aside or forgotten.

Thierry (Vincent Lindon)is a laid off factory heavy equipment operator who's wasted 20 months taking training courses that turn out not to qualify him for a new job. And we see him being advised to take out life insurance; unable to get even near the market rate for his mobile home; informed in a Skype interview that his chances of being hired for a job like his old one are very slim, though not zero. The first part of the film shows us a series of bureaucratic humiliations patiently endured by Thierry, and we're introduced to his wife and son Matthieu, who has cerebral palsy (requiring expensive special care). After all the grim lessons of the heartless "Law of the market" (the French title) of the depressed economy, we suddenly see Thierry in a job unworthy of him -- suited up as a security guy in a big box store. Here the title's second meaning is applied: he must now impose the ruthless law of this market, an internal one, both cruel and kind, based on a surveillance-state system using dozens of cameras to monitor every inch of the store.

Except the first, a cocky young Arab guy who steals a charger for his smart phone, the shoplifters are poor and unfortunate, the climactic one an old man who has pocketed two pieces of red meat to add to his small bag of groceries. By store policy he goes free if he can pay for the meat, but he's spent the last centimes of his monthly dole on the small bag of groceries. But the unkindest cut is what follows: the store spies on its own employees, especially the cashiers, and one of them, a hard working 20-year employee with a drug addict son caught out for hoarding store coupons, commits suicide.

This movie not only lacks final uplift; it contains nothing that's remotely fun. Even dancing lessons Thierry takes are somehow mechanical and sad. But Vincent Lindon embodies his character so well we strongly feel his feelings in the scenes with shoplifters even though he's barely saying anything because another security staff person does most of the talking.

Most of the scenes throughout are improvised, and many feel like simulations, which give a somewhat artificial sense of realism. That's except for Lindon. He owns and fully inhabits every role he plays, even when cast wildly against type in Benoît Jacquot's 1998 School of Flesh as a prissy transvestite. I like what Mike D'Angelo said in his Cannes report on this film for The Dissolve, that Lindon "fairly oozes rugged masculinity." (Except maybe as a transvestite.). And to do that and seem authentic isn't so easy. So three cheers for Lindon's Cannes award . I'll go with Scott Foundas' Variety review: Lindon as Thierry gives us "a veritable master class in understated humanism." This performance is a nice parallel, as others have also said, for Marion Cotillard's in Two Days, One Night. But I'm reserving judgment on this film.

The Measure of a Man/La loi du marché, 93 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition, wining for Vincent Lindon the Best Actor award, arguably long overdo given the depth of Lindon's many performances. French release AlloCiné pres rating 3.8. A Kino Lorber release. North American Premiere. US theatrical release begins 15 Apr. 2016 NYC (Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Metrograph).