MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL Oct. 6-16, 2016

[Chris Knipp]

ROBERTO ANDÒ: THE CONFESSIONS/LE CONFESSIONI (2016)



Solemn message

Sicilian-born Roberto Andò directed a film a couple years ago with Toni Servillo, Viva la libertà/Long Live Freedom. This time the protean actor dons the robes of a monk, but the theme, as before, is modern politics, or rather, this time, economics. While Long Live Freedom's plot of a politician who escapes his problems using a nutty identical twin didn't really come off, it did give Servillo an opportunity to show off his thespian skills. He should not have so much to do this time, since he's a Carthusian, and they rarely speak. (See Philip Grüning's three-hour wordless documentary Into Great Silence.) This time the point is clearer, but at the risk of being heavy-handed. For some reason the monk, who's called Roberto Salus, is invited to a gathering of the IMF for a secret G8 summit by its leader, Daniel Roché (Daniel Auteuil), who wants to confess to him. The next ting we know, after a stiff ceremony for Roché's birthday and some very choppy, irritating editing, Roché is found asphyxiated with a plastic bag over his head. The bag belonged to Salus, and the movie turns into a kind of thriller with questions about whether it was really suicide. But the real revelation is that international bankers have cold hearts, and rich people are not very good for the masses of men. If this comes as a revelation, this well crafted but stilted and humorless film will appeal to you. Saus disobeys the Carthusians' vow of silence many times over, giving way to this film's overwhelming desire to lecture us. Also starring Connie Nielsen, Marie-Josée Croze, Pierfrancesco Favino, and Lambert Wilson.
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The Confessions/Le confessioni, 103 mins., opened in Italy in April 2016, and showed at Karlovy in July; scheduled for the Zurich, Vancouver, and Mill Valley film festivals in Sept. and Oct.

[Chris Knipp]

JEFF BARRY: OCCUPY, TEXAS (2016)


LORELEI LINKLATER IN OCCUPY, TEXAS

Rebellion reconsidered

Occupy, Texas teeters on the edge between defiance and responsibility as a young man steps gingerly back into middle-class life after a long fugue into rebellion. The story was penned by the star, Gene Gallerano, who injects much wit and slyness into his role, though the movie's energy and conviction gets blunted a bit along the way.

Beau Baker (Gallerano) is a twenty-something fetched back home in Texas from New York City homelessness to shoulder mentorship of his two young sisters after their parents have died in a car crash. It seems Beau walked away from a brilliant performance in school and likely success as a lawyer seven years ago to give up chinos and polo shirts, dress hippie, and flee Texas. After some involvement in the Occupy Wall Street, he seems to have drifted into street life till rather mysteriously his Uncle Nolan (Reed Birney, VP on "House of Cards") finds him sleeping on the street and summons him back to Dallas. His parents have listed him not only as executor of the estate but legal guardian his two teenage sisters, 17-year-old Claire (Lorelei Linklater of Boyhood) and 13-year-old Arden (newcomer Catherine Elvir). His ambitious aunt Uma (Peri Gilpin) is outraged, but duties take her out of town and leave the three siblings to sort things out.

Somehow the chronology doesn't seem altogether well worked out for Beau or these events clearly placed in a context. Nonetheless for a while it is fun watching the fast-talking Beau parade around his family's posh suburban world with beard, high-concept haircut, and tattered, punkish clothes. He is defiant and irresponsible - it's hard to reconcile his childishness with either his former promise or his recent social consciousness - but he also reluctantly shoulders some of his responsibility toward the girls, though setting things up for them to take an open-ended bereavement leave from their stuffy Catholic school. Young Arden warms to Beau's ways and they bond nicely, but Claire is angry and defiant, so his job is difficult even in the moments when he shoulders it. The situation dramatizes Beau's need to assume adulthood and perhaps accept that he may be able to accomplish more good in the very world of privilege he was born into than as a tattered dissident elsewhere.

Garry and Gallerano deliver some amusing dialogue and the film is frequently good in the moment, even though the overall story arc sometimes falters. Much happens and yet not a great deal leaves a deep impression. It's not clear where things are meant to be going, perhaps because Beau's personality isn't very well defined or his transformation sufficiently delineated. He has a fling with a married woman (Janine Turner), and though his ex-girlfriend Sherry (Nikki Moore) is married and also guidance counselor at his sisters' school, she seems easily swayed to spend time with him, and the girls. Somehow there's a big party at the house where underage kids are found drinking and he's temporarily arrested and Claire is threatened with expulsion from school.

Locals attest that the filmmakers have made good use of authentic Dallas settings and landmarks, including the distinctive Lakewood Tuscan Villa used as the Baker residence around the corner from where Gallerano himself grew up, and they have assembled a very good cast all down the line. Scenes between Beau and old best buddy Kelsie (David Matranga) show what relaxed, authentic moments the film is capable of when it's not trying too hard. Gallerano is an unmistakable talent, and we look forward to more from him and director Barry.

Occupy, Texas, 93 mins., debuted at Dallas International Festival 15 April 2016, playing also at the New Jersey, Myrtle Beach and Mill Valley film festivals. It was screened as part of the latter for this review and shows there 13 and 14 Oct. 2016. Theatrical release planned for 15 Apr. 2017.

[Chris Knipp]

WANG YICHUN: WHAT'S IN THE DARKNESS (2015)


SU XIAOTONG IN WHAT'S IN THE DARKNESS

Girls in trouble

Wang Yichun's debut feature What's in the Darkness, a girl's coming-of-age story in rural northern China in the Nineties, is also, or seeks to be, as Maggie Lee wrote somewhat grandly in her Variety review, "Perhaps the most acute and uncompromisingly grim murder mystery to come out of China in years." The interweaving of the two is a considerable feat, executed with surgical precision, a sense of period, and an eye for landscape and well orchestrated little human panoramas - police in tall grass investigating a crime scene, children and young punks in a classroom, a street market. Maybe we shouldn't be too disappointed if such an ambitious mix winds up being somewhat thin on atmosphere. One longs for the passion and nostalgia of Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day or the dreamy stylishness of Tsai Ming-liang's Rebels of the Neon God, both incidentally from the early Nineties when Wang's story takes place. Still her intermingling of ambition and restraint is impressive if not engaging.

What unites the two story lines, in a manner that's both ironic and chilling, is sexuality. The general mood of the provincial society is a mix of prurient and repressive. Adolescent schoolgirls are discovering theirs; the murder mystery is a series of related rapes and killings of young women. The two girls in the foreground whose contrasting life paths are in view, the shy Jing (Su Xiaotong) and sensuous, rebellious Zhang Xue (Lu Qiwei), are the daughters of two of the main policemen on the case, whose methods are also in sharp contrast. The effect isn't as schematic as it sounds, because Wang's constantly shifts scenes and keeps them short, which leaves time for many small plot threads and has a cooling down effect . Maggie Lee's claim that "the performances are superbly natural across the board" fails to account for how shrill and overstated is the acting of Guo Xiao playing Qu Zhicheng, Jing's father. He's a detective who studied forensics, and he aims to be scientific and logical in tracing down the killer, while Zhang Xue's father (Zhou Kui), also a detective, just wants to put somebody away ASOP.

The mutilated and raped bodies of young women keep turning up. Meanwhile Jing is drawn into such wicked things as nail polish and a hairdresser's by Zhang Xue. Zhang Xue has a raucous boyfriend; Jing is followed by a rather sweet kid, who yet gets rounded up briefly as a sex offender. Even Jing is caught with a group about to watch a sexy movie on a videotape, when morality police come in ard round them up. Jing volunteers at a retirement center, and even there an old man puts the make on her. She comes in for continual abuse from both father and mother (Liu Dan). He sees even Jing's straddling a bike as sexual now that she's maturing. There is no warmth, no comfort anywhere, except there is the charm of Jing's enthusiastic performances of pop songs standing on a platform in a vacant lot. The boy who is keen on her she catches tape recording them, and in the nicest moment after she's forgiven him and they've become friends, he climbs up on the platform with her and they do a duo performance.

[i]What's in the Darkness/黑处有什么 [Hei chu you shen me], 100 mins., debuted at FIRST International Film Festival, also Berlin, Titanic, Singapore and Melbourne, New York Asian Film Festival at Lincoln Center (North American premiere) and also Mill Valley (15, 16 Oct. 2016), as part of which it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

ASGHAR FARHADI: THE SALESMAN (2016)


TARANEH ALIDOOSTI, SHAHAB HOSSEINI IN THE SALESMAN

Revenge tragedy

Most (western) reviewers who've written about this film have seen four of the director's other ones, though there are two others in his filmography, Danse dans la poussière/Dance in the Dust (2003) and Beautiful City (2004). We all saw A Separation (NYFF 2011), which made Farhadi internationally famous, and has gotten the highest critical praise. Then we were treated to his next one, also extremely well received, which was shot in France with dialogue mostly in French, Le passé/The Past (2013). Afterward came delayed US re-releases in 2015 of his 2009 About Elly, and early this year, going further backward, of his 2006 Fireworks Wednesday.

I'm glad to have seen these two earlier films, because personally I was put off by the way A Separation seemed to heighten some of the worst aspects of Iranian culture, the quarrelsomeness, the blaming, the lying, and Le passé felt like a more claustrophobic and stifled foreign version of the same thing, not quite as good as the raves said, finely crafted, complex, but a bit tedious as well. About Elly, with its L'Avventura-like tale of a vanished girl at a seaside resort, has great ensemble work, and Fireworks Wednesday has a lovely flow to it. They are both pleasanter and lighter, and show Farhadi's gift for orchestration and movement and wrangling groups of people in a way that's both virtuosic and pleasing. It was these two that made me see Farhadi had something special.

Some are saying it's more of the same thing as the first two we saw, but The Salesman, though having in common the very generic theme of something going wrong in a family, still feels quite different, especially at the end - which, though a bit extreme, is still one of the strongest things Farhadi has ever done.

To begin with The Salesman is complicated by a combination of several different milieux: a home - which keeps changing, and is terribly compromised on doing so; a classroom, because the husband, Emad (Shahab Hosseini, also featured in About Elly and A Separation), is a high school literature teacher with a classroom fully of adolescent boys; and a theater, because he and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti, who starred in Beautiful City and About Elly) are amateur actors cast as Willy Loman and his wife in a Farsi production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (though this play-within-a-film element is the least effective).

The action begins with a sudden emergency. Due to construction nearby, the apartment building Emad and Rana have just moved to has to be immediately evacuated because it is judged about to collapse. Windows crack scarily, and so do walls. Actually the building does not collapse, but it's unsafe and the couple and everyone else must move out at once.

The chaos in the building exemplifies Farhadi's skill at directing groups of people running around. But I found it felt very artificial, like action on a theatrical stage - and we know Farhadi started out in theater. This bad impression is immediately offset, however, by a scene of Emad teaching his class. I was struck by how real and lively the geeky boys seemed, many of them in glasses - a contrast to the impossibly glamorous youths in posh Paris lyçées shot by Christophe Honoré say, or recently by Mia Hansen-Love. Farhadi's good with kids too, and did some shrewd casting here with the boys.

Their theater colleague Babak (Babak Karimi, another Farhadi regular) proposes Rana and Emad move into an apartment he has which has just been vacated, and they take it at once. This is where the real trouble begins. The previous occupant has refused to come and get a roomful of possessions, whic they put outside, and then have to move when it rains. It turns out she "had many acquaintances" - in other words, she was a prostitute. (There is a parallel character in Death of a Salesman). Then, Rana buzzes open the downstairs entrance, thinking it's Emad, and gets in the shower leaving the apartment door open. She is assaulted in the shower by an intruder, leading to a head injury requiring X-rays. But what's worse, this event, whose details are left vague (was she raped? attacked? or did she just fall?), leaves Rana badly traumatized.

At first she can't function and a performance of the play is cancelled. Then she breaks down during a performance because a man in the audience, she says, looked at her like the stranger who entered the bathroom.

Emad is impatient with Rana about all this, not really understanding, and then it becomes clear that he's not only angry at her for somehow allowing this to happen and not being able to put it behind her but also because his manhood is lessened for not protecting her. Finding the perpetrator and exacting revenge now become his goals. The key to finding the man is that he left behind a pickup truck. Later it disappears, but Emad is able fo find it.

Farhadi continues his method of almost plodding, neorealist detail, particularly in the way he describes the vicissitudes the couple's relationship goes through. But while the importance of the domestic picture, the classroom, and the theater keeps being balanced, the story turns into a kind of whodunit and a grimly realistic and incredibly tense revenge tale with a disturbing final twist.

At Cannes Peter Bradshaw invented the conceit of "The Haneke/Antonioni Shock Event," which he suggested as a new "genre of world cinema" exemplified by this film as well as Cristian Mungui’s Graduation and ("to a lesser extent") the Dardennes' The Unknown Girl (those two included in Filmleaf's 2016 NYFF coverage). There is something of Haneke in the unease that pervades the homes Rana and Emad are forced to occupy and the scary, life-changing moment of violence - its mysterious menace is reminiscent of Haneke's Code Unknown. Evan the brutality and violence of Farhadi's ending may have something of Haneke.

Bradshaw calls Farhadi's plot "contrived" and this charge can be brought. Emad's finding of the perpetrator ("The Man," Farid Sajjadi Hosseini) may have something of contrivance about it, and to some the finale seems to feel melodramatic. But I simply fell under the emotional power of the final sequence, especially gripped by the way Emad appears to be embarrassing himself and digging a hole from which his marriage may never safely emerge. Returning to the couple playing the tragic finale of Death of a Salesman is memorable, Farhadi making his theatricality work for him in a haunting and thought-provoking way.

An earlier scene memorably foreshadows Emad's dangerous path to come. He shows his boys a movie and dozes off - neither he nor Rana can sleep after her trauma - and when the boys take comic selfies of themselves with their sleeping teacher and he awakes, he becomes furious and tries to humiliate one of the boys. It's funny classroom horseplay that hints at the grim destructive path Emad is headed toward.

Le Client/The Salesman/فروشنده (farushande),125 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2016, where Shahab Hosseini won Best Actor, the script won Best Screenplay, and the film was nominated for the Palme d'Or. It also showed at 22 other international festivals including Munich, Toronto, Mill Valley, Vancouver, and London. French theatrical release 9 Nov. 2016 (AlloCiné press rating 3.4/34, critically least successful of the four featured there). US theatrical release 27 Jan. 2017, in New York at Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas 6, in Los Angeles at Laemle Royal. San Francisco area release 3 Feb. Despite early comments that it was not up the the director's best, the English-language critics' ratings have overall been very positive, judging by Metacritic's score: 83%.; but Separation was in the 90's.


FARAHANI, HOSSEINI AT CANNES AWARDS

[Chris Knipp]

LYDIA TENAGLIA: JEREMIAH TOWER: THE LAST MAGNIFICENT (2016)


JEREMIAH TOWER

Portrait of a pioneer of the new American cuisine

The most remarkable part of Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent - the phrase is associated with bon vivant writer Lucious Beebe, a role model of Tower's - is the beginning. In it Tenaglia, producer of food films, especially with Anthony Bourdain, recreates her subject's grand but lonely childhood as a solo gourmet diner at grand hotels and in first class on luxury liners, forgotten by his rich vagabond parents. They spent long periods abroad. Once as he tells it his parents were surprised to find him on a boat dining by himself. Each thought the other had sent him to boarding school. Played by the exceptionally self-possessed young Rocston Issock, the pre-teen Jeremiah is seen dining alone, in style, in grand settings - these evocative, odd, stagings alternating with old footage showing the boy's parents dressed rich. To some viewers this introduction is overblown. I found it a welcome departure from documentary routine.

This childhood made Jeremiah Tower into a lonely sybarite whose comfort was fine food, which as a student at Harvard he began producing for the entertainment of himself and fellow classmates. It also made him into a closed, mysterious person, a quality doubtless augmented by having an alcoholic mother and abusive father and growing up gay in the fifties. (He says his greatest misfortune is not having been an orphan.) Tower's secrets the various talking heads say they have never penetrated. Tenaglia uses other found or period footage to recreate in more detail earlier times, and show the man's link with elegant, traditional fine cuisine, which he was to help revolutionize. His foothold in traditions of earlier high style dining, which younger chefs are described as lacking, is reflected in his greatest success, the San Francisco Civic Center restaurant Stars which lasted fifteen years from 1984 to 1999. The film jumps around a bit, turning more into a conventional food history, but the haunting early sequences leave their mark.

Jeremiah Tower is tall, handsome, and elegant. In 1972, taking over from Victoria Wise, he became one of the first and the most famous chef of Berkeley's Chez Panisse, the restaurant credited with being the origin of the new California cuisine, with a casual emphasis on the south of France and reveling in the best local ingredients. Tenaglia makes liberal use of old footage of Jeremia and Alice Waters, Chez Panisse's guiding spirit, cooking together in the kitchen. Rumor had it that they may have had an affair; the attractive Tower, in the hothouse kitchen atmosphere, swung in different ways. He says they did not, as rumored, fight. But he left when Waters' first Chez Paniesse cookbook came out and she claimed all the dishes he and others had created were hers, only mentioning the other cooks by their first names in an opening general thanks. Waters is not one of the many talking heads here. He went to the Santa Fe Grill, at an old Berkeley railway station (is this mentioned?), and on to Stars later.

The film devotes plenty of time to Stars, an extraordinary and for a while enormously successful restaurant with an open visible kitchen and a long bar that was the center of attention. The restaurant mixed socialites and punks who could see and be seen. Tower was omnipresent, charming, keeping a keen eye on every dish that came out of the kitchen. Batali and Bourdain say it was more important and more innovative in its time than Chez Panisse. There is ample film footage of Stars in its glory, which began to fade with the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which devastated the Civic Center area. How did it last another ten years? Eventually it lost too much money and closed. This film is probably a better portrait of Stars restaurant as a social phenomenon than of the birth of new American cuisine. Tenaglia provides a wealth of information about Tower's life and career. But she still omits certain essential linking details, and jumps around in time in a confusing way.

The nostalgic portrait of the lonely child gourmet fades in favor of a bevy of talking heads interspersed with period footage. Old Harvard friends alternate with chefs like Anthony Bourdain, Wolfgang Puck and Mario Batali. But the film also goes to Merida, Mexico, where Tower, whom we hear from frequently in voiceover, now lives in quiet grandeur. We see him preparing a dinner of octopus for himself, and climbing a Mayan ruin in slippers, and scuba diving. A Harvard interest was architecture, and he designed undersea buildings. It's left sketchy here, but he has spent some years rehabbing and reselling buildings in Merida. A late episode, time-lined from 2014 to 2015 and covered live by the filmmaker, is his return after disappearing, as perhaps the first celebrity chef, to try to revive the Tavern on the Green on the West Side in New York City. This is even better coverage than of Stars, but it's the story of a failure. Tower's revamp got a great review, then a bad one; Tower departed due to differences with the owners - when the bad review caused them to take over the food as well as the restaurant, knowing nothing about it. The Tavern on the Green was too big, but Tower evidently took it on because its grandeur reminded him of early days. We see him walking away into Central Park, as a talking head proclaims him the loneliest man in the world.

Maybe so, but wherever he is, however bad his luck or his strategies, Jeremiah Tower lives and eats well and his importance, lost touch with in his long absence, may be reasserted by this film. "He’s a hero of mine," Anthony Bourdain said in a San Jose Mercury article two years ago. "Jeremiah was a true innovator, an important original, and probably the first American chef anyone wanted to see in the dining room. He was an integral part of a power shift that has changed menus all over the world."